How She Got That Body

Victoria's Secret Angel Adriana Lima: it's no day at the beach

Time for that semi-annual peep show—um, fashion show—in which Victoria's Secret models strut the runways, tonight at 10 p.m. on network TV. And my guess is that the gem-encrusted bra Miranda Kerr will don (said to be worth $2.5 million) will not really be the focus of most eyes, male and female, during the program. Hey, I'm a fan of lingerie myself. But it's not really about the lingerie, is it?

It's about those impossible bodies, lithe and full-breasted at the same time, and about the fact that we're allowed to stare at them with impunity, pretending it's about fashion. This time around, however, I'll be thinking about the tidbit I read recently that outlined how exactly those bodies are...well, made doesn't seem quite the word. Achieved? And this part ain't pretty.

Victoria's Secret Angel (as they call them) Adriana Lima revealed last month to the London Telegraph exactly what she did to get runway-worthy:

—starting in August, she worked out with a personal trainer every day of the week

—for the three weeks before the show, she pushed it up to two workouts a day

—she met with a nutritionist who measured her muscle mass, fat ratio, and levels of water retention, and prescribed a regimen of vitamins, supplements, and protein shakes. She also started drinking a gallon of water a day.

—for 9 days before the show she drank only protein shakes (lots of powdered egg was involved)—no solid foods at all.

—Two days before the show: she stopped the gallon-of-water business and just "drank normally."

—Twelve hours before the show: she stopped drinking anything at all. (Presumably that means she took in no nutrients of any description, since her diet was completely liquid by that point.)

It makes for painful reading. But it's also educational reading, because it's proof that few people can attain that kind of "perfect" body without extreme, almost super-human effort.  And keep in mind that these women are preternaturally physically gifted to begin with; many bodies will never look like that no matter how many gallons of water go splashing down.

I actually think this news report represents progress, because it begins to dispell the notion that bodies like those of the Angels—or name your svelte model or actress here—are either naturally occurring or easily attained. It's a much-needed corrective to those uber-annoying model lies of the past: "Oh, I just eat anything I want to! And I hate working out!" Those lies only contribute to more self-flagellation on the part of their credulous audience (i.e., women with "average" bodies).

But bottom line: Why do we insist that these naturally gorgeous girls starve themselves down to some strange and unnatural shape? Why can't we enjoy their pre-two-workouts-a-day/pre-liquid-diet beauty? A question for our age, apparently.

Too Scary

I thought I was pretty jaded when it comes to the cognitive dissonance happening all around us. Say, for instance, in these two seemingly disparate subjects: Halloween (former children's candy-collecting holiday, now slutty nurse/cop/cheerleader fashion show masquerading as a light-hearted party night...hey, whatever floats your boat!) and Eating Disorders (group of tragic, obsessive mental illnesses that affect up to 24 million Americans and have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, also on display daily in the form of socially-acceptable emaciation among models and actresses and retouched photos of already-thin celebs).

But even my metaphorically seen-it-all jaw dropped at the sight of Ricky's "Anna Rexia" Halloween costume, the result of an evil Venn diagram intersection of the two topics.  Ricky's has already pulled the costume from its website after a firestorm of protest.  I can't even comment on how totally unfunny (and unsexy) this is; it's so obvious that one wonders how on earth the prototype ever got beyond some hilarious designer's drawing board. It's just too painful--as is the knowledge that a not-inconsiderable number of young women aspire to be a skeleton. Oh, correction: a skeleton with big boobs.*
*not included

One Dumb Cookie

This is getting crazy: first marshmallows, now Oreos. Can't they leave perfection alone? Feast your eyes on the brand-new Neapolitan Triple Double Oreo (Nabisco needs some grammatical help in the naming department, clearly). Ersatz chocolate and strawberry "creme" sandwiched between three vanilla Oreo wafers (vanilla Oreos??), stamped with one of the most recognizable patterns in American food history. I call it a totally unnecessary knock-off of one of the finest old brands in the country. Oreos were introduced in 1912, and are widely reported to be the best-selling cookie in the U.S.—for good reason. All they require, really, is milk.

