In a sort of sideways attack on claims by Jonathan Safran Foer and others that vegetarianism is the only ethical food choice, Angier writes,

[B]efore we cede the entire moral penthouse to "committed vegetarians" and "strong ethical vegans," we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants - their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar - the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It's time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

She then launches into a series of anecdotes about the ways plants protect themselves from getting eaten, all of which are entertaining, and all of which seem slightly beside the point. Anyone who's ever eschewed meat has encountered more than one person who makes jokes about cruelty to carrots, usually with the goal of making vegetarians feel like idiots. They do this because vegetarianism often feels like a judgment, implicit or explicit, against the way omnivores live their lives. But the fact that brussels sprouts combat hungry caterpillars by releasing compounds that summon caterpillar-eating wasps doesn't invalidate vegetarianism anymore than the sheer number of sick people in the world invalidates medical care. We can never end all suffering, and the assumption that this is the goal of all vegetarians misunderstands what vegetarianism is about — a misunderstanding unfortunately fostered by some vegetarians.

Angier's real point isn't actually that vegetarianism is dumb, or that we should all subsist on fruit and dead bugs. Rather, her argument is that all eating is a compromise. Angier writes that she no longer eats "mammalian meat," but still consumes fish and poultry. She continues,

My dietary decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent, and when friends ask why I'm willing to try the duck but not the lamb, I don't have a good answer. Food choices are often like that: difficult to articulate yet strongly held.

The truth is, the best thing human beings could do for (almost) every other species on Earth would be to cease to exist. Anytime we choose to keep ourselves alive at the expense of other living things — which we do all the time, consciously or not — we sacrifice a certain amount of our moral purity. This is something people on both sides of the debate about food politics have to accept — that vegetarians will never be entirely morally perfect, and that this lack of perfection doesn't invalidate what they're trying to do.

Food politics are ancient, as a look at any religion's dietary laws will attest. And as Angier says, people often believe in their food choices almost as deeply as they believe in their gods, making many a dinner table a kind of culinary Middle East. Arguing about food can be just as thankless as trying to talk someone into or out of belief in God, and at this point we might do well to accept an interfaith model of eating. Yes, food is about morality, and yes, we can judge others' dietary morals if we wish. But food, like religion, can also be about comfort, memory, tradition, transcendence, and joy, and these are things people can share even if they're not eating the same dish. It might be time to focus on them.

Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like To Live, Too [NYT]

A segment on chocolate. Specifically: The sustainable cocoa farming Dove supports in Brazil. And then a commercial for Dove chocolate, a sponsor of the show.

Of course, food is often a touchy subject even in non-vegetarian homes. My desire to eat nothing but plain chicken and bagels throughout my childhood caused plenty of bitter fights, and contributed to my parents' early fear that my vegetarianism was just another form of pickiness. In retrospect, I'm not sure why I hated all foods with flavor so much, but I do know that kids start searching at a relatively young age for ways to exercise their own autonomy, and food choice is one of these ways. So should the children of vegetarians get to choose to eat meat?

Emily Sohn of the LA Times addresses several issues surrounding this question, including health. It's a common misconception that growing kids need meat to survive. I remember a sort of legend that made the rounds in college about a student who tried to raise her toddler vegan; all the kid's teeth fell out, and had to be replaced with metal ones. The metal is, I think, a dead giveaway that this story was bullshit (although I'd kind of like to get a look at little Johnny Steelfangs), but it's true that vegetarian and especially vegan diets for kids require a few tweaks. As Sohn says, small children may need calorie-rich foods like peanut butter because a vegetarian diet can otherwise fill them up without giving them enough energy. And breastfeeding vegan moms may need a B12 supplement. But horror stories aside, a meat-free diet shouldn't do kids physical harm.

Then there's the psychological angle. As Sohn points out, "school-age children in particular can become anxious when anything about them is different from their peers, including what they eat for lunch." This actually seems like an opportunity for educating kids about differences — after all, children are always going to stick out in some way, and if parents can teach them to stand up for what's in their lunchboxes, they may be better at standing up for what's in their heads.

What seems more difficult to negotiate is a kid's desire to separate herself from her parents — including their dietary restrictions. Of course, many parents exercise some control over what their kids eat, and in some religions, dietary rules have been passed down for millennia. But, as Sohn notes, "resentment can build up if foods are forbidden completely." And at some point, kids are going to have the opportunity to try a hamburger. Parents can tell their children why they believe vegetarianism is important, and they can make only vegetarian foods at home. But when it comes to the big, bad, omnivorous world, probably the best they can do is teach them to make informed choices and not to let anyone else think for them — including mom and dad.

Don't Make Food A Conflict For A Vegetarian Child [LA Times]
Nutritional Guidelines For Vegetarian Children [LA Times]

Foer writes eloquently of his early attempts at vegetarianism, his re-commitment when his son was born, and the moral underpinnings of his choice ("Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals"). But what stood out for me about his piece was the descriptions of food he'd given up. He writes,

Some of my happiest childhood memories are of sushi "lunch dates" with my mom, and eating my dad's turkey burgers with mustard and grilled onions at backyard celebrations, and of course my grandmother's chicken with carrots. Those occasions simply wouldn't have been the same without those foods - and that is important. To give up the taste of sushi, turkey or chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory create a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But perhaps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting - even worth cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated). To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.

