In which I meander and rant.
Okay, I'd like the opinion of my very learned, very wise f-list about this article here, because I happen to think that this woman is not so much writing about the neurological/genetic causes of anorexia and the impact it's had on her life as she is bragging about the fact that she's thin and can eat whatever she wants.
I also think her article is chock full of contradictions. She says:
For example, I am absolutely positive that the physiques of Kate Moss, Posh Spice, or any other convenient scapegoat had no more than a kernel’s worth of influence over my decision to live on raw broccoli and Swedish crispbread for most of my college years. This is what we’ve always been taught-Barbie makes us hate our bodies as girls, and some unholy alliance between the worlds of fashion, Hollywood, and advertising keep feeding the furnace well into womanhood, until we’re supposedly too old to care.
But then she goes on to say:
As a small child, I remember telling my mother that when I grew up I wanted to weigh 110 pounds, which was what the National Enquirer said Princess Diana weighed at her thinnest.
Am I the only one who thinks that this is completely illogical of her to claim? That she wasn't influenced by media culture and their obsession with utterly unrealistic bodies?
Ignoring that the author of the article so blithely cites her father's "casual disdain" for fat people and says that she inherited it (because turning self-hatred outward to people who are already the targets of media bullying has nothing to do with why you're screwed up. Nothing at all. *eyeroll*)
I find it funny that all the attributes she picks out as part of the "anorectic personality" are all inherently good (or positively portrayed) attributes and those which are the reverse of the "fat personality". Because it's not like fat people haven't been stereotypes as lazy, sloppy, unmotivated slobs or anything. It's not like fat people aren't shown as headless, faceless images across news screens (almost always with something unhealthy in their hands) to show that there's an obesity epidemic on.
This is one of the things I really hate most about how the media deals with anorexia, overeating, and obesity.
First, I think anorexia gets a crippling and damaging amount of sympathy from the media. I say this because I think it is to the detriment of people suffering this disorder to have an already scrambled neurology reinforced by a society that rewards their behaviors by enforcing that somehow, what they're doing is good, even while we say it's unhealthy. I think the "oh, you poor thing, you're so thin! You must be so tormented and troubled, I feel so bad for you!" attitude is what makes it harder for people to recover.
For me, I think that eating disorders are more closely related to drug addictions than anything. While I can't comment personally on anorexia (I'm obviously the furthest from anorexic you can get), I can comment on overeating. And if you reward someone with pity for their addiction, you're not helping them. You're giving them little excuses to continue.
I can tell you that food is most definitely my drug. But unlike someone addicted to meth, I can't just walk away from the table. I must live with my tormentor and mediate my interactions with it.
And I must do this in a society that tells me, "Eat! Food! Delicious Food!" and showers me with near fetishistic images of it (close ups of hamburgers reminiscent of the many money shots you see in cheap porn flicks, the industry dedicated to making food look supernaturally pretty and appealing, the billboards that show that universally eating a food product comes with happiness and parental love and friendship) and then punishes me when my neurology goes haywire and causes me to indulge too much.
Even on channels dedicated to children's entertainment, the notion is reinforced. We show children in magical candy lands, having a spectacular time among the high sugar, high fat foods on offer. Mac and cheese will have you skipping across a blue background, this candy will make you popular with your friends, will make you cool.
I counted today. In a thirty minute spot, half of the commercials I saw were for food or restaurants. All of them showed close ups either of the food itself, or the food packaging. Several of those also showed a child being given care and affection by a parent/caretaker while receiving that food.
I didn't count the ones that weren't for food, but showed people eating (such as the financial commercials that show the guy at the barbeque, or the ones for nasal allergies that show people at a picnic).
For all that I sympathize with drug addicts and their woes, at least they don't pass a billboard for crack cocaine every quarter mile on the highway. At least they can simply say, "No more!" and walk away.
I mention this because I think it goes to the cause of our unhealthiness on both ends of the eating spectrum.