But where you and I might see crispy-creamy quintessence, Nabisco sees untapped potential. And like every other recent do-over of a food classic, the new triple-decker Oreo comes in heavy: 110 calories per cookie, more than twice the heft of the original. So, just as with the similarly superfluous super-sizing of the marshmallow this summer, you can eat the same number of treats—and take in two or three times the calories. If anyone ever asks why more than two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, I think you have your answer.

You've Been Served

Trigger-happy? Get ready for sticker-shock.

I'm crushed. All these years I was feeling so virtuous, spraying my pans with Pam or its generic knock-offs, dreaming of all those cumulative thousands of calories I was saving. But those lying liars at ConAgra Foods (oh, and Campbell's, Nestle, Haagen-Dazs...) were, quite simply, lying about calories.


Zero calories, zero fat in a "serving" of Pam? Sure, if your definition of "serving" is a spray that lasts a quarter of a second. If, like most sentient humans, you hold that spray button down for, say, six seconds--long enough to actually get a non-stick coating onto the surface of the pan--you'll be taking in 50 calories and 6 grams of fat. And I'm saying, Hell, I coulda used butter (literally: a half-tablespoon of butter is 50 calories) and added some actual flavor--not ersatz "butter flavor," as Pam puts it.


The Center for Science in the Public Interest is serving papers to the FDA demanding that the agency start doing its job and policing the avaricious food companies that persist in telling dangerous untruths--life-threatening untruths. Because obesity and high blood pressure are killing millions of people who read the label on a can of Campbell's soup and think they're eating a serving that contains 790 milligrams of sodium, when in fact they're taking in twice as many. When was the last time you considered a half-cup of soup a "serving"? That is--I kid you not--8 tablespoons. Please. That's lunch?

Emotional eating just got more fattening.

And, be honest, when was the last time you considered a half-cup a serving of ice cream? Haagen-Dazs measures it that way. But if you eat a cup instead, you've just ingested a full day's recommended limit of saturated fat. And if you were on the Dumped-Again Diet and stood in front of the fridge until you finished a pint of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough (yes, people, it does happen!) that's two full days of sat fat. And fat is what you will be. Much like the wallets of the food-company CEOs.

Big Fat Stupid Food

Exhibit A

     Really, need we say more? Did the world really need Jumbo-Mallows? Consider: one old-fashioned marshmallow=25 calories. One cynically redesigned monumental jumbo-mallow=90 calories.
     Consider also: a recent study showed that people tend to eat by number-of-pieces, rather than by size-of-pieces. Thus, when one group of study subjects was given whole candies to eat, and another group was given pieces of candy that had been broken in half, both groups consumed the same number of pieces. The half-candy group therefore took in half the number of calories.
     Translate that to marshmallows. There's no doubt: people will rack up more calories when they eat super-sized marshmallows. Their eyes, their brains, will tell them "Hell, I've only had one marshmallow!" One hellacious marshmallow.

     Beyond the simple math, and the not-so-simple obesity epidemic, there is the aesthetic issue. Marshmallows were perfect as is, an American object amply endowed with quintessence. Ideally proportioned to pop into one's mouth, serendipitously shaped and sized for roasting and then for squishing between (also quintessential) graham crackers and Hershey's squares for the creation of quintessential s'mores. Why mess with it? Those crafty people at Kraft could tell you: just follow the money.

Exhibit B: Hey, Big Boy!

The Truth About "Bad" Foods (Finally)

Yes, Virginia, French fries are fattening

I know I wrote once—okay, I wrote many times—that there are no “bad” and “good” foods, and that labeling them that way can be unhealthy. A magical thing happens when you say something is bad: suddenly, you want it more. Call it our naturally greedy human nature.

