While traditional gestures like serving ladies first, giving the guy the check and letting women have the banquette seat (courtly or paternalistic?) are far less prevalent than they were — to the confusion of servers everywhere — certain distinctions apparently still apply. Well, obviously: I mean, in an industry where success can hinge on the width of a napkin ring, no one's gonna blow off the divides in a customer base's priorities, expectations and tastes.“Women are looking for somewhere comfortable,” says Mario Batali. “Men are looking for somewhere to show off.”

Now that the old rules don't apply so much anymore — no smart restauranteur is going to assume a woman can't handle a wine list — and some of the gender gap has been closed by fads like the gender-neutral low-carb trend or equal-op annoying foodie-ism, the more fundamental divides between the eatin' sexes are apparently becoming manifest. Since we all love being told about ourselves by groups of strangers, here's the breakdown!

We sit in banquettes: Even though it's no longer the protocol — like any guys still know that rule, anyway — apparently women gravitate towards the seats that give the best view of the room/potential assassins.
We Need Warm Rooms: We apparently "tend to dress with more skin showing" so the thermostat's got to be up.
We Like Healthy Food: "Women more often ask if a menu has leaner, healthier options. Men more often ask if they can get a decent steak."
We Don't Like Crappy Places: "A woman is more likely to take offense if the restrooms are cramped, ugly and messy. "
We Do Like Awesome Places: "She’s also more likely to appreciate color and playfulness in a restaurant’s design, while there’s more risk that a man will be cool to that." Apparently this one mint-green restaurant with a seafood-heavy menu was attracting such a disproportionately female crowd that the owner redid it to make it more gender neutral. “There’s more meat now — a Niman Ranch pork chop, veal breast, a lamb T-bone,” and it's been repainted cream.
We Like Meat But We Like To Be Tricked Into It: "Stephen Starr, who owns Buddakan and Morimoto, said that women more often hesitate if the name or look of a dish is too blunt a reminder that they’re biting into an animal. 'If it’s something that says chorizo with some sort of egg, they’ll eat it,” Mr. Starr said. “If it’s a suckling pig, they’re not going near it.'" (Not true. Suckling pig delicious.)
We Don't Actually Tip Less, But Parties Of Women Still Suck for Waiters: Although the pernicious fiction that women are bad tippers is apparently a myth, we do tend to order less and hold tables hostage four hours so a server can't turn it over.
We're Less Insecure: "A man is more likely to care about being greeted rapturously and treated like an insider," whereas we apparently just want to eat fish and "eggs" in stifling hot mint green rooms, for hours, while seated in a banquette.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had — what Johnson describes as the body's ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying is, "hold their liquor." So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol's toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors — by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. "Most of the world's population today," Johnson writes, "is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol."

Yeah, this doesn't really explain that super-species of excessively-cerebral alcohol-allergic people you encountered in college who are now entirely too accomplished to hang out with you, but, you know, fuck 'em, right?

Earlier: Who's Sabotaging Your Relationships? It Could Be Darwin, But You're Probably Too Distracted To Care

Remember that eating disorders are inherently an existential struggle over the very notion of free will.
You can worsen them, and you can encourage them, but you cannot singlehandedly instill them in your kids, nor can you prevent them. The coolest thing about my mom is that she kind of got this. Her reaction to my adolescent 800-calorie-a-day diet was one of concern but also, exasperation; she had specifically taken such great care to rear me on healthy food and ABSOLUTELY NO MENTION OF MY WEIGHT; I was not even at all overweight, and now, as my big display of free will and rebellion I'd chosen anorexia? She made it clear she thought it was fundamentally shallow, and intellectually, I agreed, but by that point I had almost given up on free will when it came to eating; food issues were just my DESTINY, my curse and fate and blah blah blah. Anyway, that was probably mostly depression. I didn't medicate it, but eventually I suppose it subsided, and my intellect took the wheel again, which was lucky.

With that in mind, ask yourself, are you shallow?
What do you most want for your kid? Happiness and some sort of fulfillment, right? People of all sizes achieve that! The negative correlation between happiness and excess pounds, such that it exists, is totally all in your head, as the field of duh studies has recently confirmed. So if your kids think they're fat, you need to chew on this question: does that have anything to do with you? (Chewing on said question, btw, is a good way to stop yourself from nagging your poor kid!) Like I said, are you shallow? If so, is that the trait you'd most like to pass onto our progeny? (Please, for the good of the country, answer "No.") Conversely, are you so dogmatically un-shallow that they think you just don't have any idea what sort of world world they're living in? That was sort of my problem. In the end it was a good one to have. It was like, hey, the one genetic advantage I have here is that my parents are bright people with strong moral values who don't give a shit how fat I get, except inasmuch as they know I don't exactly have health insurance.