We live in a society that tells us to eat and tells us to be thin, but never tells us how mediate this contradiction. We are forever reminded by the news, by pop science experts, by talk show hosts, by Dr. Phil to cut down on high fat, high sugar foods.
But the problem is, I'm not sure most Americans have a strong enough grasp on what counts as high sugar/fat, and how much they should or should not be getting per day. Sure, we all know a McDonald's cheeseburger is bad, but what about that salad at Chili's? Surely the salad is a healthy choice!
Nope. A recent trip to Chili's for an outing revealed (thanks to New York State's new law that requires all establishments with more than seven locations to list the calories in each item next to it on the menu in readable type) that the lowest calorie salad they had was 1100 calories, approximately.
The average adult, barring health conditions, should get about 2,000 calories per day provided they're suitably active enough. 1100 is over half of their daily apportionment of calories. Several menu items were 2500 or 3000 calories - more than you'd need for a day.
I myself am on a 1000-1200 calorie diet as part of my quest to lose weight, and to rid myself of the spectre of diabetes that's hanging over my head. Since I have both a physiological and genetic (my grandfather was, my great uncle was, and likely my father is diabetic) risk for it, it's imperative that I get down to a healthy weight as soon as I can and maintain that weight, because diabetes is no joke. My grandfather died a much earlier death than he had to, and I have no doubt that had he not been diabetic, his heart, lung, and circulatory problems would not have been so exacerbated.
Which means I have had to endure a rather rocky education on food labels, fat content, deceptive packaging, portion sizes, and nutrition - and it leads me to believe that if America is suffering an obesity epidemic, it's a symptom of an educational epidemic that is the real disease.
It is my firm belief that American schools are wasting their time running a 19th century model of what students ought to learn. Learning about history, algebra, and reading such tomes as Moby Dick may be well and academic, but rather useless, especially to a society that is becoming increasingly oriented to on-the-job training and specialized fields.
I think the American school system would be better off and would improve our society greatly if we included three central curriculae - health/sex/nutrition, money, and science. I think if we had a generation that grew up knowing the basic biological facts of life, we'd have a much healthier society.
Let me give you a real time example of what I don't think most people get.
I always thought rice was a fairly healthy food. It seemed on the list of "good foods". But I then learned that not all rice is created equal. Brown rice is better for you than white rice.
A mere serving of white rice will cost you 267 calories, whereas a serving of brown rice is 218 calories for a serving*. That doesn't sound too bad right?
Until you realize that a serving size of rice is 1 cup, cooked.
Go try a little experiment. Go get some rice, and portion out the size that you'd normally eat. Then go portion out a cup. Look at the difference.
Back in the bad old days, if rice was being served as a side dish, I'd probably scoop a full two and half cups onto my plate (that's somewhere around 667.5 calories, and that's just for plain white rice, let's not talk about the hamburger helper/rice-a-roni type rice), because that's how much I'd want to eat. That would be the portion size that fit my appetite.
Just for reference, an entire McDonald's BigMac comes in at approximately 540 calories.
So, basically, I'd added a Big Mac and change to my plate, all by eating extra rice. Because I didn't know. If you just read the calories on the label, without the serving size, rice is healthier. It has much less fat, sodium, and other baddies. But rice can quickly become as unhealthy as a cheeseburger with portion size.
Nobody teaches you this, though. Food manufacturers have a vested interest in keeping the public ignorant.
Another example? Cereal.
When I was first starting out seriously getting my weight under control, I decided that a good start to my day would be healthy granola cereal. What could be a better start, right?
Until I looked at the calories and the portion sizes. For a mere half-cup of Kashi's Mountain Medley granola cereal (or the comparable generic brand I found), I'd be consuming 220 calories and twelve grams of sugar, and that's without the milk!
Go get a half cup and pour it into a bowl. See what kind of a portion size that is, and then look at the serving suggestions on the front of the box and how full that bowl is. Most of us, probably, would pour about a cup and a half to two cups into a cereal bowl if we were just judging by how much we wanted to eat.
