Guy Fieri is killing my husband...

I don't know if other people are familiar with Guy Fieri, the host of two wonderful Food Network shows, but he's killing my husband.

Or could be. Ethan is - how can I say this - very suggestible when it comes to food. We found out several years ago that this is due to the fact that he is insulin resistant, a condition that is often a precursor to diabetes (which runs in his family) and can be indicated by mood swings, pronounced cravings, and distraction while hungry (ladies, if your husband fits this description, make an appointment today with an endocrinologist - your family practitioner may not know the first thing about this - for a special blood test). Once this condition was diagnosed and Ethan put on a preventative medicine that controlled his blood sugar levels and will probably prevent him from ever developing diabetes, there was a marked improvement in the above symptoms. My sweet husband was wonderful all the time and "cranky pants" man faded into the background. But he still loves food (I think my cooking is why he married me) and food shows can be rough.

Pancakes are the worst. Ethan loves, loves, loves pancakes and they're okay to have every now and then but not all the time. He actually will give directions based on pizza restaurants. We got into a major car fight a couple of months ago because we were trying to figure out how to get somewhere and I kept saying, "You mean take the right side of the fork by the CVS?" and he testily replied, "What are you talking about? I'm telling you to bear right by Michele's Pizza!" People, allow me to say that the pizza place was a little hole-in-the-wall location with a sign so small that you couldn't even read it easily while going past it at the 30 mile an hour speed limit, whereas the CVS is absolutely GIGANTIC - the lit sign must be 30 feet in the air and 12 feet wide and can be seen from far away. But he honestly didn't register it and actually was quite chagrined when I glared at him as we approached it. And the dinky pizza place - can I add that he's NEVER EATEN THERE! Yet it provides some kind of internal compass point for him, as do all of its pizza brethren.

But we were watching one of Guy's shows tonight, the Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives show, which is really good, and onion rings came on the screen. Even I, who do not like onion rings, thought they looked good, which means that Ethan practically launched himself through the television set. He was drooling like a Newfoundland dog at a hot dog eating contest and had some serious trouble focusing on me when I attempted to speak to him. We both started chuckling when we brought up an incident that happened very early in our relationship. We were engaged and had just moved to Indiana so Ethan could go to graduate school at Purdue University and had stopped at a Dairy Queen with his parents who helped drive the moving truck for us. I had had some serious conversations with Ethan about eating better, especially with his family history of diabetes and heart disease (from all sides) and he was making a lot of progress, particularly with me demonstrating that food can be cooked from scratch and mashed potatoes don't come out of a box. But Dairy Queen had it's own siren song and it whispered, "Onion Rings" to him so he got them. Sitting back down at the table, he was gloating and I was horrified, to the point that I starting saying, "My God! What are going? Give me those! Are you trying to make me a widow before we're married?!?"

He clung to the onion ring for all it's worth, thinking I was just going to give up (it was early in our relationship, did I mention that?), but I proceeded to chase him around the Dairy Queen and leap on his back, wrenching the onion ring (which may have been in his mouth at this point) out of his possession while his parents looked on in horror. He was horribly embarrassed, but I think he took my commitment to his health quite seriously after that, and now always laughs when he thinks about that day in the DQ. Which is every time he sees onion rings.