Conversations

Fillyjonk's post at Shapely Prose made me stop and think about conversations women have, and what my conversations with other women were/are like.
Ya know, I don't talk to many people outside of family any more (not since I got married and quit working), but even when I'm talking to my daughter-in-law, or my DH's step-son's wife, we don't talk about weight, or diets, or how we hate our bodies. We talk about their kids, the books we've read, how their jobs are going, what kewl movie we've seen, and any neat recipes we may have tried. For me, that's a first, since I've never gotten along with most women well enough to even want to talk about those kinds of things. I was always the girl who was out in the garage with the guys, talking about cars, guns, hunting, fishing, farming, and politics.
I guess I was lucky, when I was working, that most of the women I talked to at work weren't into dieting/weight loss. We talked about work, our kids, our parents, shows we'd seen on tv, movies we'd seen, repairs we'd had to do/have done around our houses (a lot of the ones I hung out with were divorced/widowed/never married), places we'd been, and places we wanted to travel to when we were lucky enough to retire.
But I've had some women friends that diets, exercise, and how much weight they've lost/still have to lose is all they can think about/talk about. I just kinda nodded and yeah, uh huh, really? until they were ready to talk about more important things. Even when I was dieting, it wasn't something I wanted to talk about, because talking about it was one sure way to make me want to binge (I hated talking about food I couldn't eat, and ways to make it less calorie-filled so I could eat some of it). It got to the point where, when I finally quit dieting for good, when anyone even mentioned dieting, I was going through the cupboards looking for something/anything to eat. It didn't have to be a friend who mentioned it, it could have been a commercial about diets or diet pills on tv that set me off. I don't do any of that any more, but it's a conscious effort on my part not to binge when people start talking diets/weight loss.
Now, when I talk to the two female friends I have that aren't related to me, it's understood that we don't talk about dieting or weight loss, but everything else is pretty much fair game. Those are the kinds of conversations I like, where we can crack jokes about fashions we've seen and think are atrocious, what their kids/nieces/nephews/grandkids are doing, books/movies/tv, debate politics (and we're good at agreeing to disagree, a lot of the time), and how men can be such a pain in the ass, but we love them anyway (and yeah, we agree that we can be pains in the ass too). We can talk about global warming, the environment and what we can do to help preserve it, and not have to bring weight into it. I just hope that more and more women find out that they not only don't have to talk about dieting all the time, they don't have to diet at all anymore in order to be considered a worthwhile person with something constructive or interesting to say.