What surprised me was when I started looking at other cereals. For an entire cup of Kellogg's Corn Pops, I'd only expend 110 calories and the amount of sugar is the same! For Honey Nut Cheerios, one cup is a mere 138 calories with only 11 grams of sugar! But, these are supposed to be the bad cereals, the evil ones.
Now, this may seem like nickle and dime nutrition to you, but when you're me, when you only get 1200 precious calories to eat per day, every single calorie counts. 220 calories is quite nearly a fifth of all the calories I can have. A fifth!
Do you know how long you have to do step aerobics on the Wii, or how long you have to speed walk or how many sit ups you have to do to burn 220 calories? Quite a lot, actually! Even if you are lucky enough that you can afford 2000 calories per day, these things add up, especially when you don't know that you need to watch portion size.
But Kashi probably doesn't want you to know this, because they market themselves as wholesome, healthy, natural. They don't want you to know that cup for cup, their cereal has almost twice the calories!
Remember how I said that salads weren't always the great choice you thought they were at restaurants? A lot of that has to do with the dressings. Ranch dressing, for instance, has 140 calories per serving, and a serving is a mere two tablespoons, but if you ever look at the little cups of dressing you get at restaurants? Usually you're given a full half-cup to a cup of dressing.
In the U.S. a cup is a full 16 tablespoons. So, let's be generous. Let's say that you were only given a half cup worth of dressing in that little plastic container by your salad and you, like I often did, dumped the whole thing on and spread it around, patting yourself on the back for being so virtuous, even when you really wanted that fat-laden cheeseburger or the pizza or the fried chicken fingers.
But guess what? You just added 560 calories to your salad. You just added a Big Mac. And in terms of fat and sodium, ranch dressing isn't that much better than a cheeseburger. So you thought you were doing the right thing. You were doing what you've had people screaming in your face to do: Eat less fat! Be healthy! Stop pigging out and stuffing your piehole you horrible fatso!
But because you weren't educated, because people didn't bother telling you the truth, because your society is more concerned with calling you lazy and hideous than teaching you, you're making bad decisions, and you're defeating yourself.
Now, I want to be clear. I'm not saying that society bears the responsibility. It is your job, as a human being, to maintain your own body as you see fit. Meaning, if you want to be healthy, you can't expect people to hand you that. You have to go out and learn all the lessons (even the hard ones) for yourself, you have to take your problems (whatever they are) by the scruff and deal with them. You have to do the work of maintaining your own meat puppet.
It sucks, because people some people get handed more problems than others. Some of us are fat, and some of us are smug "anorexics" (I find myself doubting Ms. Shukerts claims, actually) who brag about getting to eat whatever they want at the buffet. Still others get handed tragic disorders and disabilities that make obesity look like a walk in the park. But no matter what straw you drew in the genetic lottery, you have to deal with it.
Which is why I think we need a radical shift in not only our media, but our health education in this country.
I think our media needs to stop relying on ignorance and deception to sell products. I, personally, think that New York's law ought to be a federal law, and that not only should the calories and fat be printed on menus, but so should sugar and sodium. I think that commercials that sell foods directly to kids ought to be illegal. In fact, I think any commercial that markets to a child ought to be illegal. Kids aren't consumers. They're kids. Their brains aren't even developed. Give them a few years before your start rewiring their neurology for fun and profit, would you?
I'd like a ranking system in foods, required to be put on all packaging, that shows the relative healthiness of the food in accordance with portion size, calories, fat, sugar, and sodium. That way, these smartass companies that try to deceive you into believing that something is healthy can't get away with it. It means that when Kashi tries to make you believe that their "Mountain Medley" is wholesome, they won't be able to trick you into consuming twice the calories you would have otherwise.
Of course, all this should go along with a great push in education to teach kids from the time they're in preschool to the time they graduate, to read labels carefully, to make wise decisions, and to be aware of tricky advertising schemes that make them think that somehow, someway Oreos are healthy.
Still, as a person fighting the fat, if I could recommend one thing that our society do, above laws, above education, it would be one thing: parental involvement for kids.