Thus, my dietary philosophy was for years aggressively laissez-faire. Rather than swearing off certain forbidden foods forever—and then feasting on them in moments of weakness—I believed in leaving things alone, and letting them achieve a natural balance. I saw it in action in my kids, with the result that they often left “goodies” unfinished for the simple reason that they were full. They knew the delicious (and not-forbidden) food would be available to them again tomorrow, if they so desired, so why get uncomfortably stuffed? Have you ever seen a dieter who has momentarily fallen off the wagon not scarf an ice-cream sundae down to the last rainbow sprinkle? She’s thinking of tomorrow, when she will vow to never ever again touch Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. 

But you may notice I use the past tense here. While I still think there's truth and logic to what is called the Blown-Diet Syndrome, I can’t deny this additional truth any longer: there ARE bad foods! And they’re killing us! A huge study from Harvard’s School of Public Health last month spelled it out yet again, in greater detail. Weight gain over the years (and the average is 17 pounds over 20 years) was highly associated with a handful of foods. Leading the charge were French fries, potato chips—in fact, potatoes in any form—and sweetened drinks.

Thin and Rich: It Means More Than You Think!

Pennies from the God of Small Things

Ok, now it’s personal. It’s one thing to spend one’s adolescence and young-adulthood (and middle-adulthood? possibly) feeling inadequate because one isn’t thin enough. At least—best-case scenario—one wises up, realizes there’s more to life than a dress size, makes peace with one’s thighs, and goes on to embrace the important things. By which I mean those little things like work, family, and friends, the elements that together constitute what is known as Real Life.

Now comes news that the most material of these three—work—the endeavor that makes the comforts of friends and family possible, is in thrall to (surprise!) thinness. A rather horrifying study has shown that the skinnier women are, the more money they earn.

Here is the price that is placed on emaciation: women who are 25 pounds below average weight take home an additional $15,572 per year. That will buy you more than a few Skimpy Treats. The researchers estimated that over the course of a 25-year career, an average-weight woman will earn $389,300 less than a woman who is 25 pounds lighter.

Granted, the basic idea here isn’t that much of a shock, I suppose. Women are rewarded for being thin. But here’s the part that’s particularly hard to get one’s head around: The exact opposite is true for men. Not only do thinner men earn less than heftier guys, but men who are 25 pounds heavier than average earn more than normal-weight men--$8,437 more per year.

Yes, I hear you howling, braying at the indifferent universe. Women already earn less than men overall; not to raise your blood pressure too precipitously, but since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963 the wage gap between men and women has been steadily closing at an astonishing (to a snail, anyway) rate of half-a-penny a year. In 2009 women still were earning only 77% of what men earn. Now we have this other, infuriating ingredient. It’s not enough to work our asses off—our asses also have to be considerably smaller than other women’s asses, and way smaller than those of men, who are being rewarded in cold hard cash for eating dessert.

The researchers hypothesize that the pay difference may be due to the fact that people who conform to others’ ideas of the ideal body (i.e., women should be thin, men should be solid) actually perform better on the job. And why would that be? Because, they write, “employees are more able to influence others and get things accomplished when they conform to the media’s ideal body form.”

That seems like a huge leap to take. I’ll be a better magazine editor and get promoted, with a spiraling salary to match, if my super-thin body makes me more able to “influence others” and “get the job done”? While I’m sitting at my desk editing an article (and craving but not eating a candy bar)? Please. I would ask those particular researchers not to insult our collective intelligence.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this disheartening monetary development is simply another expression of a very old paradigm: that the world is much more comfortable when women are small—in every sense of the word—and men are large. That configuration conveys to us, at a very basic level, that all is right in the cosmos. When we redesign that pattern, when women become larger, take up more space, consume more of the good stuff, it throws a lot of people off. How do you control that out-of-control feeling? By convincing women that what they should really covet isn’t necessarily a big corner office but a tiny body—if possible, a Size Zero body. Can’t get much smaller than a zero. If she buys in to the shrinkage, heck, we’ll give her a raise! She’s working hard to be thin!

The dynamics of the whole small/large, diminishing/expanding question are, pardon the expression, huge, and worthy of much more exploration. Check in for further updates here. But meanwhile, what I do know is this: I don’t want my livelihood—and my kids’ college education—to depend on the size of my tush.