It's true that not every tradition is worth preserving, and plenty of things that we now consider abhorrent were once happy memories for some. At the same time, Foer is more honest than many vegetarians about the personal cost of not eating meat. For me, becoming a vegetarian didn't involve jettisoning a lot of beloved foods. I was such a picky kid that my favorite foods were toast, apples, and ice cream, and although I enjoyed a brief food renaissance when I went to college, I didn't really become emotionally attached to meat. Giving it up at the age of 20 was easy.

But I got sick. Vegetarianism led to near-veganism led to an obsession with "healthy" food (combined with a summer on a very strict beans-and-broccoli budget) that left me underweight, cold, and anxious all the time. I was never diagnosed with an eating disorder, but my friends were concerned, and my doctor sternly told me to gain weight. Which I did, in part by eating seafood again.

I still do it, and I'm still not completely proud of it — while I don't share Foer's ethical fervor for the vegetarian cause, I do know that fishing can be as bad for the environment as factory farming. I think of my eating style as a way to eat less flesh and use fewer resources than I would as an omnivore — which it is — but it's also a way of honoring good memories and keeping bad ones at bay. Being a pure vegetarian or a vegan still reminds me of a time when I was sickly and scared and not taking good care of myself. Eating the occasional clam linguine or California roll reminds me of getting better, of feeling physically and mentally healthy again. I know that many, many people thrive on animal-free diets, and I believe that, with the right preparation and the right frame of mind, I could too. And I don't believe, as some do, that vegetarianism is just another eating disorder. But I am afraid of how easily my ethics can turn into self-denial, my self-denial into self-punishment. And I don't want my diet to remind me of my summer of beans.

Foer says that when his grandmother made her chicken and carrots, she "wasn't preparing food, but humans." And it's true that food is rarely just food — it's also the stories and the values that surround it. For me, for now, a can of anchovies tells a story about healing myself, and it's not a story I'm willing to give up just yet.

Against Meat [NYT Magazine]

Maybe, sorta. Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner profiles a group of human guinea pigs whose feed seems a lot less spartan than the Quorn-and-asparagus regime Julian Dibbell described in his 2006 New York article. Participants in the Calerie (Comprehensive Assessment of Long-Term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy) study are supposed to reduce their caloric intake by 25% for two years, so researchers can measure the effects on the aging process. But they still get to eat potatoes, pasta, even Häagen-Dazs. And most of the subjects say their biggest problem isn't hunger, but the fact that counting and reporting calories is a pain in the ass.

Then again, Gertner talks to Jeffrey Peipert, who occasionally woke up in the middle of the night because he was so hungry, and couldn't go back to sleep without a bowl of cereal. These incidents, researchers determined, were caused by his active lifestyle, and their advice was just to move around less. While calorie restriction is apparently better at increasing lifespan than exercise, it seems a lot less entertaining. And, of course, a few people had to drop out of the study because of anemia or bone loss. Everybody needed sweaters. People deemed prone to eating disorders were excluded at the outset.

This exclusion, along with a number of others, may point to the biggest problem with the Calerie study. Not only do participants have to be of "normal" weight and free of any tendency towards anorexia or bulimia, they also have to be the kind of people who are willing to restrict their diet for two years for only a few thousand dollars. In fact, those who were motivated by even this small amount of money were excluded from the study, so basically everyone participating had to kind of want to eat way less for a long time, which sets them apart from most people.

One investigator in the study, John Holloszy, says 99% of people aren't capable of calorie restriction. He also thinks the participants will quit doing it when their two years are up. And neuropsychologist Robert Krikorian says, "I don't think humans are designed to pay attention to how much they eat." Participants in the Calerie study have enviable blood pressure and cholesterol readings, and other research indicates that if they stick with it, they may enjoy longer live. But they're also the kind of people who say things like, "I've never gotten so much pleasure in my life. I'm wearing a medium shirt now. I haven't worn a medium since high school." Some people may get more pleasure out of not having to weight their potatoes.

Back in 2006, the media cliché about calorie restriction was that it was so unpleasant it wasn't worth the added lifespan. The Calerie study may be less extreme than what hard-core, arugula-counting restricters do, but its participants' diets are still pretty rigid and circumscribed. And if anything, this now seems unfashionable. Three years ago, eating next to nothing might have seemed like a cool rebellion against excess. But now excess is harder to come by, and eating like a pauper seems a lot less hip if you are one. Not only that, but the obesity crisis has been so variously trumpeted and debunked that the Times Magazine's whole Food Issue (tagline: "putting America's diet on a diet") seems a little dated. Diet is such a dirty word now that even Weight Watchers won't admit it is one, and something as, well, restrictive as calorie restriction just seems pretty passé.

This doesn't mean America isn't still obsessed with weight and weight loss, just that the buzzwords now tend to be things like "sustainable" and "lifestyle changes." And while one calorie restricter claims the practice just "teaches you how to eat normal foods but make better choices," it's pretty clear that it's not sustainable for most people. Which might be fine. American food culture is still pretty fucked up, but in the last couple of years there has been a little more emphasis on eating food you enjoy with people you like. This may not increase anyone's lifespan, but compared to a lot of recent diet fads, it seems pretty healthy, not to mention fun. Holloszy says hard-core calorie restricters are motivated by "fear of death," but someone once told me that people fear death more if they're not enjoying their lives. And except for a select few, logging every calorie just isn't enjoyable.