Consider the many commercials that advertise food, to parents (mostly very worried, stressed moms who are under near Pompeiian pressures from society to be perfect) that are healthy, but make it clear that moms need to trick their kids into nutrition. "Oh, this food is actually low in sugar, high in vitamins. We'll package it like it's the bad stuff so your kid will eat it, but don't tell them!"
One memorable commercial is the one for a Chef Boyardee meal-in-a-can type food where the dad keeps trying to cite how healthy the meatball and pasta is, but the mom keeps banging on pots and pans and shaking her head as though the fact that the pasta is enriched with a few vitamins is a state secret.
And we wonder why there's an epidemic on!
If you teach kids that nutritious eating is, by it's very nature, a nasty trick, and a sacrifice that entails giving up taste, good food, and happy eating, of course you're going to get a society of folks who, after a while, just want to be happy and give up and decide to eat that cheeseburger. Because hey, life sucks, why not be happy for a little while? Why make yourself miserable eating bland cardboard health food, only to live long enough just to eat more cardboard?
Why not have the stuff that makes you happy?
Humans aren't that great at negative reinforcement. As a species, we're really only willing to flog ourselves for so long before we decide we've been punished enough. That's why I believe that most diets fail. People see them as Fat Penance. We go on diets to show that we're sorry for being hideous and lazy and overindulgent. For a while we torture ourselves with bland food and meager portions, we go and sweat off our sins at a gym, and then, after we feel we've been punished enough, or if we repeat our sin and can't face having to do even more penance we quit.
The one thing that might fix a lot of the eating disorders in America, and not just overeating, but anorexia and bulimia, is if parents taught their kids from an early age to prefer healthy eating, healthy living, and a healthy weight - if we got rid of the love/hate obsession with food and our own bodies. What if no girl ever had to hear her parents whine about their weight woes?
The thing is? We're sort of born with an inborn sense of good and bad when it comes to food, of how much is enough. But our parents often say, "No, finish your dinner!" when we insist that we're full, or they teach us that apples are common food and the real treat, the real rewards are oreos and cookies and cakes.
I don't think parents realize that when they do this, they're rewiring their child's neurology. For whatever innate instinct a child has to seek out good food and stop eating when they're full, a parent can quickly and easily override that and teach them that they're not eating enough, that they need to eat in big meals that are hours apart, that sugar and fat are food which should trigger feelings of security, love, happiness, accomplishment.
Some people accuse food manufacturers of putting mood altering chemicals in our food. And I'm loathe to say that none of them do (caffeine is an obvious one), but I think a lot of the mood alteration comes from our parents and caretakers who teach our tiny brains that these foods should trigger a sense of reward and elevate our moods.
I know it goes against everything we're imbedded with by our society, but honestly? I think we need to stop centering rewards around food, stop centering our celebrations and festivities around big meals. All our major holidays traditionally involve a big supper. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter. The summer holidays come replete with barbeques, ice cream, lemonade, fried chicken, hamburgers, hotdogs.
I think we need to stop the love/hate with food, with weight, with health.
I won't even start on the exercise revolution that needs to happen. If you want to know the biggest reason that Americans don't get enough physical activity in their lives, don't look to cars or offices or even televisions. Look to gyms. Look to treadmills and weight machines.
I think if Americans knew that you could get the same health benefits from doing something as simple as taking walks in the park, playing a game of basketball, or other forms of sports and recreation that are fun, we'd have not only a healthier society, but a happier one.
I mean, can you imagine what the landscape would look like if parents spent at least an hour a day playing games with their kids in the backyard, if they handed them apples and carrots instead of cookies and chips? If we rewarded kids with love, affection, and non-food items? Geez, imagine if we rewarded kids with books and taught them that healthy things were actually as good as they are.
(*all nutritional values according to calorieking.com. Some may vary by 10-20 calories per serving. The Big Mac, especially, varies between 240 and 280 depending on the source of the information.)