Be honest and remember it's not a big deal.
Acting like a kid's chubbing out is a grave issue that must be discussed in hushed tones is probably not the best idea, especially if they have the sort of grandfather (mine) who will go up to them and play the "Pinch an inch" game. While the Pinch an Inch game is annoying, I never really doubted that my grandfather loved me. I think he just thought kids today spent too much time watching the idiot box and not enough playing elaborate war games in the woods. And he had a point! I asked my friend Don, a former fat kid, whether his mom (a personal idol of mine) had ever said anything to him about his weight, and he recalled a time one summer at the age of 13 when he was eating a piece of pizza while wearing a swimsuit and somehow the topic of his blubber came up. Laughing, she agreed, "Yeah, you really have to do something about that." A few years later, when he stopped eating meat, she worried she'd scarred him; but seriously, Don was picked on his entire childhood for being a fat kid, and she basically played it perfectly, choosing to encourage his positive traits (such as he is fucking hilarious) and accept that he was never going to be as physically attractive as she is. (She is, to be fair here, really pretty.)

Don recommends this movie.
It is, he says, his "Exile in Guyville."

Earlier: Sometimes A Parent's Words Can Bear The Weight Of The World

Image via Skip To My Lou

Deny.
So it doesn't take Frederic Jameson to recognize in John Prescott some maaaayjor class issues. He talks on and on about his problems with "grammar" which the writer suggests he is actually mistaking for "syntax." The son of a Welsh railway worker and child of divorce, the "defining experience in his life" was failing a test sixty years ago and he only got to Oxford through some deal set up with his union. "I didn't feel adequate. I felt inferior and guilty, and I've always had a chip on my shoulder," he admits to the writer, who helpfully calls him "conspicuously working class." But did any of this secret shame/unease within his context/impostor complex play into his compulsion to consume barbaric amounts of Peking Duck and Digestives cookies only to — essentially the dietary equivalent of cheating on a test — puke them all into a Parliament latrine later on? Nah. Says Prescott of his first visit to the eating disorder clinic:

They ask you about your parents. I wasn't too convinced about all that, and walking into a room full of women was a bit embarrassing, but I did it.

A better idea: maybe get more sleep..
This is a good if obvious point. People always eat more when they're tired because the extra energy/indigestion keeps them awake. But when it's time to sleep, the indigestion is less helpful:

I get so tired. The only thing that stops me working is eating. Remember my box [his red ministerial box] comes at 11 at night, and I'm up at seven. I work my box [until] one o'clock. If you want to relax, you eat. Then you begin to find you've eaten too much and actually get a relief from expelling it, and then you're into that.

Focus bile on the haters. (Who are probably just as fat as you.)
Prescott points out that a lot of the shame of admitting one has an eating disorder is the fact that a lot of eating disorders, for all the psychic havoc they wreak, do not have the desired effect of making you thin, rendering the act of keeping them up absurd. But like, yeah, motherfucker, of course eating disorders are absurd; that's why he wrote the book!

They say I'd failed because I was still fat. Notice how fat they are, the ones who are writing it. You can gain weight. The mistake to make is you assume you expel the food immediately. You don't. You wait. If you look at the letters that have arrived, you're staggered: 'I'm so glad that you've said it. My daughter, who's 19, she's been doing that and now she's come to me and said: if John Prescott did it, it's not so abnormal is it?"

And forgoing even well whiskey for a grain alcohol daiquiri squeezed out at one of those drive-thrus in New Orleans is tragic. A lot of drunk driving accidents happen on account of those daiquiri joints, babe; it's the Louisiana liquor lobby keeping them there, the same ones who've kept them from raising the liquor tax since 1948, which is why the whole state is one big sobriety check. Modern life can be a needlessly overwrought con that way, which brings me back to calorie-free sweeteners.

I used to rip Equal packets into cappuccino foam, and watery oatmeal, sometimes even toast (though Splenda, incidentally, is better on toast.) I had a sweet tooth, I listened to St. Etienne and Stereolab and shit; I fell in love and marveled that my mother reserved her sweetness intake to a Starlight mint after work and a half-teaspoon Sugar In The Raw; in one office, they kept unlimited Diet Coke and I would throw my cans in other people's cubicles to hide my shameful excess, blah blah blah blah. Anyway, at some point I stopped caring about sweets, I think when I realized my mom had about the happiest life possible. (Not especially.)

"After the sugar high," you write, "there is the sharpened sense of everything that is not sweet. After the saccharin, there is a sense of shame at our consumption. These moments of guilty aftermath aren’t more valuable than the moments of indulgence that precede them, it is simply that the tension of this sequence can bring us into contact with the full range of ourselves, as carriers of sentiments both heartfelt and cerebral."

But hold up, sweetie, is that what the comedown from a sugar high is like? We're not fucking talking about Ecstasy here. I haven't had one for awhile, but I recall that the comedown from a sugar high feels like run-of-the-mill lethargy, and I have a feeling you're deliberately misappropriating metaphors here because what's going on can be summed up as
1. An eating disorder and:
2. Unrequited love maybe? Unrequited worship? Do you desire someone older and more knowledgeable than you, or maybe just with better CDs? I know, it's a cliche, like creation itself! (Oooh, Equal on apples: discuss.)

