If a person leans over to you and says, “Whatever you do, don’t look up in that tree,” what’s the thing you most want to do?  Look up in the tree, right?

Well, that’s how a diet is for me.  Tell me I can’t eat something and suddenly that thing is about the only thing that sounds good.

My thirtieth high school reunion (yes, that’s 30 for those of you with your mouths gaping wide) is next weekend.  Gag!  It took me awhile to get past the fact that I’m old enough to have been out of high school that long.  Then I started thinking about seeing my old running buddies.

Now, I’d like to tell you that I’m so “at one with the universe” that it doesn’t matter what people think of how I look.  I’d also like to tell you that I am such a saint that I won’t be looking to see how well or how badly my friends have aged.  But we have to be honest here, right?  Neither is true.  Reunions are ruthless.

The truth is I want to look really good because I know they’re gonna be looking at me just like I’m gonna be looking at them.  I know when I get home, I’ll be saying stuff like, “Gosh!  Jim used to be so slim.  And Mary used to be so pretty.”

I know I’m not going to win any beauty pageants, but I just want to keep those kinds of comments to a minimum.  I’d be pretty happy with “Sarah doesn’t look that bad.”

I bought this outfit to wear that would look really good if I were about fifteen years younger or if I weighed about ten pounds less.  I didn’t have the time or inclination to do the plastic surgery thing that would make me look fifteen years younger.  Thus, the diet.

I told myself that with the reunion as a goal, a diet wouldn’t be hard.  Ten pounds would be easy.  A snap.  No problem.

I’d just cut out pastas, butter, and Cokes.  For several mornings, I had grapefruit and dry toast … and I craved butter.  I wanted butter all day long.  I had to hide the butter so I wouldn’t see it when I opened the refrigerator.

My husband said the words “Italian food” and I started salivating.  Nothing else sounded good except fettuccini Alfredo.  When I’m not on a diet, Italian food sounds heavy a lot of times and I’ll opt for a salad.  But I was on a diet, and I would have killed for fettuccini.

And the soft drink thing.  Besides the fact that I’m totally addicted to the caffeine in them, I like the ones that have real sugar.  All diet drinks taste like flavored water to me, with an awful aftertaste of rusted metal.  When I’m not on a diet, water sounds good, tea sounds good, but no, not now.  Nothing except Coke sounded good.

The perfect meal was dancing around in my head, torturing me.  Fettuccini Alfredo with butter in the sauce, bread with butter on top, and Coke.  Maybe cheesecake for dessert … it has lots of calories too.  Everything with calories sounds good.  Everything that doesn’t sounds bad.

I really need this reunion to get here.  I’ve gained five pounds since I started this blasted diet.