I'd also like to note how suspicious I find it that my comments on the article have mysteriously gotten lost but other comments were approved. Hmm. Maybe I should have read the invisible "No Fatties Allowed" sign before I commented.
I also think her article is chock full of contradictions. She says:
For example, I am absolutely positive that the physiques of Kate Moss, Posh Spice, or any other convenient scapegoat had no more than a kernel’s worth of influence over my decision to live on raw broccoli and Swedish crispbread for most of my college years. This is what we’ve always been taught-Barbie makes us hate our bodies as girls, and some unholy alliance between the worlds of fashion, Hollywood, and advertising keep feeding the furnace well into womanhood, until we’re supposedly too old to care.
But then she goes on to say:
As a small child, I remember telling my mother that when I grew up I wanted to weigh 110 pounds, which was what the National Enquirer said Princess Diana weighed at her thinnest.
Am I the only one who thinks that this is completely illogical of her to claim? That she wasn't influenced by media culture and their obsession with utterly unrealistic bodies?
Ignoring that the author of the article so blithely cites her father's "casual disdain" for fat people and says that she inherited it (because turning self-hatred outward to people who are already the targets of media bullying has nothing to do with why you're screwed up. Nothing at all. *eyeroll*)
I find it funny that all the attributes she picks out as part of the "anorectic personality" are all inherently good (or positively portrayed) attributes and those which are the reverse of the "fat personality". Because it's not like fat people haven't been stereotypes as lazy, sloppy, unmotivated slobs or anything. It's not like fat people aren't shown as headless, faceless images across news screens (almost always with something unhealthy in their hands) to show that there's an obesity epidemic on.
This is one of the things I really hate most about how the media deals with anorexia, overeating, and obesity.
First, I think anorexia gets a crippling and damaging amount of sympathy from the media. I say this because I think it is to the detriment of people suffering this disorder to have an already scrambled neurology reinforced by a society that rewards their behaviors by enforcing that somehow, what they're doing is good, even while we say it's unhealthy. I think the "oh, you poor thing, you're so thin! You must be so tormented and troubled, I feel so bad for you!" attitude is what makes it harder for people to recover.
For me, I think that eating disorders are more closely related to drug addictions than anything. While I can't comment personally on anorexia (I'm obviously the furthest from anorexic you can get), I can comment on overeating. And if you reward someone with pity for their addiction, you're not helping them. You're giving them little excuses to continue.
I can tell you that food is most definitely my drug. But unlike someone addicted to meth, I can't just walk away from the table. I must live with my tormentor and mediate my interactions with it.
And I must do this in a society that tells me, "Eat! Food! Delicious Food!" and showers me with near fetishistic images of it (close ups of hamburgers reminiscent of the many money shots you see in cheap porn flicks, the industry dedicated to making food look supernaturally pretty and appealing, the billboards that show that universally eating a food product comes with happiness and parental love and friendship) and then punishes me when my neurology goes haywire and causes me to indulge too much.
Even on channels dedicated to children's entertainment, the notion is reinforced. We show children in magical candy lands, having a spectacular time among the high sugar, high fat foods on offer. Mac and cheese will have you skipping across a blue background, this candy will make you popular with your friends, will make you cool.
I counted today. In a thirty minute spot, half of the commercials I saw were for food or restaurants. All of them showed close ups either of the food itself, or the food packaging. Several of those also showed a child being given care and affection by a parent/caretaker while receiving that food.
I didn't count the ones that weren't for food, but showed people eating (such as the financial commercials that show the guy at the barbeque, or the ones for nasal allergies that show people at a picnic).
For all that I sympathize with drug addicts and their woes, at least they don't pass a billboard for crack cocaine every quarter mile on the highway. At least they can simply say, "No more!" and walk away.
I mention this because I think it goes to the cause of our unhealthiness on both ends of the eating spectrum.
We live in a society that tells us to eat and tells us to be thin, but never tells us how mediate this contradiction. We are forever reminded by the news, by pop science experts, by talk show hosts, by Dr. Phil to cut down on high fat, high sugar foods.