Fear of sugar/sentiment/cliche has crippled your art, you claim, and you cite one of your early characters, Sophie, as an innocent victim of your fears. Of Sophie, a fellow writer offered:

“I know someone’s going to want to kick me in the balls for saying this, but there are times when it seems like the author is just lining up Sophie’s misfortunes: She has a facial deformity that has crippled her self-esteem, she is sexually assaulted, guys don’t like her, she may have an eating disorder, and she’s a transfer student. Does anything ever go right for Sophie?” It was a fair point. Sophie hated herself because I hated her too, and hated myself for making her hate herself so much.

So here's another fair point: depending on the deformity, those are some pretty First World problems, and hating yourself for being too young to dwell on any other sort of problem is extra-First World, but eventually the self-hate will subside, resignation will set in, and coffee will taste better black. And the prospect that he may love you back will be just as awesome, though it may lack the same sweetness, since there's no manufactured shame from which you'll be delivered.

In Defense Of Saccharin

It's also a mind-blowing experience: I'm full and completely satisfied after three mindful bites.

Putting An End To Mindless Munching [WSJ]

Today's Modelslips is entirely spurred by one commenter's question. See how questions are important? E-mail yours to: Tatiana.Anymodel@gmail.com

From Dosido:
You seem to be extremely well-adjusted and body-positive. Has working as a model ever caused you to doubt yourself to the point that you've considered engaging (or have engaged) in the sort of self-destructive behaviors that so many models fall victim to? Things like smoking to kill appetite, drugs (same reasons, I suppose), or anorexia/bulimia?

—-—

Other commentators as of late have pointed to a time in recent memory when, they say, a US size 6-8 woman was standard on the runway; other writers have said that there was a time when models took up space. I don't remember this time. Models have always seemed to me universally skinny, small-breasted and towering, with their big eyes, sharp cheekbones, and protruding hipbones.

As an adolescent, I had no trouble recognizing my body type in theirs. My measurements were 32-24-34 — perfect for scaring my doctor, sending my BMI farther into the chart's nether regions with every inch I grew, and, at least theoretically, the kind of editorial and runway work that requires one to fit into the one-off, uniformly sized sample clothes designers make for their collections' first outings. I had years of periods that came as if I were on Seasonale (I wasn't) and the friend who was my secret crush probably never realized how badly he hurt my feelings when he gave me the nickname that would stick to me through high school — Death. I ate whatever I wanted in whatever quantities I wanted, and didn't even play an all-year sport. For a time, I happened to be as thin as is currently considered ideal in one Western industry.

Until, one day, sometime in college, I wasn't.

When a New York agency expressed interest in representing me, on the proviso that I trim my 26-inch waist and 37-inch hips to some more reasonable approximation of a waif, I went home by way of the library and checked out the first diet book I'd ever looked at. Three months of eating probably not enough and doing lots of yoga and weight training (which didn't help me lose weight, except insofar as muscle gain speeds metabolism, but which did give me quick results that kept me from dropping the whole exercise regime in frustration) earned me a 23-inch waist and 35-inch hips. The same agency expressed reservations about my hip measurement, but I went to fashion week and made decent bookings anyway. This was enough to merit my going on to Paris.

At the other end of a transatlantic flight, I was dropped off at an office to sign a contract in a language I don't read. Then I was introduced to a man who grabbed me by my hips and made loud exclamations in a language I don't speak. Two of the bookers giggled from across the room.

"Your 'eeps, Tatiana," he sneered, exhaling cigarette smoke. "Zey are not ze 'eeps of uh mo-duhl."

He then banned me from show castings. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing.

I went to the apartment where I was to stay, I lugged my suitcase up six flights of stairs when it wouldn't fit in the tiny elevator, and I crawled under the covers of my living room cot and cried.

The next morning, when, jetlagged, I awoke at 5 a.m., I started looking up calorie counts for the foods I most often consume. I trawled the web for low-calorie, low-fat, high-fiber, high-protein, generally nutritious food. I found diets that should have horrified me alluring. I wondered whether I should consume 1400 calories a day or if I could knock it down to 1200 without provoking ketosis. Not going to castings meant I had a lot of free time, and no chance of getting any work meant I had the excuse of poverty to explain the paucity of my diet.

I exercised on the hard tile floor of the kitchen. With four room-mates filling the living room as well as the ostensible bedroom, it was the only room in the tiny apartment where there was any privacy. It did occur to me, as I did my daily 20 minutes of yoga, my daily two sets each of 20 sit-ups, my lunges with 20 pound weights, my squats, bicep curls, and tricep extensions, that trying to get my measurements within the parameters that were so comfortable when I was 14, was slightly sick. What kind of industry would demand an adult woman forever maintain the dimensions of girlhood? I often thought about this as I counted my push-ups.