The Calorie-Restriction Experiment [New York Times Magazine]

In a PsychCentral article, Margarita Tartakovsky quotes eating expert Ellyn Satter's definition of normal eating:

Normal eating is going to the table hungry and eating until you are satisfied. It is being able to choose food you like and eat it and truly get enough of it-not just stop eating because you think you should. Normal eating is being able to give some thought to your food selection so you get nutritious food, but not being so wary and restrictive that you miss out on enjoyable food. Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad or bored, or just because it feels good. Normal eating is mostly three meals a day, or four or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way. It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful. Normal eating is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. And it can be undereating at times and wishing you had more. Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating. Normal eating takes up some of your time and attention, but keeps its place as only one important area of your life.

Some of these things — eating until you are satisfied, for instance, seem so basic that it's sad we need permission for them. Others almost sound like sacrilege: it's really normal to eat because you are "happy, sad or bored"? Isn't that "emotional eating," something women do that sabotages them and makes them fat? Satter's definition acknowledges something few diet articles ever will — that having a piece of cake because you want it, or even because you're in a bad mood, isn't a stupid mistake only someone with no willpower would make. It's normal.

Contrast that with this advice Tartakovsky quotes from Fitness Magazine:

Make a plan and stick to it. Consuming the same simple, locally grown or organic foods week to week will help prevent you from resorting to last-minute fast-food (and unhealthy) meals. Avoid using treats, such as ice cream or other sweets, as a reward for a hard day.

Nutrition researcher David Katz, MD, won't overexcite his taste buds while trying to lose weight. ‘The more variety of foods and flavors you introduce, the more appetite is stimulated,' Dr. Katz explains. ‘If your diet resembles an all-you-can-eat buffet, you're going to eat a lot.' Dr. Katz also says that restricting meal options will help eliminate temptation. Redundancy is the safest bet.

Tips like this one — which basically boils down to "bore yourself thin" — may seem normal because magazines tout them so much. But eating to avoid exciting your taste buds is actually counterintuitive and difficult. Maybe one reason so many diets fail is because they ask people to eat in ways that are, frankly, pretty weird.

Of course, Satter's prescription for normal eating might not make people thin. But it probably wouldn't make them gain a million pounds either. The idea that you'll be morbidly obese if you let yourself eat until you're full, and don't beat yourself up about overeating occasionally, is based on an invalid principle: that fat people eat way too much of all the wrong things, while thin people carefully restrict all their food. Overweight people who don't live on a diet of donuts already know this. So why is America, which is now 66 percent overweight or obese (at least according to the CDC) still full of fat hatred?

In an article titled "America's War on the Overweight," Newsweek's Kate Dailey and Abby Ellin blame, in part, something called "the fundamental attribution error, a basic belief that whatever problems befall us personally are the result of difficult circumstances, while the same problems in other people are the result of their bad choices." They also quote Marlene Schwartz, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, who says, "A lot of people struggle themselves with their weight, and the same people that tend to get very angry at themselves for not being able to manage their weight are more likely to be biased against the obese." Interestingly, her research shows that young women, who may experience the most weight pressure, have the most negative thoughts about fat people.

But there's yet another explanation for America's rage against the overweight. According to psychologist Ryan Martin, "People actually enjoy feeling angry. It makes them feel powerful, it makes them feel greater control, and they appreciate it for that reason." Dailey and Ellin mention snarky Internet comments, one of the most popular mediums of fat hatred — and also, perhaps, one of the easiest ways to gain a feeling of control with no consequences. When Tara Parker-Pope of the Times Well blog asked her readers what they thought normal eating was, they were actually pretty well behaved. But one commented,

As long as "registered dieticians" and registered politicians subscribe to the "I'm OK; you're OK" school of health, our population will get fatter and fatter. Personal responsibility? It's so passe.

And another added,

Clearly the "norm" in America is to overeat to the point of degrading health by consuming excessive amounts of salt, fat and sugar and insufficient amounts of complex carbohydrates. The article seems to be much more a discussion of what "feelings" about eating are desireable rather than what would lead us to eat in a manner that is desireable from a health standpoint.

Discussions of food tend to make emotions run high, here as everywhere. But we'll risk it — do you agree with Satter's definition? What does normal eating mean to you?

What Is ‘Normal' Eating? [NYT]
America's War On The Overweight [Newsweek]
What Is Normal Eating? [PsychCentral]

Did you know that breakfast is good for you, but eating fast food every day isn't? Or that a varied sex life can help keep a relationship healthy? Maybe they didn't teach us this in fifth grade, but do we really need Cosmo for "dirty sex" tips like "have fantasies" or "use a blindfold?" Or to remind us of the lame old saw that if we want to pique a guy's interest, we should stop calling for a few days (in a serious overstatement, Cosmo calls this a "risky move")? Actually, the only thing surprising in this month's Cosmo is the suggestion that you tie a necktie around your man's penis — or "lightly dust" his balls with a makeup brush. Just add some glasses on top, and you have a face!

