GLASGOW — I made the not-so-original New Year’s resolution to attempt to start eating healthy. It seems doable but the hardest part, which I’m sure many women can relate to, is getting your husband or boyfriend on board.

I know my mother’s battles with getting my father, who thinks taking his cholesterol medication magically cancels out the doughnuts he consumed before bed, to join her in eating healthier. She’ll buy lower calorie foods such as Tilapia to eat to which my father’s response is usually a frightened “you’re not making that for me, right?” We still laugh to this day about mom’s attempt to make a healthy version of spaghetti, substituting strands of squash for noodles, which my father greeted with little enthusiasm. In fact, I recall his face looked like he was consuming something that was physically painful to eat.

I was doing well with my New Years resolution. I was researching healthy recipes to try, printing them out and taking them with me to the grocery store. I often pack my boyfriend’s lunch and push my healthy agenda on him, but my boyfriend, like my father, likes the foods he likes and is hesitant to branch out.

Every day I packed a similar lunch of a sandwich, yogurt, a couple of cookies and a pear. Every day when I came home I’d find the same lonely pear sitting on the kitchen counter uneaten.  After two days straight, it became an unspoken game between the two of us. He’d take to pear out and I’d put it back in. This went on for about a week.

Every time I saw the same sad pear on the kitchen counter I’d laugh to myself. I thought when I asked my boyfriend if he liked pears at the grocery store and he said yes, I naturally assumed that meant he liked to eat them not just drive around with them in his car.

I pictured my boyfriend, who is a cell tower technician, driving around to various cell towers sites in the countryside of Kentucky with the pear strapped in the passenger seat. The thought made me giggle a bit, but it also gave me an idea. I wanted to do something as a joke between the two of us, a sort of thing to make him know that I knew what he was doing.

I decided to dress up the pear. I grabbed a black sharpie and drew a face on it with an encouraging note, “try me! I taste yummy!” I’m not sure it looked more appealing to eat, in fact, the pear now more closely resembled Tom Hanks’ soccer ball friend Wilson in the movie “Castaway.”

The day went on and around lunchtime I received a call from my boyfriend laughing so hard he could barely catch his breath. Luckily, he appreciated the humor in my satire fruit, and wouldn’t you know, when he came home that night the pear was gone. He said he ate and actually enjoyed it.

I supposed it goes to show with a little bit of creativity and determination you can get anybody to break out of their comfort zone, and if not, you’ll just have a fridge full of fruit that looks like Mr. Potato Head.