If I walked into my neighbor's kitchen and helped myself to a snack in her fridge, she'd think I'd lost my mind.

I've never been inside any of my neighbors' kitchens, nor have they been inside ours. It's a far cry from how I grew up, where our small ranch house was constantly filled with neighborhood kids and cousins.

No one thought twice about rummaging through our fridge. Researchers Will Miller and Glenn Sparks believe the decline in "refrigerator rights" relationships in America is directly connected to our increasing anxiety, incivility and stress.

In their book, "Refrigerator Rights: Our Crucial Need for Close Connection," they make a convincing case that too many of us have neglected our need for intimate relationships outside of our nuclear families.

They've created a visual shorthand for these relationships: How many people can come to your home and open your refrigerator without permission? In how many people's homes are you comfortable enough to do the same?

For too many Americans, the number is probably limited to those in our extended family -- many of whom may not live anywhere near us.

Are we losing our closest friendships? The authors cite a Stanford University study that reports one out of every four people questioned said they had "nobody at all" in whom they could confide. Twenty-five years ago, only one in eight said that.

We see dozens of people every day, at work, at school, on the sidelines of our children's soccer games. But how many of these relationships go beyond acquaintances?

Sparks and Miller offer three main reasons for our social isolation:

-- We move frequently and too often away from our families and roots. Statistics show that Americans relocate every five years.

-- We are increasingly distracted by electronic media. The average American watches more than 32 hours of television each week. And the internet takes a bigger and bigger chunk out of our personal time. While it allows us to be super-connected to the larger world, our individual sphere is neglected.

"Our immersion in electronic media comes at a price -- and that price is almost always the decreasing amount of time we spend with other people," Sparks writes on his blog.

-- Finally, we create a hectic busyness in our lives. With our constant go, go, go lifestyle, we are too tired in our downtime to spend it with other people.

The authors recommend that we re-examine why relationships tend to fall on the lowest rung of our priorities.

Tonight I have the choice of meeting some dear family friends for dinner. My list of excuses to beg off is long: My little one has a virus. The weather is rotten. I'm too tired to get dressed up. Their home is too far away. It would be so easy to just stay at home in my pajamas and catch up with them on Facebook.

But refrigerator rights relationships are only cultivated by spending time and sharing experiences -- face-to-face, in real time -- with those we care about.

Tonight I'm choosing face time over screen time.

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This column originally appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on December 28, 2008.

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The older I get, the more I have wondered why gaining weight is so easy and getting rid of it such a struggle.

After I turned 40, the conversations with friends my age more frequently touched on the same frustration: Why can't I lose weight?

I decided to ask a doctor and a nutritionist, who often talk to patients about this very issue, what they wish they could tell people more bluntly about our collective weight struggles. Here’s what the internal medicine specialist said: 1. Diet 2. Diet 3. Diet.

“I think people really underestimate how much they’re actually eating,” she said. Some people eat too much “healthy food,” others overindulge if they’ve eaten healthy all week and may not realize how many extra calories those rewards add.

“I think people try to look for excuses like their jobs, which are usually sedentary. They also say, ’I have been under a lot of stress,’ so I have not been able to watch my diet,” she said. Of course, there may be underlying hereditary and metabolic causes that play a part, she added. “But, the big one is still diet.”

I would guess this is a pretty typical medical view of why many Americans are overweight. And, to be honest, it makes sense.

But, here’s some context I wish doctors would also consider. Metabolism does slow down in middle age, while responsibilities and stress seem to snowball. If humans have a finite amount of willpower and self discipline each day, more of that gets used up raising tweens and teens. It saps self-control reserves to stay calm and patient with children who are trying your very last nerve. This leaves less willpower to resist emotional and stress-related eating and drinking.

There is legitimately less time available to work out when you are working, raising children and driving them around from activity to activity. And when you are able to prioritize working out, that exercise makes you hungrier.

These aren’t meant to be excuses, but explanations that take into account many parents’ realities. Of course, people do lose weight successfully in middle age and later, but it’s also fair to say that it takes a great deal of effort to lose it and keep it off.

When I asked a nutritionist, she agreed that diet is the main culprit, but she also pointed out the things outside individual control.