According to the Daily Mail, women eat less with a man present than they would with a woman. When eating in a group, women ate less the more men there were. "But," writes an unnamed Daily Mail reporter, "when in all-female groups women pigged out and consumed more calories - reinforcing the image of an indulgent girls' night in with ice cream and chocolate."

In a slightly more sober and detailed (than the Daily Mail? No!) writeup for WebMD, Kathleen Doheny quotes study author Meredith Young:

"Women in groups of women tended to increase the caloric value of the food they choose," she says, compared to eating alone or with men. "The bigger the group of women, the more they eat," she says. For instance, women who ate in a group of three each ate about 650 calories, while those who ate in a group of four averaged about 800 each.

Young hypothesizes that women may eat less in front of a man "to look more feminine and in control." Doheny writes,

women want to look more attractive, especially if a potential date or mate is sitting at the table. Other research, Young says, has found that women who eat less are viewed as more attractive and that thin women are seen as more attractive.

It's not really a surprise that women still buy into the stereotype that eating a lot in front of the man is unfeminine (although it is possible that some women eat less with men out of sheer nervousness). But the Daily Mail's "indulgent girls' night" and Doheny's headline — "Ladies' Night Out a Diet Wrecker" — are a bit simplistic. Is it necessarily worse to eat more when you're with your girlfriends? Sure, there's the old trope of women goading each other into ordering dessert (and the equally popular trope of looking down on each other for eating it), but not every meal shared with women is an eating-disordered binge-fest. Some variance in how much we eat at each meal is normal, and while Young's advice — "I suggest it's just something to be aware of" — is pretty measured, it seems unnecessary and unfun to raise your diet-guard every time you go out with your friends.

Young found that men didn't change their intake no matter who their eating partners were. The Daily Mail says, "men simply eat what they want no matter who they are with." What a novel idea.

Want To Lose Weight? Women Eat Less When They Dine In The Company Of Men [Daily Mail]
Ladies' Night Out A Diet Wrecker [WebMD]

Earlier: Friends, No Friends Both Lead To Obesity

In the first study, kids were paired with either a friend or a stranger and told to eat as much as they wanted. Both overweight and "normal" weight kids ate more with a friend, but overweight kids ate more if their partners were overweight, whether they knew them or not. ScienceDaily says the study "demonstrates that friends may act as 'permission givers' on children's food intake." And study author Sarah Salvy says,

Overweight children are more likely to find food more reinforcing than non-overweight youth. Being in the company of overweight peers may give them the permission to eat more or may decrease their inhibitions, increasing what are seen as the norms of appropriate eating, or how much one should eat.

The study doesn't appear to address whether overweight children actually "find food more reinforcing," but it does manage to moralize eating by talking about it in terms of "permission." It's not odd that kids felt more comfortable eating with a friend than with a stranger, but it's interesting that coverage of the study implies that the higher intake is the disordered one. Isn't it possible that kids consciously or unconsciously eat less than they normally would when they're with a stranger, because they're uncomfortable? And isn't it also possible that overweight kids eat less with a skinnier partner because they're embarrassed about being heavier? As someone who loses my appetite when I'm stressed, I've relied on friends to cook with me and encourage me to eat during difficult times, and I have to object to the notion that eating more at a shared meal is a bad thing.

The second study examined groups of monkeys, and found that the ones who were lower in the social hierarchy — who "are often the target of aggression and aren't included in group grooming sessions as often as dominant monkeys" — gained more visceral fat, or fat in the abdominal cavity. This type of fat contributes to atherosclerosis and heart disease. In women and female monkeys, hormones can protect against these conditions, but researchers also found that monkeys with more visceral fat had lower levels of protective hormones. Study author Carol A. Shively wisely points out that "obesity is directly related to lower socioeconomic status in Western societies, as is heart disease. So, the people who have fewer resources to buffer themselves from the stresses of life are more likely to experience such health problems."

Not only do people of lower socioeconomic status have fewer material resources to cope with stress, they may also have more "social stress" as a result of being lower in the economic hierarchy. And perhaps there's a feedback loop here, in which overweight people are socially stigmatized, causing them to build up more visceral fat and increase their risk of heart disease. Visceral fat is much more dangerous than fat in other areas of the body, and the stress of being overweight in a sizeist society might cause people who don't have a lot of this type of fat (not all overweight people do; not all skinny people don't) to develop it.

So might some of the vaunted health risks of obesity actually be the result of stigma? It's possible. It would be interesting to see how overweight people fare health-wise in societies that don't look down on them (although some of these societies, like Mauritania, have their own problems). Failing that, scientists could take a more nuanced look at childhood social influences, rather than telling us that eating with friends makes kids fat.

Friendship Influences Eating Behavior, Particularly When Friends Are Overweight [ScienceDaily]
Overweight Friends Alter Eating Patterns, Study Shows [Softpedia]
New Research Links Social Stress To Harmful Fat Deposits, Heart Disease [EurekAlert]

The email reads, in part:

At breakfast, lunch, dinner, or even on the go, you can take the gym with you when you eat! Knife and Fork Lift is a handsome, stainless steel, custom made combo knife and fork set, each protruding from a two-pound dumbbell to remind a person that eating puts weight on. One can actually exercise while dining as cutting and lifting food to your mouth is like doing curls with barbells. A great gift for your dieting friends.

