From a technical point of view anything that you eat can, and is, considered to be a diet. So what do you do when you have people in you house who are on different diets? Maybe one of you is eating a lot of junk food, while the other one is limiting their calories. Maybe you have someone on Atkins in the house, or the problem could be even simpler than that. Since even on the same diet plan experience can vary widely.

Right now, two people in my house are on Weight Watchers, and while the basic plan in the same it is not the same for the members of my house. The difference all comes down to one thing, a simple number. The number of points plus that they have to eat each day. The first person has a fairly generous amount of points for the day, 42. The other person is stuck with the bear minimum under the newest iteration of the plan, 26. You can see how this makes meals more than a bit of a challenge. After all, what one person can have as a reasonable dinner, a 12 or 23 point meal, will be about half of the other persons daily allotment of points.

This creates a conundrum, after all the person with 42 points needs them to get through the day, they do not want to feel deprived in order to satisfy the person with 26. The person with 26 does not want to eat bigger meals than they need to in order to satisfy the person with 42 points, or they will not lose weight.

It is a catch-22 for them, and it could be your problem to if you are eating on a low carb meal plan and you are married to a lover of pasta and pizza who is used to eating them three times a week. Should the pasta lover give up what they want completely to accommodate the need of the dieter, their personal pleasure lessened in the service of another person’s goal?

Well, as it turns out the answer is a little bit of yes, and a little bit of no. The solution is that age-old concept, compromise. Take the Weight Watchers pair to start with, the solution is scalable meals, where portions can be controlled easily and the person with fewer points can add lower ‘cost’ fruits and veggies to the mix in order to be satisfied with the meal. The carb lovers dilemma requires a bit more work, but the same idea. Changing over the basic pasta to a whole wheat or whole grain if you can get your hands on it, then make it into a pasta primavera, with a mix of fresh vegetables added to the mix in order to bulk it up and create a meal that will let the pasta lover have what they want, without forcing the person on a restricted diet to cheat on their diet in order to do have the same meal.

Now, figure out how you can compromise.