I keep a document I created during this period on my desktop. It's titled "1 cup of oatmeal with brown sugar.doc" — my preferred breakfast, even though it is one that doesn't exist in France, was the first food item I thought to analyze — and it contains about 12 pages, single-spaced, of recipes, calorie counts, diet tips ("Drinking COLD water burns extra cals bc your body must use energy to bring the water up to body temp") and other esoterica of a not-quite-right mind. I lasted about two weeks in this phase — long enough to knock a half-inch off my hips and quell the objections of the smoker and get grudgingly sent to a few castings — and I never had body dysmorphia or any of the other diagnostic criteria of a true eating disorder. But I keep 1 cup of oatmeal with brown sugar.doc on my desktop to remind me how easy it is in this industry to slip into disordered eating. You have so little else to do besides watch your weight, and so many opportunities for self-denial.

That was over a year ago, and I mostly remember it as my little Paris freak-out; my reaction to a new and strange and isolating industry and one mean man. I eat more or less what I want now, and I've found that my bookings have grown as a function of my book, and bear little relationship to my measurements, whether actual or those stated on my cards. But there is a tiny way in which I feel the subjective experience of modeling dovetails with the subjective experience of an eating disorder sufferer — at least one area of theoretical accord that underlies the two.

The experience of being a model is largely one of reducing the body to symbol. When you see a model, you don't think "woman": you think "body" and its component parts. "Lips" are here symbolic of "Yves Saint Laurent perfume." "Face" means "David Yurman jewelry." "Legs" on this page represent "Dolce and Gabbana ready-to-wear."

A version of this happens live. Walking the runway is an experience like being in a diving bell: you can see the world around you, but your usual connection with it has been artificially suppressed. You must stare straight ahead, part your lips slightly, and not make eye contact. You have to look through the people who are staring at you and barking commands at you from the photographers' pit. You have to occasionally scan where those people might plausibly be, but never see them. You are, needless to say, mute, but also physically unresponsive to your surroundings. And you expect no response from them.

In 1993, during a Vivienne Westwood show in Paris, Naomi Campbell fell on the runway. The only impressive thing about this, or any other runway fall I'm aware of (save one: Karen Elson's tumble at Zac Posen this February), is that nobody — neither the other models nor the front-row audience members who sit within inches of them — ever goes to help the stricken model, even when they have tumbled from 8" platform shoes such as those Campbell was wearing, shoes that can break, and have broken, the wearer's ankles. Because a fall is not supposed to happen, the production can never acknowledge a fall when one occurs.

Reducing the body to symbol is of course what the anorexic or the bulimia sufferer does. (Or the serious athlete, for that matter.) We remake our bodies as monuments: to hungers overcome, to perceived strengths, to a gendered, formal ideal we've sized up or down to. Bodies no longer communicate want or need: we subject them to our desires, and take pleasure in their submission.

I certainly enjoyed every inch I ever lost.

I also very much enjoy walking on the runway.

But there is one way in which this industry has taught me to take less of an obsessive interest in how I measure up, appearance-wise. The feedback you receive as a model is breathtaking in its contradictions, vehemence, and beside-the-point meanderings. My shoulders, too broad for one client, will be criticized for their narrowness by another. I have been told I have too many freckles, and also too few. I've been too pale, too tan, too old, too young, too brown, too red, too blonde. I'm too tall or too short. My feet are too big or not big enough. At first, this was unsettling, and kind of withering, but it soon became white noise — when a casting agent shares advice with me ("Tie your hair back for castings!" "Walk more smoothly!" "Work out so you have some arm muscle!") I thank him or her politely and do precisely nothing — because I know the next will want to see unfettered hair, a cocky swagger of a walk, and arms that aren't as "bulky" with muscle as mine. It all cancels out, and I'm left with the conclusion that the client will cast whomever they will cast and they'll know it as soon as the right model walks in the door and nothing in my power will change that. The best I can do is show up.

It's a strangely liberating conclusion to have drawn from fashion.

Then I realized "cholesterol" was a scam designed to sell expensive pills to old people and that eggs don't really do that anyway and also: since when have I been one to worry about shit like cholesterol?

Anyway, at the risk of sounding like some sort of Sesame Street parody I love eggs like Jay-Z loves girls; fat kid: cake, etc. etc. even the nasty spongy Starbucks sandwich kinds, even the ones where you ask the guy to poach em soft and they come out all chunky and hard: fuckit, they're great. Jessica is with me; she eats ten a week; Maria eats around 7; Cheryl 5, Tracie varies — she's on a poop-friendly regimen right now — and Anna eats about 12. But just the whites, ma'am. "I predict I will be a vegetarian in three years and a vegan by the time I'm 40," she says. In the meantime, though, we are all eating eggs. What the fuck else can we afford?