But the problem is, I'm not sure most Americans have a strong enough grasp on what counts as high sugar/fat, and how much they should or should not be getting per day. Sure, we all know a McDonald's cheeseburger is bad, but what about that salad at Chili's? Surely the salad is a healthy choice!
Nope. A recent trip to Chili's for an outing revealed (thanks to New York State's new law that requires all establishments with more than seven locations to list the calories in each item next to it on the menu in readable type) that the lowest calorie salad they had was 1100 calories, approximately.
The average adult, barring health conditions, should get about 2,000 calories per day provided they're suitably active enough. 1100 is over half of their daily apportionment of calories. Several menu items were 2500 or 3000 calories - more than you'd need for a day.
I myself am on a 1000-1200 calorie diet as part of my quest to lose weight, and to rid myself of the spectre of diabetes that's hanging over my head. Since I have both a physiological and genetic (my grandfather was, my great uncle was, and likely my father is diabetic) risk for it, it's imperative that I get down to a healthy weight as soon as I can and maintain that weight, because diabetes is no joke. My grandfather died a much earlier death than he had to, and I have no doubt that had he not been diabetic, his heart, lung, and circulatory problems would not have been so exacerbated.
Which means I have had to endure a rather rocky education on food labels, fat content, deceptive packaging, portion sizes, and nutrition - and it leads me to believe that if America is suffering an obesity epidemic, it's a symptom of an educational epidemic that is the real disease.
It is my firm belief that American schools are wasting their time running a 19th century model of what students ought to learn. Learning about history, algebra, and reading such tomes as Moby Dick may be well and academic, but rather useless, especially to a society that is becoming increasingly oriented to on-the-job training and specialized fields.
I think the American school system would be better off and would improve our society greatly if we included three central curriculae - health/sex/nutrition, money, and science. I think if we had a generation that grew up knowing the basic biological facts of life, we'd have a much healthier society.
Let me give you a real time example of what I don't think most people get.
I always thought rice was a fairly healthy food. It seemed on the list of "good foods". But I then learned that not all rice is created equal. Brown rice is better for you than white rice.
A mere serving of white rice will cost you 267 calories, whereas a serving of brown rice is 218 calories for a serving*. That doesn't sound too bad right?
Until you realize that a serving size of rice is 1 cup, cooked.
Go try a little experiment. Go get some rice, and portion out the size that you'd normally eat. Then go portion out a cup. Look at the difference.
Back in the bad old days, if rice was being served as a side dish, I'd probably scoop a full two and half cups onto my plate (that's somewhere around 667.5 calories, and that's just for plain white rice, let's not talk about the hamburger helper/rice-a-roni type rice), because that's how much I'd want to eat. That would be the portion size that fit my appetite.
Just for reference, an entire McDonald's BigMac comes in at approximately 540 calories.
So, basically, I'd added a Big Mac and change to my plate, all by eating extra rice. Because I didn't know. If you just read the calories on the label, without the serving size, rice is healthier. It has much less fat, sodium, and other baddies. But rice can quickly become as unhealthy as a cheeseburger with portion size.
Nobody teaches you this, though. Food manufacturers have a vested interest in keeping the public ignorant.
Another example? Cereal.
When I was first starting out seriously getting my weight under control, I decided that a good start to my day would be healthy granola cereal. What could be a better start, right?
Until I looked at the calories and the portion sizes. For a mere half-cup of Kashi's Mountain Medley granola cereal (or the comparable generic brand I found), I'd be consuming 220 calories and twelve grams of sugar, and that's without the milk!
Go get a half cup and pour it into a bowl. See what kind of a portion size that is, and then look at the serving suggestions on the front of the box and how full that bowl is. Most of us, probably, would pour about a cup and a half to two cups into a cereal bowl if we were just judging by how much we wanted to eat.
What surprised me was when I started looking at other cereals. For an entire cup of Kellogg's Corn Pops, I'd only expend 110 calories and the amount of sugar is the same! For Honey Nut Cheerios, one cup is a mere 138 calories with only 11 grams of sugar! But, these are supposed to be the bad cereals, the evil ones.
