How often is enough?

If you're keeping up a healthy diet, and I hope that you are, you eat dinner seven times a week.

Now, those seven dinners can be a chance for you to try out a new recipe, go to your favorite restaurant to unwind from the daily grind or maybe the twenty minutes you have to put some fuel in your body before you rush off to study for that midterm exam.

Regardless of how you spend those seven dinners, it's important that you are conscious of what you choose to do with that special hour of time towards the end of your day. Even more so, it's important to think about who we choose to spend that time with. And if everyone is eating dinner at some point during the evening, that means that every day we have an opportunity to share a meal with someone.

How do you spend most of your dinners? Are you sitting in front of the TV watching a marathon of "Real Housewives" episodes? Are you aggressively wrestling a burrito out of its microwave- safe wrapper, shoving bites of refried beans into your mouth as you fumble for a bottle of hot sauce? Or maybe the thought of preparing dinner for a guest stresses you out so much that you throw down the spatula and reach for the phone to tell them there has been a change of plans.

Not that we don't all need a little down time where we just look to nourish our bodies and have a bit of a quiet evening, but think about all of the possibilities you are denying when you choose night after night to eat dinner alone! Maybe sharing dinner with someone means more to them than meets the eye? What if you thought of each dinner as a chance to let someone into your life and provide a bit of care that they haven't received in, perhaps, a long time?

Makes those seven dinners seem a little more meaningful.

How are you making those seven evenings count? Are you allowing memories to be created or waiting for them to come to you, if it's convenient or if you finally get the house cleaned?