Italics are theirs, although we are totally excited about taking ridiculous bulky utensils on our next trip too! Megan says, "Actually, that would be a great gift from the kind of 'friend' who would give you one of those, as a 2 pound dumbbell would allow you to give her a good beating without actually risking her death." Hortense adds, "And you'd also have the opportunity to use a Marx Brothers-esque line: 'Well, it takes a dumbbell to give a dumbbell.'" Oh, but they beat you to it! From the website:

By lifting these heavy utensils, even a dumbbell gets the message that what you eat puts weight on.

See, your friends are fat because they are too dumb to stop eating! Remind them of that fact with this thoughtful present. To be fair, though, the guy in the website graphic does seem to be having some cognitive troubles. He's wearing a football on his head, and appears to be eating popcorn with a fork. Perhaps he's auditioning for a cartoon version of The Stupids?

But seriously, everyone knows that diet and exercise sometimes fail. The only foolproof way to prevent fatness is complete abstinence. Sadly, according to science writers at The Onion, this approach has problems too:

Despite the popularity of abstinence-only meal programs in schools across the country, the study found that children who were provided with no food at lunch and cautioned against eating at an early age were no less likely to become overweight than those who were provided with a well-rounded nutritional education.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the findings could adversely affect federal funding for all programs that tell kids "lunch is worth waiting for."

"There's no evidence to suggest that instructing teens not to chew, swallow, or even think about food is actually going to stop them from eating," Sebelius told reporters. "Let's face it: Kids are already eating. And not only during lunchtime. They're eating after school, at the mall, in their parents' basements. Pretending like it's not happening isn't going to make it go away."

Clearly the Knife and Fork Lift is the answer for these dumbbell teens. In the same vein, I'm going to market a line of condoms with baby dolls attached, to remind people that sex causes pregnancy. And while I'm at it, I'm just going to staple calendars to everything, because after all, living "puts years on."

Knife And Fork Lift [Official Site]
Study: Abstinence-Only Lunch Programs Ineffective At Combating Teen Obesity [The Onion]

Writer Mandy Katz's analysis of the zeitgeist is a little silly (is the show More to Love really an example of Fat Acceptance? Is Oprah, with her public confessions of "embarrassment" about her weight, really a paragon of Health At Every Size?), but the basic message of her article is worth repeating. "A loose alliance of therapists, scientists and others," she writes, believe,

that all people, "even" fat people, can eat whatever they want and, in the process, improve their physical and mental health and stabilize their weight. The aim is to behave as if you have reached your "goal weight" and to act on ambitions postponed while trying to become thin, everything from buying new clothes to changing careers. Regular exercise should be for fun, not for slimming.

It's not a new concept, as Katz acknowledges, but it's still a controversial one. Katz quotes Walter Willett, chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, who says,

Virtually everyone who is overweight would be better off at a lower weight. There's been this misconception, fostered by the weight-is-beautiful groups, that weight doesn't matter. But the data are clear.

Leaving aside his dismissive tone, Willett doesn't mention how "everyone who is overweight" is supposed to get to "a lower weight" and stay there, probably because there's no reliable answer. Given the fact that trying to change your weight often leads to yo-yo dieting (Kathryn Griffith, interviewed in the article, has been through Weight Watchers 27 times), it's no wonder a variety of people have decided to just eat what they want already — that is, to choose "intuitive eating." A companion article, also by Katz, defines intuitive eating thus:

Intuitive eating involves returning to basic drives, dispensing with the notion of "good" or "bad" foods and rules about when to eat. Absent a fear of deprivation, the philosophy holds, one's hunger and taste cues - rather than cognitive rules - provide the most trustworthy guide toward balanced, healthy eating.

Some claim (this is Corinna Tomrley's critique of Susie Orbach) that this kind of eating will make you thin. But Kate Harding of Shapely Prose tells Katz that when she quit dieting,

I thought, ‘O.K., maybe I could be a size 10, and it won't be so bad.' As it turned out, I ended up as roughly an 18, which was exactly where I started.

Really quitting dieting may mean not just letting that Weight Watchers subscription lapse, but also giving up thinness as a goal. It's still incredibly difficult, because people like Willett (and every women's magazine ever) continue to insist that it must be everyone's goal. But psychologist and eating disorder specialist Deb Burgard says, "the pursuit of thinness as a dream is a place holder. It gets in the way of asking, ‘What is it I am dreaming of?' "

This may be true not just for individual dieters, but for our diet-obsessed society in general. Also in the Times, Roger Cohen writes about the recent study that shows that calorie-restricted monkeys live longer. The child of a primate expert, he examines a now-famous photo of two monkeys, Owen and Canto — and thinks Owen, the well-fed one, is probably happier. He writes,

It's the difference between the guy who got the marbleized rib-eye and the guy who got the oh-so-lean filet. Or between the guy who got a Château Grand Pontet St. Emilion with his brie and the guy who got water. As Edgar notes in King Lear, "Ripeness is all." You don't get to ripeness by eating apple peel for breakfast.