Greetings from Shapeland!

Summer news flash: I'm thrilled to announce that as of last week, The Food Bitch is on the job as Deputy Editor at Shape magazine. This puts me at the epicenter of All Things Shapely, a kind of Eye of the Storm deal: I’ll be bringing Food Bitch readers the latest thinking from inside the beltway (so to speak)--diet and nutrition studies and scoops, exercise breakthroughs, healthy-living wisdom. 

I’ll also still be obsessing about the usual suspects: my thighs, our weird and wacky cultural expectations, the perfidy of the Big Food Business Industrial Complex and how it’s helping us get fatter. Hope to hear from my esteemed readers, whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent!

My Guilty Secret (Or, The Real Truth About Women, Weight...and Envy)

(Not that I noticed)

Here's something many women feel and few women admit to: We look at women's bodies, perhaps even more than men do. And not (for the most part) because of latent lesbian tendencies. We are--and I know I can't speak for all women, but I also know I speak for many--very often if not nearly constantly checking. I wish I could remember when I first started asking whoever would answer me (be it girlfriends or boyfriends): "Is my ass as big as hers?" I really wanted to know. I wanted an honest assessment, so I could understand how I appeared in the world: Yes, your butt looks just like that (only more so).

What I don't know but wish I did: Do guys do the same vis-a-vis other men's bodies? But really, how can they--except perhaps at the beach, where everyone's lats and pecs are out for inspection? Our fashions are such that women's goodies are nearly always on display, breasts and behinds and waistlines cinched into the season's latest bodice or "skinny jeans." When was the last time you could discern a guy's junk when he was sporting office-wear?

In fact, while men's clothing has almost always been more concealing and forgiving of so-called figure flaws, it has become even more so in the last few years: as women's bikinis have shrunk and styles become more form-fitting, men's swimsuits and shorts have ballooned into gigantic baggies. You could hide a multitude of sins in there. As you could in any men's business suit: tush and belly handily concealed by a jacket that hides the evidence of last night's or week's or year's pig-outs (unless you're Chris Christie, in which case there's no hope).

The fact is--I'm sorry, there's no getting around this--whatever you may read about men becoming more self-conscious and more concerned about their beer-bellies, they still have a long way to go before they catch up to women's level of body-self-consciousness. And, because who else do we have to size ourselves up against, we scan the rest of womanhood for validation/confirmation/our place in the body-sphere. I once walked down the street in a ridiculously short skirt with my husband, and he later told me that women's heads swiveled more than men's ("is my butt as big as hers?"). And I recall, honestly, that the biggest diet I ever embarked on, The Diet that brought me close to Eating Disorders-Land, began when I worked at a women's fashion magazine (where the size of butts was always noted) and watched a co-worker lose 15 pounds and suddenly look stunning in stretch-pants.

Was I simply inspired by her example (hey, I could do that too!) or was I spurred by something less admirable (I want to look skinnier than her)? And, is this comparison-dance a naturally occurring phenomenon from cavewoman days, or a natural result of the disheartening fact that women are still often valued far more for their looks than for their abilities? Two questions I still find very hard to answer.

I wish that our butts were all beloved, by ourselves first and foremost. But I also do wonder how deep the urge to look, compare, and covet runs in human nature. Exhibit number one: this incredibly revealing shot of Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield. Two women of rare, almost otherworldly beauty...and one is just checking.

Are they bigger than mine?

Food Lust, Food Guilt: Who's Normal Anymore?

"Be honest honey, what would you rather have--cheesecake or thin thighs?"

Standing in the current of cool air from the open fridge door, thinking. No, make that obsessing. Thinking is what my teenage son does in that situation: Should I have that leftover pizza? A salami sandwich? An apple? Some ice cream? It’s all good—the only difficulty lies in deciding which sounds most delectable at that precise moment.

