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I have been reading a lot of nutrition labels over the last few months. And like most people, I’ve been looking foods with a relatively low amount of calories. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not only looking at the calories. I’m also looking at the fat, carbohydrate, and protein content of the foods I’m choosing to buy. But Never once have I stopped to think that someone would put an item back on the shelf because the food didn’t have enough calories in it.
However, some people have the opposite problem that I do. For some recovering anorexics, no matter what they put in their mouths, their body burns it up and doesn’t store anything for later. In a recent New York Times article, Harriet Brown writes:
Like many Americans, I can be obsessive about reading food labels. Only I’m looking for more calories, not fewer, because my daughter Kitty is in recovery from anorexia.
Sometimes it helps to look at your problems from a different perspective.
J.D.
3 responses so far ↓
1 greenman2001 // Jan 20, 2008 at 8:54 am
Notice her comment: “there is no such thing as good and bad foods.” She’s making a point here about the way our culture loads foods with judgment, in addition to their nutritional content, which we mostly ignore.
Why is this important? What difference does it make whether we call a food “bad” or not? For women in particular, I think this kind of language is one link in the chain of body-hatred that binds women to extreme self-consciousness about their appearance. A not-thin woman puts a bad food in her mouth, and now she’s twice as worse off than she was. For the child in this NY Times article, that cascade of negative judgment leads her one step closer to her own literal self-destruction. For the average woman, it’s just one more thing to be miserable about, one more piece of the self-reinforcing negative feedback loop that traps them (men and women) in their universe of coping mechanisms. The media is happy to help feed that misery (our job is to inform), and the consumer culture is happy to show you a way to spend your way out of it (our job is to meet consumer demand).
But for everyone who’s dieting, there’s a particular pattern of failure, and these kinds of labels are part of that pattern. Dieters put obstacles in their way. They identify “exercise” with “the gym” so that if they don’t get to the gym they don’t exercise. They arrive starved to restaurants. They keep all food in the fridge so that it’s the maximum distance away when mealtime arrives while they’re driving. They become disciples of the South Beach Diet, and are lost when dining with friends who are disciples of the Pizza Hut diet. They eat “bad” foods, become discouraged, and then eat to feel better. They avoid “bad” foods when they’re hungry, so that their appetite becomes ravenous, leading them to overeat the “good” food they turn to. They pack their lives with obligations that leave them without time at mealtimes, limiting their choices to quickly available foods, which tend to be “bad.”
Meanwhile, your body doesn’t care about any of this: it simply needs calories. It doesn’t care whether they’re good or bad. For your brain, this is a matter of survival. Enough Sno-balls and not enough brocolli, and you’ll begin to suffer in other ways, but the brain isn’t worried about that right now. When you introduce categories — good food, bad food — you create an obstacle that your body must overcome to survive. It may be a smart obstacle to put in place, but it can also be an extremely problematic one for dieters who have failed over and over and over again.
2 brad // Jan 20, 2008 at 9:52 am
My 18-year-old stepdaughter is also a calorie hunter. She is so thin that many people assume she is anoxeric but it’s just genetics - her mother is the same way. She desperately wants to gain weight and fill out, so her figure isn’t so girlish. I watch in awe as she fills her plate with mashed potatoes, which already have quite a bit of milk and butter in them, and then puts half a stick of butter on top and mixes it in. She lives on a typical Rebellious Teenager Diet: hot dogs, rice, Nestle’s Quick in milk, poutine (a Québec fast food of French fries smothered in gravy and cheese), pizza, raw Pilsbury chocolate chip cookies out of the fridge, and McDonald’s hamburgers with fries. She eats a green vegetable once every eight months or so, and refuses to eat anything we eat. Her diet is ultra high fat and yet she weighs about 80 pounds and can’t gain weight. We try to explain to her that she might gain a bit more if she ate a more balanced diet, but because that advice comes from us she ignores it; we’re just hoping she starts hearing the same thing from her friends. But anyway it’s amazing to watch what she eats while staying razor-thin.
3 em // Jan 28, 2008 at 2:36 pm
brad, has she seen a doctor about this? it sounds like she may have a thyroid problem. this was the case with a friend of mine in high school.
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