"When life extension supplants life quality as a goal," he continues, "you get the desolation of Canto the monkey." Long life and even health have become goals in themselves, and we seemed forgotten that a long healthy life is for something — enjoyment. When we take health, longevity, or thinness for that matter, as ends rather than means, we get our priorities screwed up. We think it's acceptable to tell people to starve themselves so that they can fit Willett's definition of what's healthy — or Vogue's definition of what's attractive. We'd be better off remembering that health is about being able to do things with your life — including eat — and that thinness is about, well what is in thinness about exactly? If you look at a women's magazine, it's about health, yes, but also attractiveness, happiness, and personal empowerment — all of which can be achieved at any size.

Tossing Out The Diet And Embracing The Fat [NYT]
To Eat Well, Be Instinctive [NYT]
The Meaning Of Life [NYT]

According to Dowd, Barack employs a trainer, preached the importance of breakfast to the black community, and once, at a fancy restaurant, ate just one french fry. Michelle, meanwhile, invited kids yesterday to the White House vegetable garden, and helped them prepare their own baked (not fried) chicken. Yet both Obamas have been spotted at burger joint Five Guys, where evil grease soaks through the bag and into the arteries. What gives?

To her credit, Dowd recognizes that Obama may be "treat[ing] himself to fries and burgers to beef up his average-Joe image." And nutrition professor Parke Wilde tells Politico's Erika Lovely, "The pressure for politicians to eat like the common guy is part of the human condition. Eating with someone means connecting by sharing their kind of food. You can't refuse to participate in the way most people eat." Clearly, as with Michelle's cooking efforts (or non-efforts), the challenge is to set an example for Americans without alienating them.

But is this really so hard? White House chef Sam Kass says, "We try not to do diets, as opposed to just change our lifestyle. A diet means you're inherently going to fall off of it." And Lovely writes,

If the Obamas have a diet secret, it is that they've achieved the elusive "balanced" lifestyle - a concept that has been preached for years by health secretaries, doctors and even the fast-food, candy and beverage industries.

A balanced lifestyle — which, for the Obamas includes exercise, vegetables, and the occasional burger or cheese platter — doesn't have to be elusive. The reason it seems so may have to do with the false dichotomy people tend to set up between healthy and unhealthy behavior. Lovely quotes one culprit, anti-obesity activist MeMe Roth, who views sundae toppings the way most moms the crystal meth (while she's on good behavior here, saying merely that Obama "has to come across as health conscious, not a foodie," she once compared eating junk food to rape). Maureen Dowd comes off as an absolutist too, writing, "the president should forgo the photo-op of the grease-stained bovine bag and take the TV stars out for what he really wants and America really needs: some steamed fish with a side of snap peas." And on the other side, we have people like Jeffrey Stier of the American Council on Science and Health, who says that if the government keep promoting organic, local food with their vegetable garden,

People are going to eat fewer fruits and vegetables. Cancer rates will go up. Obesity rates will go up. I think if we decide to eat only locally grown food, we're going to have a lot of starvation.

As people and as a nation, we're caught between those who say that any deviation from steamed fish is going to give us a heart attack, and opponents who argue that healthy food is elitist and we'd better stick with a steady diet of donuts and pesticides unless we want to die of starvobesity. But what the Obamas demonstrate is that it really isn't a contradiction to eat baked chicken and cheeseburgers, and that occasional grease can be part of a healthy diet. It's smart that the Obamas don't make burgers into Roth-style forbidden foods — this demonizing attitude might just make Sasha and Malia crave them more. And while the Obamas can afford whatever organic food they want, and a trainer to keep them fit, it's also true that a vegetable garden like Michelle's could be a money saver for people with the space and time to grow one. The recession, says Gardener's Supply Co., has caused a spike in interest in home gardening. Obviously not everyone can plant a garden, and not everyone can eat like the Obamas. But their "balanced lifestyle" is a lot more attainable than people like Stier would have us believe — and a lot healthier than Dowd implies.

Hold the Fries [New York Times]
President Obama's Diet: Fitness And French Fries [Politico]
Industry Is Critical Of Michelle Obama's Organic Garden [Politico]

Earlier: Should Michelle Obama Get Back In The Kitchen?
Michelle Obama's Garden Continues To Sprout Criticism

Although foodies everywhere have applauded the First Lady's commitment to healthy eating in the form of a widely-publicized White House organic garden, food writer Amanda Hesser takes issue with Michelle's stated disinterest in that food's preparation.

When The Washington Post asked Mrs. Obama for her favorite recipe, she replied, "You know, cooking isn't one of my huge things." And last month, when a boy who was visiting the White House asked her if she liked to cook, she replied: "I don't miss cooking. I'm just fine with other people cooking." Though delivered lightheartedly, and by someone with a very busy schedule, the message was unmistakable: everyday cooking is a chore...Both times Mrs. Obama missed a great opportunity to get people talking about a crucial yet neglected aspect of the food discussion: cooking. Because terrific local ingredients aren't much use if people are cooking less and less; cooking is to gardening what parenting is to childbirth.

Now, the objections to this statement are obvious: Hesser (herself a busy working mom) acknowledges that the First Lady is a busy woman with a lot of important things on her plate, and it would be disingenuous to pretend that her life, or cooking opportunities, are like that of the average American. While food and cooking, to someone in the food world, is at this point not a gendered issue, to Michelle Obama it's probably not incidental to distance herself from generations of recipe-swapping First Ladies who aligned themselves firmly with the domestic. And because Mrs. Obama does not cook much these days does not imply unilateral scorn - Mrs. Obama has mentioned cooking in the past, they've hired a chef well-versed in organic and sustainable cooking, and this year's Easter Egg Roll incorporated a cooking class for kids. A garden can teach a lot about nutrition and the environment even to those who can't or don't have the opportunity to cook. And Mrs. Obama clearly enjoys and appreciates good, healthy food - perhaps as important as anything. Besides, should a First Lady have to censor her every word? Be an example and a role model at every turn? At the end of the day, probably a lot of people can relate to a First Lady who doesn't always talk from the script - and doesn't cook.

