Diet vs. Diet

No, I'm not going to compare different fad-diets.  This is more-so about social language, and the way it impacts how we talk about our diet.

"Diet?" you may ask, "Why am I on a diet? I'm not on a diet. I'm fine with the way I eat."

You're not on a diet!  

And neither am I!

This is just exactly it.

Words and their meanings are ever-changing.  Society's trends in language can transform a word from something positive to something negative.  Some think its beautiful how language can evolve over time.  I do appreciate that our language is always evolving, but I, like a lot of people, do not appreciate when I have to change my preconceived definitions of a word. 

Which brings me back to our diet. 

Diet is a word with multiple meanings. 

Diet noun  "the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats."

vs

Diet verb "restrict oneself to small amounts or special kinds of food in order to lose weight."

It frustrates me now that when I want to talk about my diet (noun version), I have people looking at me like I do not know what I am talking about because fad-diets are usually pretty ineffective.  Why are they ineffective?  That's easy. 

Fad-diets are temporary.  Naive people, such as my former-fat-self, jump on a bandwagon thinking that this short-term plan will fix our long-term problem.  However, once the diet is over, and we are left to eat whatever we want, we fall back into unhealthy habits, splurge on foods we were not allowed to even think about, and pile the pounds right back on.

But I digress.

Moral of the story:  I want the word back to normal!

Diet does not only define a restrictive meal-plan, it defines the food we eat every day.  It defines the types of food we love to eat, whether its healthy or not.

The way that I eat is not A diet, it's MY diet.