Skipping Cereal And Eggs, And Packing On The Pounds [NYT]
Rise In Price Of Eggs Is No Chicken Feed [SF Gate]
Starbucks Announces New Service Upgrades (Upgrades? What is this, Pravda?.) [Time]
Ask Men: Eggs [AskMen]
Why Egg Prices Are Cracking Budgets [Chicago Tribune]

Now, surely the Daily Mail can argue that Lisa Marie's pregnancy may have occasioned her to consume an excess of food — indeed, that she was using pregnancy as an excuse to do so — but the truth is that for some time we have been watching a steady erosion in the customary grace period allotted to a female celebrity's figure maintenance to account for her part in the creation of a new human being. And while both Ms. Barberie-Reynolds and Ms. Presley stand to gain financially from the blurring of the lines between the two forms of weight gain — and that is to ignore the myriad other ways female celebrities have managed to line their own pockets, in addition to those of the celebrity-industrial complex, through the conception (or failure to conceive) children — I am beginning to wonder if the whole thing isn't a little, well, degrading to the very culture of human life the media is supposed to be celebrating when we fetishize fertility/eschew the subject of abortion in all consumer magazines and blockbuster movies/pay seven-figure ransoms for baby pictures.

No, seriously, actually, whatever. It's just this week's sign of the apocalypse etc. etc. But you know.

What's the deal? I hear you're dating Lloyd Grove these days; dude doesn't exactly have an emaciated indie rock physique...so what's it? Well, duh! It's a long-harbored mental illness. But knowing you, adopting some sort of touchy-feely First World clinical term to describe what you'd probably describe as basic figure maintenance would fly in the face of all your flawed ideological principles, so here's my advice: don't. You don't have time for an existential crisis. Don't succumb to one. Instead, just eat something. A sandwich, a Snickers bar. Regular Americans do it every day. You don't have to go bingeaholic, babe, just pack a Luna bar in with whatever amphetamines you take every morning. And in lieu of the chablis, try a beer! What's more American than drunkorexia, Ann?

Hillary, Stand By Some Other Man [Townhall]
Bush Serenade Is A Gridiron Smash [Washington Post]
Ann Coulter: As Long As Someone Wants To Date Your Bony Body, You're Not Anorexic

Dealing with your weight in a healthy way, as opposed to letting it get in the way of your life—which I did for many years, is a feminist issue. And to get stuck on weight, to be standing in a dressing room with women of every nationality, talking about how much they hate themselves—"I hate my hips, I hate my thighs, I hate my stomach, I hate myself"—is not very feminist. And it sold more copies than any other book I ever wrote.

So...why do you need new underwear? Well, you can't really search inside the book. I imagine that feeling confident and sexy and secure in your attractiveness is all part of being a good feminist and it is a lot easier if you have nice underwear, though I have gotten to the point where on the off-chance I get laid I do not really give a shit if I am wearing the giant stained Queen-sized Hanes I bought one morning in desperation at the Chestnut Rite Aid, because, you know, like that guy is really going to become my husband anyway. But wait, I'm off-topic: is there such a thing as a "diet book for smart women"? I know I write about dieting a lot, namely to derive page views from a common dysfunction so many of us have shared, but seriously, a whole book? I promise you that you will lose more weight if you just sit still a minute and read, like, the New York Review Of Books or something. Oh shit, there I start with the dieting advice again.

Susan Estrich On The Battle Of The Sexes [Psychology Today]

So anyway, it seems a lot of women seem to be coping with their eating disorders by replacing them with an alcohol dependency problem. Given all the problems celebrity eating disorders into which seem to evolve — ahem, Amy, Lindsay, Anna Nicole, etc. — I would say this is not such a terrible thing. Eventually they'll all recognize that the starve-drink-purge-large brunch-Gatorade-coffee-cigarette-nap cycle isn't really helping them lose weight so much as it's killing their productivity, and they will start ordering food again like a normal person, at which point they will realize their stomachs are incapable of breaking down anything without the assistance of alcohol.

Yes I am talking about myself. Anyway, this is why I advocate beer, because it kills the fewest brain cells and we need all the brains we can get to avoid going down that whole "eating disorders" road again.

Starving Themselves, Cocktail In Hand [NY Times]
Earlier: If You Drink Six Beers For Dinner, Are You 'Drunkorexic'?

Not eating. "Dry" cappuccinos, chicken bullion, cabbage soup, gum, pickles, celery, kim chi, diluted cream of wheat, V8 juice, miso soup, diet soda...I have pretty much ruined all of these foods for myself by subsisting on them for years at a time. Don't do it! It sucks so much to look at a pickle and have that twinge of, "oh yeah, once I was thin."

Laxatives. These were my absurd crutch for years. Absurd because they never worked. Senokot for regular days, Correctol for really bad binges, laxative "Dieter's tea" when I felt like punishing myself for cultivating such a gross and stupid addiction by forcing myself to ingest something really disgusting to remind myself how pathetic I was. Laxatives absolutely do not work at all, which is why I wonder how someone as experienced in these things as Tyra would still seem to be abusing them. (Maybe, like a certain other Jezebel I know, she just likes the way the chocolate Ex-Lax tastes?) They just give you that "empty" feeling you remember so fondly from the days you could actually pull off anorexia. Which is why they don't work: you're so empty you need to eat.

