The brain is a mysterious, complex and marvelous thing.

No News there.

The ability to selectively remember some things and conveniently forget other things is astounding!

No News there.

When one rules out any organic etiology/causes for forgetfulness e.g. dementia, traumatic brain injury (TBI), etc., the puzzle of what people remember and what they don’t becomes even more intriguing.

For people interested in what makes people tick….Definitely

No News there.

And yet, the mechanism in the human brain that causes it to act like the old toy Etch a Sketch ^tm continues to bewilder me!  A shake of the head and a promise is forgotten, a boundary gets mushy, and an understanding unravels.

Case in point:

Many of us who embarked upon the personal journey of self/size acceptance and chose to embrace the Healthy AT Every Size (HAES^sm) approach, at some point had to “come out” to our families and friends.  There was a moment for many of us when we declared we will not engage in negative fat talk, negative body talk, or the interminable conversations about how great so and so would be if only they would lose weight or gain weight or get their nose fixed.  The assumption that appearance was the proof of someone’s success was flawed and off the table for discussion.

THAT WAS NEWS!

And yet, family gatherings and reunions with friends inevitably begin with the predictable sequence:

Hug, kiss, you look… (Fill in the blank).

The conversation quickly morphs into some strange and mysterious version of the financial page of the local newspaper.  It is a veritable “Dow Jones” check list of losses, gains, highs, lows, and initial public offerings of new diets, reinvestment in old diets, and insider secrets of which diet pill will be on the market next.  The fervor of these exchanges rivals the trading floor of the NYSE.

But this is so old it can’t possibly be

News.

Etch a Sketch ^tm brains…they have all forgotten that you are not investing in this hedge fund; the gab-about-flab-fest goes on without you.

But eventually the need to re-establish boundaries and above all else, CHANGE the subject becomes so over-powering something must be said. Something that can illustrate how old and tedious and unimportant the conversation is.  Something that will bring the conversation back to WHAT people are doing and what is NEW in their lives NOT just their bodies.

My favorite interjection is, “So I’ve got news….”

Friends/family turn to me expectantly…they have forgotten of course that I am not one of them…Time has passed; they shook their cerebral red screen with the two white knobs of their memory…

Did you hear the Beatles broke up?