“Our food system is obesogenic,” she said. Manufactured food is often designed to be addictive and make us fat. An abundance of cheap, processed food may often be the easiest option for harried parents. Surprisingly, she also takes issue with USDA guidelines that suggest Americans should get 45 to 65 percent of daily calories from carbohydrates. For some middle-aged women, that is way too high, she said.

Changing guidelines on how to eat, what to eat and when to eat can be confusing for the average person. Feeling stuck in a cycle of losing and gaining weight adds to an underlying chronic level of stress many of us carry around day to day.

One of the smartest things I did last year was to get rid of clothes that haven’t fit comfortably for years and made me feel guilty every time I looked in my closet. Having a better understanding of why a task is so challenging should help us feel more compassionate and forgiving towards ourselves.

I’ll still make goals to be healthier in the upcoming year -- to eat less sugar and to exercise and sleep more.

I’m definitely ditching the guilt.

Feeling a little lighter already.

(Editor’s Note: A version of this column originally appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2010.)

On the last day of her family’s spring break, Sharon Dunski Vermont confronted an ugly truth: Her tween-aged daughters were close to becoming spoiled brats. They had spent the day out with friends and decided to get ice cream. Vermont told them in the car that they would be getting child-sized scoops. Her older daughter said that wasn’t fair. In the store, she got more irate and had a meltdown.

"As she was having the fit I was mortified," Vermont said. To her, the fit was about something bigger. It was about the fact that her children, who got most of the things they asked for, did not appreciate what their parents did for them and everything they had.

"This was a growing theme in our family: more, bigger, better, more clothes, more electronics," she said. "This fit, which really was not about ice cream, was the straw that broke the camel's back."

She took an innovative approach to address the issue.

“If I was going to rectify this, then grounding was not going to be effective,” she said. “I was going to have to give them a different experience if I really wanted to instill gratitude.” She decided that since the incident happened in a type of restaurant, they would no longer eat at restaurants until they met 30 people they had not met before and had given them food instead of getting food.

Her younger daughter responded to the idea by saying, "That's not fair. I wasn't the one who had the meltdown." Her older daughter said, "You're right. I think I'll learn a lot, and I shouldn't have done it."

They visited the local fire department with bags of nonperishable meals: spaghetti, pasta sauce, canned fruits and canned vegetables and boxes of brownies in blue gift bags. The firefighters were so appreciative. They sat with them for an hour and a half and told them about how they help the community.

They repeated the experiment with other people in their community.

Vermont, 41, said when they got their dog groomed, they told the groomer about their project and asked about her life story. The groomer told them she was 23 years old, and her 1-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. She was having trouble paying the bills and buying food. At that point, Vermont said to her kids: So, how important was that ice cream?

And they started getting it.

They also approached the woman who cuts their hair. “I went in and said: My daughter had a meltdown over ice cream because she wanted more. And so, I decided my children needed to meet people they didn't know and learn about their lives, so they can develop an appreciation for other people in their community as well as their own lives.” The hairdresser responded, "I always ask clients about them; no one asks about me." She was a single mom, divorced, raising three kids on her own. And that day was her daughter's birthday, and she was at work.

The entire project took almost five months. They did not buy any food at any restaurant during that time, except once on a daughter’s birthday.

The kids were introduced to some very grown-up topics: a teen mom who gave up her baby for adoption, a lesbian who was not accepted by her family, issues of poverty and illness. They heard from a Holocaust survivor, a Bosnian war survivor and a recovering drug addict. “It really helped them understand a lot of lessons I try to teach them to hear it from someone else who has lived through it,” Vermont said.

She also noticed changes in her kids’ behavior.

“Someone stole our younger daughter's scooter from our front lawn,” she said. Her older daughter called her grandparents and said, "For my birthday can you get a scooter for (my sister) as my present because she lost hers and is really upset?" Before, their thinking always was, “What am I getting for my birthday?” They seem much more compassionate now.

For Hanukkah, Vermont gave them a couple of CDs and DVDs, and her daughters were fine with that. They’ve also been doing a lot of shopping since the ice cream incident at Goodwill.

“I didn't think that would go over well, but they are totally fine with it,” she said. The experiment seems to have paid off.

“If I had grounded her, she would have forgotten about it in a month, but this had an impact on all of us, and we will never forget it,” Vermont said.