Obsessing goes like this: Should I have that leftover pizza? No, I already ate too much of it last night; I’ll have to work out extra hard later. But it sounds soooo good, especially if I slip it into the oven and make it all gooey again…No, I have to be good today and have cottage cheese, some carrot sticks, a salad for lunch. What goes on is not a decision of appetite, hunger, and taste but a complex moral/ethical conundrum that invokes words like deserve, guilt, bad, and should.  Sound familiar?

Until a few days ago, you could have seen this incredibly common mini-drama played out in a TV ad (if not in your own life) for Yoplait Raspberry Cheesecake Lite.

Weird Food of the Week: The Big Ass Burger

Dateline: Arizona. You could also call it "Prophetic Food of the Week." On vacay in northern Arizona, I couldn't resist scoping out the native vittles. Behold the Big Ass Burger, served up at Scottsdale's Roaring Fork restaurant, composed of an astounding 12 ounces of beef, crispy bacon, Colby cheese, iceberg lettuce, tomato, and grilled onions. Because Arizona doesn't require restaurants to post nutritional facts (as New York City does), I can't give you an exact calorie count--but I do know that the beef alone brings it close to 1,000.

I have nothing against burgers; love them in fact, especially charred on the outside, a little pink on the inside, topped with bleu cheese, and resting on a pillowy toasted bun. BUT...much of that delectable pleasure is lost, swamped, overwhelmed by the sheer heft of 12 ounces of oleaginous beef. I do believe humans were designed and programmed to eat some meat--chased down on the savannah and greedily devoured; lean, protein-packed, life-giving meat--but not to waddle from car to restaurant table and cast oneself into a sea of factory-farmed, chopped-and-fried, fatty flesh.

The result of such regular excursions, of course, is the "big ass" of that (surely somewhat self-aware?) title. Bottom line (pardon the pun): just because you can do something doesn't mean you must--something food purveyors in the U.S. don't seem to have grasped.

All that said, if you do decide to splurge, just this once, on the Big Ass Burger, don't forget your Big Ass Fries--a remarkable case of life imitating art...thousands of years in the (ironic) future.

Reason #6,514 Why it's Easy to Gain Weight

Because our biggest, most powerful corporations keep telling us that really bad foods are actually really good for us. Latest case in point: Coca-Cola's VitaminWater. Coke has been assuring consumers that VitaminWater is, just as its name implies, "a vitamin-enhanced water beverage," and has used the phrase "vitamins + water = all you need" to promote it--when in truth it has nearly the sugar content of Coke itself.

If you go to VitaminWater's website, all you see are healthy young people skateboarding, surfing, modeling hip clothes, downloading playlists, and doing all those other energetic things you do when you're pumped up on vitamins. In fact, Coca-Cola--in this its 125th-anniversary year of peddling sugar-water--is desperately fighting off a class-action suit claiming that the company has been misleading consumers in suggesting that VitaminWater is anything other than sugar-water (with a few supplements mixed in as window-dressing).

Just today the company agreed to go to mediation (translation: they may be ready to settle just the get the damn thing out of the news). They've already lost one court battle: they tried to get the suit dismissed last year, protesting that their nutrition facts are there on the bottle for anyone to see--courtesy of FDA laws that even one of the most omnipotent companies on the globe can't get around. A judge last year ruled that, regardless of the small print, all the large print on the bottle violates what is known as the jelly-bean rule--a guideline that prohibits companies from claiming their nutritionally empty junk food is "healthy" because they've thrown in a little Vitamin C or calcium.

It's hard enough to keep one's waistline while navigating the obvious calorie calossi--the cheese-stuffed-crust pizzas, the hauntingly fragrant cinnabons that wreathe every airport and mall. The lies of the unscrupulous jelly-bean peddlers of the world make it well-nigh impossible. But then, why expect anything else from a corporation that fought long and hard to install soda machines in schools across the country? Hey, the kids can always opt for the "healthy" option: VitaminWater.

Image of the Week: "True Beauty"

At least, I think that's how Vogue Italia's coverline, "Belle Vere," translates to English. This month, Vogue's Italian cousin puts three plus-size models on its cover--and they are delicious, scrumptious, timeless (paging Sophia Loren), and real. Though "true" (vere) is perhaps the more perfect word: finally, some truth about women's bodies. The other subtext, of course: even big girls buy clothes.