Horse Pills I've never taken klenbuterol, but my best friend bought some in Mexico and they didn't work. Well, she claims they didn't work, but she's pretty thin lately, though she's also about to get married, and everyone manages to magically become thin for their weddings, just as everyone manages to return to their normal size afterwards. So whatevs.

Amphetamines These curb the appetite nicely for a few months until you develop a tolerance to them. In the meantime, I am pretty sure they give you gum disease and inspire all the old friends you haven't seen since you became really hermetic and focused to remark that you seem kind of "speedy and jumpy." On the plus side, it's not as bad as being a cokehead.

Steam rooms I never belonged to a nice enough gym, but my friend Tom used to spend an hour — literally, an hour — in the Raquet Club steam room before going out every night. Nothing like severely jeopardizing your health to make you feel frail and weak, almost as if you were one of those THIN people! I think you can achieve the same effect from overdosing on a heating pad during a bout of really horrible cramps. You're hot, and weak, and sick-feeling — as if you'd broken down and exercised! Nothing makes me hungrier for ground beef and beer.

Master Cleanse Tracie did this. It actually sounded like the worst ratio of absurd tactics/efficacy of the whole bunch.

Trying to Give Yourself A Tapeworm. I read a book wherein someone tried to do this before by saving a Tupperware container of salmon in his glove compartment for sixty days, then eating it. On the plus side, I think he did actually make himself sick.

Syrup of Ipecac I didn't learn till way after the eating disorder days that you had to request the pharmacist for this stuff. I have gone to the drugstore many times fully intending on finally rooting out a bottle of this shit, and pussying out because I don't want to look like that desperate of a bulimic. Usually I'd just buy a can of Skoal and try to eat it and make myself puke that way. That only worked once or twice, though.

Alli Was stupid, and expensive, and I'm pretty sure I forgot to expense it too.

Ephedra My ex-boyfriend, a former model, introduced me to this. It was like crappy Adderall, and it made me too sweaty to want to take it for any length of time to lose weight. Now it is illegal I think, but I'm sure I still have 300 pills somewhere...

In Conclusion Nothing ever worked except this time I was really diligent about getting exercise. I should get into that again! I hear it's good for your brain. I cannot say the same for dieting.

And Finland, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Malta all have a higher proportion of overweight adults than the United States, according to a report by the International Obesity Task Force in 2005.

Anyway, suffice it to say that no one expects the bill to pass, but you can't fault them for trying to combat obesity, which could result in mass foot amputations remember, in new and innovative ways. And obesity is not the only terrible societal ill they are targeting!

Many bills are likely to fall to the wayside, such as HB 282, which discourages restaurants from serving certain kinds of food to obese people, and HB 291, which authorizes castration as part of a sentence for a rape conviction.

No Fat People Allowed: Only The Slim Will Be Allowed To Dine In Public! [JunkFoodScience]
EU Introduces Food Labeling To Cut Obesity Rates
Legislative Update, Week 3: Cigs And Cells [Jackson Free Press]
Related: Passenger Only Gets Half Her Seat On Delta Flight [Consumerist]

And, of course, if you spend the 256% unit price markup for the luxury of buying your food in 100-calorie portions, that's the nice thing: you're allowed to have more than one. Encouraged, even! That's the innovation. Of course, the 100-calorie snack packs prey on our perceptions that we have no self-control.

But consider this: of all the reasons psychologists have been pointed to for conspiring to make us binge on massive quantities of food, that's number one — the sense you've lost control. (Well, that and pot.) (Also, I'm sort of making that up, but it's true.)

So why buy into that evil notion? Why not just, say, eat when you're hungry? Skip dinner if you go overboard? Go take a walk, change into sweatpants, whatevs? Because it wouldn't feed the CYCLE. The cycle tempting, daring, BEGGING us all to buy something, ANYTHING, to help us cope with the fact that we hate ourselves. It started with King Size snickers bars and Super Size meals and double quarter-pounders and ended with Alli and Anna Nicole Smith's tragic, tragic death.

It's a cycle I see before me every time I find myself confronted with a drugstore rack of 100-calorie snack packs.

Break the cycle.

And oh yeah, don't forget not to buy the new 100-calorie Girl Scout cookies.

100 Calorie Packs Are Convenient, But At What Cost? [Detroit News]
Guide To 100-Calorie Snack Packs Taquitos

Charlie says many heavy drinkers, especially those who grew up around alcoholics, set a private benchmark in their denial. "They say to themselves, 'As long as I'm not making a fool of myself in a bar, or drinking in the morning, or as long as I'm still showing up for work, then I'm not an alcoholic.'" You know you've hit bottom, he adds, "when your behavior spirals downward faster than you can lower your standards."

