Show of hands: Who's still on their New Year's Resolution Diet?

Not only do I not make New Year's resolutions, I also have never been on a diet. Well, unless you count my collegiate Snickers Bars and Coca Cola diet, but that was about vending machine convenience versus trekking to the cafeteria, not weight loss.

My mother yo-yo dieted most of my childhood. She ate cabbage soup, consumed "negative calorie" foods (supposedly burning more calories digesting than ingesting,) and did Weight Watchers. Our refrigerator always had a box of the fake chocolate appetite suppressant "Ayds," a trademark eventually becoming an 80's marketing disaster. Each time she went off a program, she gained back five or ten pounds more.

While the quest for health and good body image is commendable, food consumption frequently expresses mental states, whether over or under indulgence.

In 1945, when the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, no longer needed 50,000 civilian workers for the war effort, my mother's family moved to Seattle. After relocating his family from small-town Minnesota to a temporary worker's community, then losing employment and moving into a one-bedroom basement apartment while his wife's shirt factory job supported them, my grandfather, by nature fretful, may have dipped a little deeper into psychological waters.

Their landlords, occupying the main house, were acolytes of Herbert M. Shelton, a Raw Foodism pioneer and ardent pacifist. I suppose Shelton's arrests and time served for practicing medicine without a license, starving a patient or two to death at his clinic, could be considered persecution for radical views. Of course, my grandfather was ultimately responsible for following the 40-day fast, but he didn't take it as well as Jesus. In fact, by fast's end, I think he was close to hallucinating he was Jesus.

He survived and returned to Minnesota, but Herbert M. Shelton fatefully reemerged. Fifteen years later, my pleasingly plump grandmother impulsively boarded a Greyhound bus heading for his Texas clinic. My mother, due to give birth in two months, unexpectedly went into labor. My grandmother received the news of my brother's death during a bus stop phone-home, immediately switching directions. The incident was not Dr. Shelton's fault, but his name was no longer welcome in our household.

In my family, I think food dysfunction may be ancient history. Inheriting his dad's hummingbird metabolism while unashamedly enjoying food (but not too much,) my son came back from a physical reporting his body fat measurement improved from "dangerously low," to just "low"; probably the closest he'll come to gaining the Freshman Fifteen.

I asked if the doctor used calipers, but he described an electrode attached to his finger measuring biometrical impedance. Considering Colorado lightning storms, I'm kind of glad knowing electrical current is stopped by body fat, just like my mother was delighted she floated more easily than anyone else in swimming class when she finally donned a bathing suit in her mid-thirties.