Sometimes a Carrot is Just...a Carrot

The USDA plate has landed, and it looks oddly…familiar. A primary-colored circle divided into nearly equal quarters, it has clean, retro lines reminiscent of the 1950s Four Food Groups. The huge difference, of course, is that Fruits and Vegetables have moved up in the world—from one-quarter of the diet in the meat-centric ‘50s to a full one-half today. The plate is in fact almost aggressively, preternaturally basic in design: Look how easy this is! it proclaims. Eating right is child’s play!

 And in some ways, it is. But Americans have been making nutrition way too complicated for more than a century now. The first USDA recommendations for a healthy diet came out in the mid-1890s, on a wave of brand-spanking-new nutritional science. We’ve been in love with evidence-based eating ever since. And where has it gotten us? One has to wonder.

The New Math of Good Eating

Squares, triangles, circles…the U.S. government (specifically, the U.S. Department of Agriculture) has worked its way through the major geometric shapes in the past few decades while trying to convince a reluctant American public to eat better.  There was the Four Food Group model of the mid-twentieth-century (that’s the square), the Food Pyramid of 1992 (triangle), and now, coming soon, the Dinner Plate of the new millennium (circle). Yet somehow, we’re fatter and less healthy than we were even 20 years ago. Why does practically nothing the government says about good eating seem to get any traction?

1950s eating: oh-so-simple?

One thing is sure: none of the visual constructions dreamed up so far have been very coherent, and each raises almost more questions than it answers. For instance, in the Four Food Groups model, why does Dairy appear to account for a full one-quarter of the diet, seemingly equivalent to the entire universe of fruits and vegetables?  The answer to that may perhaps be found in the fact that the USDA has a duel mandate—to promote agriculture and to promote public health—and the dairy industry has some very skilled lobbyists when it comes to “promoting” the purported health benefits of milk.

And the Pyramid had an oddly counter-intuitive structure, in which the “good” stuff like grains, fruits, and vegetables were grouped at the (big, wide) bottom of the triangle, while the “bad” things one was to “limit” one’s intake of (like sweets and fats) were up at the tiny tippy-top.  Talk about over-thinking something: you can picture the creative types at the USDA coming up with that one, and disregarding the fact that the “top” of anything is almost always superior (“You’re the top/You’re the Coliseum,” sang Cole Porter).

Climbing the pyramid...wrong by wrong

Then there is just the utter failure of the Pyramid to teach us much of anything worth knowing.  We were told to gorge on those bottom-dwellers—the grains and cereals.  As my former shrink liked to say, “And how’s that workin’ for ya?”  Since 20 years of Pyramid eating have brought our collective national weight gain to an all-time high, I think we’d have to respond at this point: Not so well.  Only now are we figuring out that too many carbs, like too much of anything, are bad for your health and your waistline.

Enter the new, improved USDA Healthy Eating paradigm: the Food Circle, or Plate, soon to be unveiled by the USDA.  The Agency is currently coyly leaking details about the plan, hoping to drum up interest from a nutrition-news-numbed public.  What they’ll spill so far: The plate’s first distinguishing characteristic is that one-half of it should be filled with fruits and vegetables.  So at least fruits and veggies have moved up in the world, from one-quarter of the diet in the 1950s, to one-half now.

That is all well, good—and improbable.  When was the last time you saw a plate of food from any kind of American food outlet—fast food, middle-American cuisine (the Applebee’s/Olive Garden ilk), or even haute cuisine—that was half vegetable matter?  The word “salad” is so cavalierly applied these days that a recent study found that “healthy eaters” (aka dieters) ended up consuming more calories than carefree burger-guzzlers because they consciously ordered entrees with healthy-sounding names.  The problem: items like the Tortilla-Bowl Salad or the Caesar with Chicken often ended up being more caloric than the decadent-sounding pastas and red-meat choices.

