I’m not perfect; I’m often tempted by food.

A friend of mine who is vegetarian but was an omnivore up through early adulthood used to tell me that even after years of not eating meat, his mouth would still water at the smell of it. “It never goes away,” he would tell me.

One of the realities for me in trying to keep my weight down (and get it down further) is that the temptation for food that led me to need to reduce in the first place never goes away. Ice cream. Candy. Rice. Pasta. I don’t believe in totally eliminating any food from my diet, just because it’s close to impossible to live that way, but I do try to limit how much I eat of things that aren’t all that great for my waistline and diabetes. Some days I go to a restaurant with a friend who’ll order a wonderful smelling pasta dish and I’ll look at it with large eyes and then look at what I’ve ordered from myself–often something not nearly as appetizing.

Why not just eliminate them entirely? To me, it’s too difficult. I know I’ll always be tempted, but my guess is I’d be tempted more–and certainly break down, possibly gorging myself–if I declared them totally taboo. That and it’s difficult socially to turn down food that’s offered by others a lot of the time. Perhaps it’s like the Geek who avoids video games not because he doesn’t like games, but because he likes them too much.

The point of this post is to tell people that I’m far from perfect in my dealings with food. I wish I was perfect, but I’m not, and I know it, so I don’t strive for it. But because I give myself permission to be less than perfect, I can do a better job than I think I could do if I required perfection from myself.