How to Get Your Man to Eat Better
By Talitha Daelemans, forward by Kathleen Daelemans

Most of you know I have a couple of books out and are familiar with the cast of characters, my immediate family. The truth is a lot of my writing is funny because they're funny. Or at least I think they are. And I think you think they are because you tell me so and I'm pretty sure you're not just being polite.

It seems my parents unknowingly produced a stable of writers. Not their first career choice for any of their children as most writers starve for a good portion, if not most of their careers. My sister Carol Daelemans is the author of the wildly popular Weight Watcher's Diaries and my twenty-something sister, Talitha, recently came to work for me too.

Contrary to popular belief, I'm not running Omni media two over here. It's pretty much just me in my home pushing out more work than I can handle. I'm always buried, missing deadlines and not getting back to people quickly enough. Not because I think I'm all that special or anything, but because I'm not as organized as I could be, the workload is fierce and my Mom quit because "The pay was lousy."

Begging Talitha to come work for me three straight years in a row finally paid off. I always knew she was smart but working with her made me realize just how talented she is. Well that and how easy she is to push around. (She's still my younger sister and I do cut the checks around here!) Anyway, I pleaded with her to lend her voice to the site mostly because I'm always desperate for content but also because she's got a whole different perspective on food and health than I do.

She's young, hip, fresh and funny. And everything still works. She can't relate to wrinkles, hormone fluctuations or sagging anything except when she's telling me to change my shirt because it's "not your best color" which means it makes my skin look ashy, my roots stand out and draws attention to the fact that my over the shoulder boulder holder has long since lost its ability to perform in my best interest. She tells it like it is.

"What should I write about, Kathleen?" "Write about trying to get your boyfriend to eat healthy." "I'd have to get him to stop eating garbage first." "Write about that. It isn't easy to get someone you love to eat better. We all need all the help we can get."

—Kathleen Daelemans


Article by Talitha Daelemans

Step one: get him to stop eating garbage. Step two: get him to stop treating his refrigerator like a giant petri dish. My boyfriend hates to "waste food" so he'll eat things that have long since passed their prime and entered their dotage. I've seen him eat things that I'm sure were not only old enough to vote but could run for president. Don't get me wrong, I do understand the waste part of it and I'm in no way like my mother who won't eat lunch meats the day after she purchases them, but I don't like eating garbage.

The expiration dates on food were put there for a reason, and no, contrary to what the Food and Drug Administration would like you to believe, they're not "a guide." Those sell by dates are absolute fact in my book. Foods cannot and should not be eaten after those dates. I'm no one's guinea pig. There are just some things that should be taken seriously, for instance the date on the milk carton. One does not trifle with the Dairy Gods unless one wishes to worship at Montezuma's porcelain alter.

I used to work in a grocery store and was talking to the dairy guy one day. I told him I tossed out milk on the sell by date. He told me I was nuts to throw it out. "You have a good week to drink milk past the sell by date. That's why it's called a sell by date." In my opinion, you better drink it up in two to three days unless you're a fan of cottage cheese on your Frosted Flakes.

Myth Busters is His Favorite Show
My boyfriend is a musician and travels a lot. When he's gone for a week he'll go into his fridge and use the milk he bought and opened before he left. As long as it "doesn't have chunks" it's fine with him. If there's mold on bread he cuts it off and eats the rest. I'm not talking a little white fuzz; I'm talking full grown dime sized green hairy blobs. He also keeps things in his refrigerator indefinitely.

No, really! Last year on Valentine's Day he was determined to cook me a real dinner: Lamb with Rice, Peas and Tomato Sauce (made with beef because he couldn't find lamb out in the boondocks where he lives; "We don't carry none of that fancy meat," the guy at Meijer told him). Normally my boyfriend's idea of homemade is macaroni and cheese from a box but he wanted this to be "really special" so he decided to make one of his Grandma's favorite recipes. Unfortunately, he didn't actually get the full version of the recipe because no one actually had it. "It's in Grandma's head" and Grandma will go to her grave before she'll give out the full version.

He was so determined to get things right, he started cooking at noon, and didn't finish until midnight. "The tomato paste and canned peas need to stew for three hours," he told me. "What, to soak up the flavors of the pot?" I mumbled under my breath. Miraculously, the meal was truly lovely once we put salt in it (he hasn't graduated to seasonings yet). Never mind that he used an entire stick of butter in the rice. At least he was cooking from scratch. Tackling nutrition comes later.

Anyway, the leftovers sat in his refrigerator until the end of May. I tried to toss them after the first week, "No, they're still good!" he screamed. "I'm going to eat that." He never did and finally admitted they were bad a month later but somehow couldn't part with them for another 60 days. I like to think he was holding onto the food for the memories and for the satisfaction that he actually cooked something all by himself.

Refrigerator Magic
Yeah, I know he sounds gross, but he's still in his twenties and living the bachelor life and clearly has no one to regularly police his fridge. He has a roommate that is just a bad as he is about growing science experiments in the fridge. I'm afraid that one day I'm going to open their fridge and something is going to crawl out with a Pyrex dish for a shell.

I've found the best way to teach him food sanitation is to clean out his fridge when he's not looking by throwing away anything past its expiration or sell by date, things I can't remember hearing him tell me he ate, things with faded labels, foods not retaining their original color and things with fur. I emphasize, at opportune times (commercials), that as a rule, leftovers have a three day maximum shelf life after which time they must follow their destiny down the drain.