Not to sound defeatist, but I don’t think a square, triangle, or circle is going to solve our health and obesity conundrums. Perhaps that’s because “eating right” is both too simple and too complicated to be boiled down to a mathematical formula.  It’s simple like this: foods that grow in the earth are good for you, as are foods bought fresh (not packaged in boxes and plastic bags to be popped into the microwave) and then cooked with a modicum of good sense and reasonable amounts of oil.  It’s complicated like this: hardly anyone even knows how to cook anymore (or is willing to devote the time and effort to it), and our entire culture is now geared to convenience and speed when it comes to eating.  It certainly doesn’t help that we have a gang-busters food industry, both in grocery stores in restaurant chains, working nonstop to increase our consumption of those “bad” goodies at the tip of the triangle.

My advice: in honor of the new USDA Plate, make a vow to spend an entire week eating only fresh and homemade foods, with a particular eye towards fruits and vegetables (summer makes that easy).  Weigh yourself before and after the week.  See what happens.  (Oh, and get out there and move your body--but that's another story...)  Let me know how it goes!

No Free Skinny

Of course it was too good to be true, like something from a futuristic Neverland.  The narrative went like this: You don’t like that pocket of pudge that won’t budge no matter how much you diet or work out?  Those saddlebags—just like Mom’s!—or that tummy, or the infamous batwings—paging Mrs. Sterling, your sixth grade math teacher…It’s astonishing the level of vitriol and loathing that has been directed towards these innocent targets.  So, zap them away, simply sculpt a new body, Pygmalion-like.  Presto, bags/pooch/wings disappear, courtesy of your friendly plastic surgeon and his/her cannula—a word that has made me shudder since I first heard it.  A cannula is a thin metal tube that liposuction surgeons insert under your skin and then move back and forth, breaking up fat tissue and sucking it out.  Liquid fat.  As Miss Clavel would say, “Something is not right!”

But liposuction has been insanely popular—despite the yuck factor, the painful recovery, the chance of “ripples,” and the small-but-present risk of death from complications.  Last year it was the second most common cosmetic—or “aesthetic,” as the docs like to call it—surgery, coming in at almost 300,000 procedures and nestled between boob jobs at #1 and eyelid lifts at #3.  Last week the other shoe dropped, thanks to researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.  They conducted the first randomized, controlled trial of lipo in humans, and documented the tragic flaw that many doctors and patients have already observed first-hand: The fat comes back.

Food and Sex (Finally)

 As an antidote to Friday’s serious-minded treatise about the economics of obesity, I offer this friendly little tidbit, which was leaked from a forthcoming book on internet porn titled A Billion Wicked Thoughts: Three times more men search for “overweight women” than “underweight women” when seeking out porn images on the Web.  I know, I know: “underweight women” doesn’t sound like a phrase that pops into guys’ heads as they’re googling for fantasy material (“slender women with unusually large breasts” seems more likely, though probably using a few choice words I won't get into here), but still…the comparison gives a bit of credence to the very logical notion that men don’t consider a bag-o’-bones to be a sexy bedmate.  When choosing between skinny and heavy, they’d much rather grab something cuddly.  This goes out to every woman who ever felt self-conscious before, during, or after the deed.

Food, Sex, and Money--or Why "Progress" Can Be, Well, a Bitch

Now here's an economic analysis of body-weight issues I can wrap my head around (in contrast to the specious plus-size-models-will-make-us-fat theory floated last week by the dim bulbs at the London School of Economics). In a book coming out next month titled The Changing Body, a team of economists traces what they describe as the most rapid transformation in the size, shape, and longevity of the human body to occur in millennia--if not in all of human history. And much of the change has occurred in the past century and a half; a time frame, they write, that is "minutely short by the standards of Darwinian evolution."

This transformation is essentially a triumph of technology and medicine. The result: the average American man in 1850 was 5 foot 7 and weighed about 146 pounds. By the 1980s he was 5 foot 10 and weighed 174.  And if you stop right there, you're just fine: we humans got big and strong because we were so damn smart. We mastered our environment.  Success writ large.