But that would, of course, be Hesser's point - that too many people can relate. And that every word, from someone so admired and imitated, is an opportunity. One could certainly argue that the food issue is one the Obamas have been strong-armed - and Anthony Bourdain and his Waters-hating ilk would likely argue just that. But having taken on an issue, one must see it through. And having acknowledged a crisis in our nation's diet, one can't separate the issue of cooking from it. Cooking is essential to changing the nation's habits - locavore restaurants are great, but it's not Blue Hill that's going to feed the man on the street. The issue here is a tricky one, though, because Mrs. Obama has to tread a fine line: while there's nothing remotely elitist or luxurious about scratch cooking to its champions, the simple truth is that this is far from a universal view, and Mrs. Obama would risk just as much criticism from devoting time to, say, a course of cooking classes, as by her current flippancy. Hesser suggests that watching the First Lady master the preparation of food would be a great example for the country, and it would - but if it's that important, it would be nice if her husband could be in there with her occasionally - and would do quite a bit to un-load the issue.

The Commander In Chef [NY Times]

Mostly, I was intrigued because I'd never even heard of a friggin "fat age." But. According to Lloyds Pharmacy, the average British woman has eaten 92 years worth of chips (what we call French fries), chocolate and cakes by the age of 50. Lloyds devised a fat age calculator, which asks you for your age and consumption habits. Lloyds admits:

"Fat Age" is not a clinically recognised term. This calculator is simply designed to give you a rough idea of whether you are eating too much fat or saturated fat. The calculator assumes that what you tell us about your dietary intake has changed little during your adult years since you turned 18.

In other words, it's not entirely accurate! Still, Jackie Stephens, 50, is told by the Mirror that her "fat age" is 138, because she eats lots of cheese and butter.

But what was interesting to me was that I discovered that my "fat age" is a good 7 years younger than my chronological age, due to the fact that I eat a lot less cheese, butter and red meat than I used to — because I now live with my boyfriend, who is vegan. Just for fun, I plugged in some numbers — regarding pizza, burgers and chicken — that represent how I ate before we met, and my "fat age" leapt up to one year above my real age. So: Since the calculator assumes I have eaten the same way since I turned 18, the original results were incorrect; but then again, so are the second set of results, since I'm not eating the way I used to. Yes, it's great that I took a moment out of my day to think about fat and saturated fat consumption; but seriously? The "fat age" calculator is a thick hunk of baloney.

Find Out What Your Secret Fat Age Is [Mirror]
Fat Age Calculator [Lloyds Pharmacy]

Are you guys familiar with "Hungry Girl?" Apparently she's huge. Because, you see, Hungry Girl, aka 43-year-old Lisa Lillien (profiled in today's Washington Post) plays to people's basest natures. Specifically, women's.

The Hungry Girl empire of website and bestselling cookbooks is based on the supposition that real women love pink, love sugar, and can't follow a "real" diet, and, rather than promoting healthy food or exercise, provides less-bad alternatives to Cheesecake factory recipes like Cap'n Crunch chicken and junk food. As the article puts it,

As foodies seek eco-revelation in the local and organic, Hungry Girl speaks the language of chips, cake, cereal, breakfast sausage, taco shells, easy noodles. By doing so, she acknowledges something we all know about ourselves: For all our slow-cooking, sustainable gardening ambitions, we are a nation of snackers.

Accordingly, HG gives ratings and real nutrition information on SnackWell's and alleged diet food, tips for eating out, as well as those recipes. Lillien, who's struggled with weight, lost 25 pounds herself on her plan and sees herself as the "best friend" who can help others. Now, on the one hand, if people want to lose weight and improve their diets, more power to them and anything that helps them achieve this is good. And obviously she's onto something: Hungry Girl has 700,000 subscribers to its daily e-mails, and Lillien employs a staff of nine. If she raves about a diet cookie, sales go through the roof; her pans can spell, if not doom, trouble. Clearly her "just us girls who need treats" approach makes people feel better than judgmental, "snobbish" (as she would say) and unrealistic dictates about fruits and vegetables.

The drawbacks are obvious: the nation's diet needs to be changed, and this isn't the way to do it. This isn't Lillien's responsibility, nor even that of the women who've been helped by her lo-cal danishes. But it's somewhat dispiriting to see this taking hold as the Next Atkins. It seems to reinforce the worrisome idea, already propagated by critics of Alice Waters and her ilk, that good, healthy food is a class issue, when it should be one of availability and price. Take Lillien's words:

People are hypocrites," she says. "They say 'shop the perimeter of the store, never eat anything that's not organic,' but it's B.S., because people can't live like that forever."

This idea, that healthy eating's fiction that salt-and-sugar of the earth types can't attain, is not just patronizing but polarizing, as much so as Berkeley-style militancy.

