Food Police

A few weeks ago, I got in the elevator at work at the end of the day and was greeted with this:

Stranger: You should stop reading that thing (iphone). It's not good for you.

Rather than take you through the dialogue that flew through my head about what I actually wanted to say to this person giving me unsolicited advice in a public elevator, I'm going to fast forward to the part where I realized the experience might inspire a blog post about the food police, who are kind of similar to the smartphone police. And let's just say I didn't react to the smartphone police (internally) all that gracefully.

Because I was given unsolicited advise--by a stranger, mind you--my initial reaction was to become defensive and to show the stranger that he was wrong. I was going to show him he was wrong by continuing to do the very thing he accused me of: checking my email. Because to stop checking my email in front of him would have been to somehow admit that he was right: I was addicted to email (which I may or may not be, but that's not the point).

I share this story with you to give you a glimpse into the way it feels to receive citations from the food police. We've all received them in one way or another--or watched someone else receive them. A food police citation might manifest as a sigh at the dinner table upon taking second servings of mashed potatoes, or it might be so blatant as a comment: "Honey, stop! Come on, you've had enough to eat." If you've ever been on the receiving end of the food police, I'm sure you know how awful it feels to have someone tell you what to put into--or remove from--your mouth.

What the food police somehow haven't figured out yet is that their unsolicited advice generally leads to continuation of the very thing that is clearly irritating them: eating.

The smartphone police accomplished nothing with me in the elevator, and the food police don't generally accomplish anything either, other than creating guilt around eating. They often also contribute to overeating because recipients of their citations will continue eating (past fullness) just to say, screw you, food police. I'm not listening.

So please, take a moment to acknowledge that we're all adults here. We eat when we're hungry, we stop when we're full, and we don't comment on other people's food choices. We also check email when we want to (as long as we're not driving, or missing out on precious time with our kids).

"But what if my husband doesn't stop when he's full????" asks the food police.

"It's not in your control, food police. Let. It. Go."