Now, this may seem like nickle and dime nutrition to you, but when you're me, when you only get 1200 precious calories to eat per day, every single calorie counts. 220 calories is quite nearly a fifth of all the calories I can have. A fifth!
Do you know how long you have to do step aerobics on the Wii, or how long you have to speed walk or how many sit ups you have to do to burn 220 calories? Quite a lot, actually! Even if you are lucky enough that you can afford 2000 calories per day, these things add up, especially when you don't know that you need to watch portion size.
But Kashi probably doesn't want you to know this, because they market themselves as wholesome, healthy, natural. They don't want you to know that cup for cup, their cereal has almost twice the calories!
Remember how I said that salads weren't always the great choice you thought they were at restaurants? A lot of that has to do with the dressings. Ranch dressing, for instance, has 140 calories per serving, and a serving is a mere two tablespoons, but if you ever look at the little cups of dressing you get at restaurants? Usually you're given a full half-cup to a cup of dressing.
In the U.S. a cup is a full 16 tablespoons. So, let's be generous. Let's say that you were only given a half cup worth of dressing in that little plastic container by your salad and you, like I often did, dumped the whole thing on and spread it around, patting yourself on the back for being so virtuous, even when you really wanted that fat-laden cheeseburger or the pizza or the fried chicken fingers.
But guess what? You just added 560 calories to your salad. You just added a Big Mac. And in terms of fat and sodium, ranch dressing isn't that much better than a cheeseburger. So you thought you were doing the right thing. You were doing what you've had people screaming in your face to do: Eat less fat! Be healthy! Stop pigging out and stuffing your piehole you horrible fatso!
But because you weren't educated, because people didn't bother telling you the truth, because your society is more concerned with calling you lazy and hideous than teaching you, you're making bad decisions, and you're defeating yourself.
Now, I want to be clear. I'm not saying that society bears the responsibility. It is your job, as a human being, to maintain your own body as you see fit. Meaning, if you want to be healthy, you can't expect people to hand you that. You have to go out and learn all the lessons (even the hard ones) for yourself, you have to take your problems (whatever they are) by the scruff and deal with them. You have to do the work of maintaining your own meat puppet.
It sucks, because people some people get handed more problems than others. Some of us are fat, and some of us are smug "anorexics" (I find myself doubting Ms. Shukerts claims, actually) who brag about getting to eat whatever they want at the buffet. Still others get handed tragic disorders and disabilities that make obesity look like a walk in the park. But no matter what straw you drew in the genetic lottery, you have to deal with it.
Which is why I think we need a radical shift in not only our media, but our health education in this country.
I think our media needs to stop relying on ignorance and deception to sell products. I, personally, think that New York's law ought to be a federal law, and that not only should the calories and fat be printed on menus, but so should sugar and sodium. I think that commercials that sell foods directly to kids ought to be illegal. In fact, I think any commercial that markets to a child ought to be illegal. Kids aren't consumers. They're kids. Their brains aren't even developed. Give them a few years before your start rewiring their neurology for fun and profit, would you?
I'd like a ranking system in foods, required to be put on all packaging, that shows the relative healthiness of the food in accordance with portion size, calories, fat, sugar, and sodium. That way, these smartass companies that try to deceive you into believing that something is healthy can't get away with it. It means that when Kashi tries to make you believe that their "Mountain Medley" is wholesome, they won't be able to trick you into consuming twice the calories you would have otherwise.
Of course, all this should go along with a great push in education to teach kids from the time they're in preschool to the time they graduate, to read labels carefully, to make wise decisions, and to be aware of tricky advertising schemes that make them think that somehow, someway Oreos are healthy.
Still, as a person fighting the fat, if I could recommend one thing that our society do, above laws, above education, it would be one thing: parental involvement for kids.
