's Daily Message - DON`T MESS WITH TRADITION

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's Daily MessageWednesdayMarch 08, 2006

DON`T MESS WITH TRADITION

Chances are you were raised on eating three square meals a day. As a kid, I couldn`t understand why they were called square meals when the plate was round! The first meal that I adored was breakfast. My bedroom was next to the kitchen. How convenient, huh? I didn`t need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning, because the smell of bacon and pancakes made my eyes and taste buds open immediately. How I loved enjoying that first meal of the day!

After I finished my last sip of freshly squeezed orange juice, I would grab my lunch box and head off to school. At around 11:30, I would start to casually turn around and look at the big clock in the back of the classroom. Thirty more minutes before lunch, twenty minutes, ten minutes. And when the lunch bell was rung, I`d open the Howdy Doody lunch box and feast on a cold meatloaf sandwich, potato chips, and homemade oatmeal cookies.

Six hours later, I`d be sitting in the dining room having dinner with my family. Back then, my father did most of the cooking. He never served dinner family style. There were never platters or bowls of food sitting on the table getting cold. Leonard would make everyone`s platter and bring them out to us. And before our dinner, my brother Lenny would say grace. It made our food holy.

I followed this tradition of eating three meals a day for a long time – that is until I began reading diet books with different philosophies. One of the diets I tried was not eating after 4:00 in the afternoon. When 6:00 rolled around, I was so hungry, I would just pace back and forth in the kitchen feeling deprived. That diet lasted 3 days.

Then I tried another diet called the "One Meal a Day Diet." For breakfast, you`d have coffee, and the same goes for lunch. At 7:00 PM, you could have your one meal. You can lose weight on this silly eating plan, but at what cost? A lady called me Sunday on my radio show to tell me she had been eating one meal a day for several years, and I told her like I tell you, starving your body to get thinner is not the way to go!

So don`t play around with your meals, because three a day is the real deal, Deal-a-Meal!

Love,