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

Are You An Alcoholic? [WSJ]
Don't read this then. [News.com.au]
Image via BoozeMovies

Because as much as I like scotch, I've never been able to down four or five of them without getting that "falafel NOW or you are going to be both mentally paralyzed AND bloated from all the fried potato products you'll need to function tomorrow morning." Which is why, like the highly evolved Jezebel dieter I am, I choose beer.

Alcohol — Ancient Medicine (Enjoy In Moderation) [NY Times]

Would you eat a Big Mac for dessert? How about three??

The only McDonald's food that made it onto the list was #20, the Chicken Selects Premium Breast strips (5 pieces) with creamy ranch sauce. But seriously, who actually orders that? It's nowhere near the dollar menu. Meanwhile, if you stick w. the old-fashioned McNuggets, you're actually having fewer calories, nugget for nugget, than you are with those Boca Chik'N Nuggets you can buy at Whole Foods for approximately $7.99 a box, the entire contents of which you will probably eat before breakfast if your hangovers are anything like mine.

Anyway, I'm not saying I don't loathe the fast food industry, the fucked up American food supply, the antibiotics in the cows, the hormones in the chickens, the illegal immigrant labor keeping all of it afloat. I do. Really, a lot. But I do love the knowledge that when Anna replaces me with some automated outrage robot programmed in Estonia I will be able to afford a delicious cheeseburger and a small bag of fries for less than two dollars while all those rich people downing 2,100 calorie On The Border Dos XX Fish Tacos totally get fat.

Dear Tinsley, I could not be more earnest when I say PLEASE GET HELP. Surely the do-gooder philanthropist in you was only trying to shed light on America's most common eating disorder, but if you want to continue curing cancer and saving children through the magic of reality TV and handbag design, you need to consume something in the course of a week that is healthier than a glass of red wine. Like Kombucha!
Or fucking beer.

Socialite Tinsley Mortimer Dines At Cipriani, Has A Soft Spot For Domino's Pizza [NY Mag, NSFW]

*I used to have a stance on Tinsley Mortimer, and that stance was "Who the fuck is she?" A few months ago I switched that stance to: "I do not want my readers to be burdened with familiarity of the idiotic name/ meaningless antics/ overall nothingness of one more alleged 'New York socialite!!!'" And then a few weeks ago I adjusted it again, because her marriage is totally fascinating.

**Yeah, I also used to have a stance on food diaries, which was, "I hate them," but, um, obviously.

***Most calorie estimates generated using data from the Domino's website added together in my head, for which I can only say, it's not as warped as someone's

Meanwhile, the New York Times, hot off the internet sensation that was the "Migraine Diet," allowed some other lady to fill a whole 1,200 words talking about her "philosophy" of eating fattening foods in "moderation" and weighing her self every day to keep her weight under control. Bold!!!!

In response to this I decided to ask all my friends — none of whom, not coincidentally, is on a diet right now, what they had eaten thus far today. Similarly to the dieters, the answers were all really boring and not really worth writing home about. But the remarkable thing is that none of them would have thought to share them with anyone! Because they're that boring! So it's like existentialist literature, or not really.

Me: Starbucks plain bagel, untoasted with light cream cheese, 16-ounce "Red Eye" (which is by the way not enough), Vico coconut juice box
Jez 1: "a cup of coffee. and i'm in the midst of an Activia yogurt"
Jez 2: "i bought chex mix when i was drunk last night and they were on my couch when i woke up"
Jez 3: "two gluten-free, sugar-free breakfast bars, 'chocolate' flavor" (she has a gluten allergy)
Jez 4: "grapes and carrots and hummus"
"Heather" #1: "a bowl of raisn bran. SOrry, that is so boring. I'm about to eat hummus though, on whatever I have to spread it on."
"Heather" #2: A soy latte and two additional cups of coffee.
Male 1: "two venti coffees.i might go to lunch. don't know. sometimes i forget to eat until i get home — which means frozen pizza, chinese or subway (always forgetting to head to the grocery store). but yeah, if lunch, then caesar salad or potbelly veggie sandwich. of course, mcd's is having a 49-cent cheeseburger sale today (limit five per visit). but i feel my cum-drenched clothing is gross enough for the office today."
Male 2: "um i had a cappuccino and a croissant and two handfuls of Wheat Thins, Original Recipe."
Male 3: " sesame bagel w/ cream cheese, two Wendy's Jr. Cheeseburgers. i've got a third right here, but i might save it for later."

You know what the best part is? That all these people were totally honest; we've seen them eat on countless occasions, and yeah Male #3 is probably the skinniest.

My Diet Strategy: Controlled Indulgence [NY Times]
Diary Of A Fast [Huffington Post]

Which leads to memories of: cotton candy, eating frosting straight from the jar, the way my grandpa would help me get around my mom's "no sugar cereal" policy by adding maraschino cherries to my Cheerios...