Consider the many commercials that advertise food, to parents (mostly very worried, stressed moms who are under near Pompeiian pressures from society to be perfect) that are healthy, but make it clear that moms need to trick their kids into nutrition. "Oh, this food is actually low in sugar, high in vitamins. We'll package it like it's the bad stuff so your kid will eat it, but don't tell them!"
One memorable commercial is the one for a Chef Boyardee meal-in-a-can type food where the dad keeps trying to cite how healthy the meatball and pasta is, but the mom keeps banging on pots and pans and shaking her head as though the fact that the pasta is enriched with a few vitamins is a state secret.
And we wonder why there's an epidemic on!
If you teach kids that nutritious eating is, by it's very nature, a nasty trick, and a sacrifice that entails giving up taste, good food, and happy eating, of course you're going to get a society of folks who, after a while, just want to be happy and give up and decide to eat that cheeseburger. Because hey, life sucks, why not be happy for a little while? Why make yourself miserable eating bland cardboard health food, only to live long enough just to eat more cardboard?
Why not have the stuff that makes you happy?
Humans aren't that great at negative reinforcement. As a species, we're really only willing to flog ourselves for so long before we decide we've been punished enough. That's why I believe that most diets fail. People see them as Fat Penance. We go on diets to show that we're sorry for being hideous and lazy and overindulgent. For a while we torture ourselves with bland food and meager portions, we go and sweat off our sins at a gym, and then, after we feel we've been punished enough, or if we repeat our sin and can't face having to do even more penance we quit.
The one thing that might fix a lot of the eating disorders in America, and not just overeating, but anorexia and bulimia, is if parents taught their kids from an early age to prefer healthy eating, healthy living, and a healthy weight - if we got rid of the love/hate obsession with food and our own bodies. What if no girl ever had to hear her parents whine about their weight woes?
The thing is? We're sort of born with an inborn sense of good and bad when it comes to food, of how much is enough. But our parents often say, "No, finish your dinner!" when we insist that we're full, or they teach us that apples are common food and the real treat, the real rewards are oreos and cookies and cakes.
I don't think parents realize that when they do this, they're rewiring their child's neurology. For whatever innate instinct a child has to seek out good food and stop eating when they're full, a parent can quickly and easily override that and teach them that they're not eating enough, that they need to eat in big meals that are hours apart, that sugar and fat are food which should trigger feelings of security, love, happiness, accomplishment.
Some people accuse food manufacturers of putting mood altering chemicals in our food. And I'm loathe to say that none of them do (caffeine is an obvious one), but I think a lot of the mood alteration comes from our parents and caretakers who teach our tiny brains that these foods should trigger a sense of reward and elevate our moods.
I know it goes against everything we're imbedded with by our society, but honestly? I think we need to stop centering rewards around food, stop centering our celebrations and festivities around big meals. All our major holidays traditionally involve a big supper. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter. The summer holidays come replete with barbeques, ice cream, lemonade, fried chicken, hamburgers, hotdogs.
I think we need to stop the love/hate with food, with weight, with health.
I won't even start on the exercise revolution that needs to happen. If you want to know the biggest reason that Americans don't get enough physical activity in their lives, don't look to cars or offices or even televisions. Look to gyms. Look to treadmills and weight machines.
I think if Americans knew that you could get the same health benefits from doing something as simple as taking walks in the park, playing a game of basketball, or other forms of sports and recreation that are fun, we'd have not only a healthier society, but a happier one.
I mean, can you imagine what the landscape would look like if parents spent at least an hour a day playing games with their kids in the backyard, if they handed them apples and carrots instead of cookies and chips? If we rewarded kids with love, affection, and non-food items? Geez, imagine if we rewarded kids with books and taught them that healthy things were actually as good as they are.
(*all nutritional values according to calorieking.com. Some may vary by 10-20 calories per serving. The Big Mac, especially, varies between 240 and 280 depending on the source of the information.)
I'd also like to note how suspicious I find it that my comments on the article have mysteriously gotten lost but other comments were approved. Hmm. Maybe I should have read the invisible "No Fatties Allowed" sign before I commented.