The diet divide is further pointed up by a piece in The Daily Beast on a Harvard-approved, "hi-brow diet" for the smart set.

The Instinct Diet functions at the nexus of biology, psychology, history, and nutrition, and deals with the sine qua non of successful dieting-we don't want to feel deprived and we don't want to feel hungry. Using her background as a foodie and her philosophy that a diet must address our five basic food instincts-hunger, availability, calorie density, familiarity, and variety-Roberts' dieting program is focused on reprogramming hunger away from the needs of our early ancestors (who ate whatever they could get, whenever they could get it) and toward the reality of modern life (the constant availability of tasty, fatty foods). In this way, the diet addresses the fact that feeling satiated is a complex brain function, and that food instincts are really just an outdated survival mechanism that makes us fat. This is the Instinct Diet's Darwinian element-helping us evolve to meet the reality of supermarket aisles packed with 36 varieties of cookies.

In other words, it's the antithesis of Hungry Girl. And, in its way, just as polarizing, just as larded (ha!) with gratuitous notions of class and intelligence, and, ultimately, just as problematic. In the absence of getting rid of dieting altogether, we wish we could strip weight loss of these dueling stigma: high-brow and low-brow, elitist and realistic. Take the morality out of food. We may have common evils; this should not be one of them.

www.hungry-girl.com
'Hungry Girl' Has Found the Way To a Snacking Nation's Heart [Washington Post]
The Diet That Shrinks Smarty Pants [Daily Beast]

Her tips are pretty solid. First, she states the obvious: avoid making critical comments about your daughter's body or what she eats, and "resist the urge to focus on your weight when talking about yourself." When trying on clothes, she suggests, don't say,"'Oh, my thighs look terrible in these pants!' say something like, 'Hmm, the cut of these jeans isn't right for me'" — which actually sounds like good advice for anyone.

A little less basic are Huget's recommendations to have a treat once in a while, to "accept compliments graciously" and pay yourself one from time to time, and to "be patient with yourself." To explain this last one, Huget references Dara Chadwick, author of an upcoming book on moms, daughters, and body image:

You're not going to undo a life's worth of body-image problems overnight. But until you do get to the point where you're comfortable with your own body, Chadwick suggests in her book, "fake it."

Like the rest of Huget's tips, this one seems basically smart. Still, it's a little sad that moms have to "fake" good body image in order to raise healthy kids. Huget's headline, too, is unsettling: "Watch What You Eat, Yes. But Also Watch What You Say and Do Around Your Daughter." It implies that good parenting is a matter of "watching" everything, including (secretly, mind you) your diet, rather than focusing on feeling good, and letting that feeling spread to your children.

In The Age, Jacqueline Lunn talks about a friend and fellow mother who felt inferior when she compared herself to postpartum pictures of Naomi Watts. She writes,

There's a choice about whether we seek out these photographs and stories or ignore them. About whether we look at the pictures and wonder at the myth of it, or look down at our own tummy and make an unfair comparison. Somewhere, among the feelings and the images, between the truth and the fiction, there is an intelligent woman and a choice.

It's true that we have some control over how we feel, and maybe "faking it" will actually help some moms feel better over time. But when Huget writes that "the main things I think about my body" are "my thighs and butt are too big and my breasts are way too small" or that moms "want [their daughters] to be able to wear the jeans they want and not have to shop in the plus-sizes shops," it sounds like she has a deeply-ingrained attitude that one type of body is better than others.

Instead of hiding this kind of attitude from your daughter, why not try to change it — by making a choice not to compare yourself with celebrities, certainly, but also by campaigning to change plus-size shops, not girls' bodies, and by championing the notion that if you're healthy, no thigh is "too big" and no breast is "too small." Moms should do this for their own well-being as much as for their kids', and childless people can be as active in these areas as parents. And whether you have kids or not, by all means compliment yourself once in a while — and believe it!

Watch What You Eat, Yes. But Also Watch What You Say and Do Around Your Daughter. [Washington Post]
Baby body blues [The Age]

Earlier: Can An Eating Disorder Be Blamed On A Parent?

Interviewer Judy Berman bills the book, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude, as an alternative to the same old diet books "by steely personal trainers and smug, tanned nutritionists." But Lay doesn't sound all that different from any other diet guru when she says,

I saw a photograph of myself, looking apparently happy. But I saw that, "Wow, I'm overweight, and I'm tired of doing this to myself." I make the suggestion, "Get yourself photographed." Cameras are much better tools than mirrors. I've got my mirror trained to show me exactly what I want. The camera is out of my control.

She may be be using a new form, but she's trotting out some of the same platitudes that have been pissing us off for years — that you can't really be happy if you're "fat", and that your motivation for losing weight should be looks rather than health. Lay also says,

I used to be a very angry, negative person, and I put a lot of that into my work. Umpteen years ago, in the strip, I was blowing up the world every month or so. These were funny little fantasies. But I lost interest in that as I started shedding my negativity and anger. That period coincided with understanding myself and losing the weight.

We're glad Lay is feeling better, but, as is so often the case with people who discover inner peace, it sounds like she was a lot more fun before. "Shedding your negativity and anger" may not be the best way to make funny comics. Luckily, with the world as it is right now, these qualities aren't in short supply.

This comic book can make you thin! [Salon]