SO GROSS, right? And that's when it all becomes obvious: some people are just genetically predisposed to love shit that they know is bad for them, and I am one of them, and so are you. And while it's still too premature to say, I have heard that "disbelieving the nutrition information on the packaging of something healthy if it actually tastes good i.e. those Macro-Vegan soba noodles" is another genetic trait that is showing indications of appearing on the same chromosome!

Family History Of Alcoholism Linked To Cravings For Sweets Among Women [Science Daily]

This is a shame, because there are numerous diet aids and procedures dedicated to giving you the runs, from Master Cleanse to the high colonic to the foulness known as Dieter's Tea to my old crutch of choice, Senokot, or more likely, its $7.99 CVS version, "Senna-C." Sennosides are formed from some sort of leaf that, once ingested, somehow agitates your stomach to produce a wet — if still clumpy — shit. I used to take quite a lot of senna tablets, to the point where the expense was on par with a moderate cigarette habit, until finally it just tapered off. I distinctly remember the last time I took them: I was working on a story, and had just consumed an entire box of Rice Krispies in water, in addition to a wheel of Laughing Cow or something idiotic like that, and an ex-boyfriend invited me to dinner. "I don't know if I can come," I protested. "What, do you have to take a shit or something?" he asked. (Conveniently, he remembered his "prescience" six hours later when I was sitting on his bed explaining why he could not go down on me.)

Anyway, Alli is sort of like Senokot, only more expensive because the sudden, massive watery shits are augmented by a few globules of grease, to let you know it's "working." The problem is, anything that "works" by making you shit constantly is invariably going to make you hungry constantly — even if you're not hungry, you're just dehydrated; trust me you'll feel empty inside — and therefore constantly desirous of food. And if you could temper your cravings for food, would you be abusing laxatives in the first place?

Beyond that, all that shitting on purpose makes people insane. The obsession with the trajectory of your weight — the obsession that makes anorexics so dead-afraid of gaining any — becomes almost cartoonish, and then you start wondering what kind of toll the whole thing is exacting on your asshole. Seriously, though fuck your asshole for a second, and just think about all the time you have wasted. No, don't! I have years of my life where the most salient memories were of the weird pully-type toilet tank in the office bathroom, and the vaguely eerie "Psssst" of the automated freshener I assumed for months was some sort of surveillance device. God, and that's a lot of time to spend smelling the residue of other people's shits. Hours you'll never get back, kids!

Anyway, in conclusion, you're better off constipated. Hemorrhoids, after all, can be treated with a little cream. Your sanity is another story!

Signs your poverty could be making you thin:
1. You don't have enough money for beer that isn't watered-down. Unless it's Olde English, but that's totally like a meal.
2. You don't have enough money for public transportation. Bonus points if you live in Harlem.
3. You don't have enough money for Swiffer refills — duh — and are thereby forced to mop. This burns 75% more calories! It's been scientifically extracted from my ass!
4. You don't have enough money for food other than eggs, English muffins, onions, the odd Snickers bar. And you have to go to five different stores to use the right coupons. Calories, and your appetite will be a distant memory within five days of this.
5. You have to check out books from the library. And then remember to return them. Twice the calories burnt!
6. You are so isolated and despondent re the poverty thing that sometimes you just cry for an hour or two about the hopelessness of it all. Crying = totes burns calories!
7. You have to fucking get a job already. Seriously, there will be plenty of time when China is the world's superpower for us all to get thin. Ask them; it gets old.

No Pain, No Gain [Guardian]
Nutrition: An Upside To Hard Times [New York Times]

Graphic courtesy Intern Cheryl, the Most Talented Human Being We Know

It didn't happen. Every time my bowels would so much as approach a fart I would be seized with the notion that my underwear was about to fill with grease. But none arrived, until one day I ran out of leftover hot dog buns in my fridge to eat and moved on to the leftover American cheese. "MY FIRST OILY SHIT!" I IM-ed Jess when it happened. Her hypothesis had been correct: if you don't eat much fat, you don't shit oil on Alli, but it won't give you problems. And I don't eat much fat, since I rediscovered the wonder of beer.

I should probably state here that I eat for two reasons: 1. to stop my stomach from hurting and to 2. avoid and alleviate hangovers. And the secret to that is beer.

Beer is supposed to make you fat, but that's bullshit. The huevos rancheros and hash browns and three Gatorades and leftover lo mein you eat when you combine too much red wine with skipping the bread because you don't want to "fill up" before the four cubes of steak you ate for dinner last night will make you fat. I don't weigh myself, and I'm in no danger of being anyone's thinspiration, but since I moved across the street from a bar that serves no hard liquor and started drinking four or five India Pale Ales five nights a week, I'd say that the laziness incurred by consuming 75% of my calories at a bar directly across the street from my house has been more than compensated for by the fact that beer may "fill you up," but it doesn't make you hungry. Because it fills you up! And ounce for ounce, it's less calories than Slim-Fast! Plus the whole "social lubricant" aspect. (Which is a much better sort of lubricant than the type afforded by Alli.)