As a child, I was raised on a steady diet of whole milk and public television. For fun, I would read books or write short stories for my father to critique. On really crazy nights, my cousins and I would get to rent a VHS of the Pippi Longstocking movies, not even noticing how poorly they had been dubbed into English.

When my parents finally agreed to get cable during my middle school years, my entire life changed.

I'm not even exaggerating when I say that.

Though we weren't allowed to watch TV after school, my brother and I perfected the art of deception, watching for our parents' cars to appear in the driveway before flipping the TV back to the station they had left it on the night before, closing the TV cabinet and racing to the kitchen table to pretend as if we had been doing our homework all afternoon when really we had been sitting idly on the couch eating slices of baloney and fighting over the remote.

It wasn't long before the areas of my brain that used to dominate spelling and geography bees during my grammar school years were rewired to create a repository for celebrity gossip shows, long out-dated sitcoms and E! True Hollywood stories.

It is important to note that I am usually quite proud of my personal Encyclopedia of Uselessness. Yes, I have watched every episode of Welcome Back, Kotter and I still wish Hard Copy was on the air. I remember passages from long-forgotten episodes of Saved By The Bell and can identify actors from their cameo appearance on Law & Order.

The problem is, the amount of space my brain is using on useless stuff is paled in comparison to the amount of space that is being used on awful stuff. Why on earth am I devoting an hour a week to watching 16-year-old teenage mothers fist fight with their boyfriends in front of their newborn child, or watching grown women terrorize their bridal parties? What does it say about me that I watch reality shows that are spin-offs of spin-offs of other reality shows? Is my rapidly decaying vocabulary a result of this intellectual junk food?

My new diet shouldn't just be about the food I eat (although I really do regret that muffin from this morning), but about the media I consume.

After this week's Lifetime movie, of course.

Which show has you ready for a junk-food-TV crash diet? 

by Nora McInerny