But if you do stop there you miss the huge, tragicomic twist in the story—the disastrous denouement. In the years since that nice trim ‘80s man was measured, people have ballooned. You know this, of course, because one would have to live on Mars not to have heard ad infinitum about the obesity epidemic, our current scourge. Nineteenth-century melancholics wasted away from consumption. Having conquered bacteria, twenty-first-century mankind, it seems, is sinking into the grave from sheer poundage. 

The sad truth is that today’s average man is the same height as the 1980s man, but he now weighs 191—at the upper end of what the National Institutes of Health considers “overweight,” nearing the precipice of “obese.”  The average woman is currently 5 foot 4 and

A New Model

The varied lovelies of the plus-size agency IPM, which "believes beauty has no size, age, and race."

I suppose after living through the economic debacle of the past two years I shouldn’t be surprised by the ability of an economist (or worse, two economists) to become totally divorced from reality. But a recent report out of the London School of Economics on the effect of plus-size models on public health and obesity rates (yes, economists writing about body weight; what’s next, Donald Trump writing about Obama’s citizenship?) sets a new bar for wonkiness—and pure wrong-headedness.

The study authors’ basic premise is this: presenting a more realistic “body ideal”—for instance, by using so-called plus-size models in some fashion spreads and insisting on a minimum healthy weight for runway models (as some European countries are now doing)—is likely to backfire and “foster the obesity epidemic.” They appear to think that they have proven this hypothesis through a string of unintelligible economic “models,” complete with abstruse equations that reminded me unpleasantly of the calculus I failed in high school (where F stands for food and c to the first power is food consumption…).  Excuse me: No. That is not how eating and body weight works. That is not

The Self-Deception That Believes the Lie

Breaking news: You're more likely to be normal about food--including losing weight if you have to--if you're not going hungry.  This staggering development was revealed recently in a rather odd study, published in the journal Obesity, that looked at both diet composition (high-protein versus low) and meal timing (six small meals a day versus three "squares").  I'll say right up front that my BS detector started pinging when I saw that the study was funded in part by the National Pork Board and the American Egg Board--and yes, a good portion of the protein being served up to participants was in the form of pork and eggs. 

However. In the spirit of not throwing the baby out with the bath-water, I have to admit the study had a few thought-provoking hypotheses, boiling down to this: people who ate a moderately high-protein diet (not insanely high: 25% protein, 26% fat, 49% carb) and ate three reasonably satisfying (but still dietetic) meals daily felt fuller throughout the day, were less tempted to snack at night, and wasted less time obsessing about food.

The contrarian in me is attracted to this conclusion, because it flies in the face of yet another weight-loss "technique" that actually has very little science backing it up: the Frequent-Meal Theory,

The Last Photo of My Body I Really Loved...

...was taken at age 9. I was pre-pubescent, just beginning to sense my body in a distinct way--sense it as being something other than simply hands that could grasp, legs that could kick, eyes that could see. By which I mean, I suppose, sense it as it appeared in the world. And I liked it: both my body, which was lanky and trouble-free, and its effect on others.

I think now that I may have liked it largely for its conformity to the slender ideal that had come in with Twiggy--because not too long after this picture was taken, with 110 film at my grandmother's pool, I stopped liking it. That happened when I started growing hips, and a booty (decades before J-Lo made them acceptable again), and cellulite, that ugly word created by (who else?) the French. (Did you know that six-month-old babies have cellulite?? But i digress...) Suddenly I wasn't a bony girl, I was a curvy, still-somewhat-awkward young woman, and the curves were in places that weren't at all chic. I felt lumbering, heavy, ugly. By seventh grade I felt compelled to scrawl in my photo album, next to my school picture: "Don't I look AWFUL?" I still have that album, and it still makes me sad to see that sentence.

Decades later, after chubby college years, aerobicized 20s, two children, followed by more aerobics, that easy self-approval of my childhood remains, if not entirely elusive, certainly not easy. But it's a fight worth waging--and I don't mean the aerobics. I mean the aspiration to love.

Free the PB-and-J!

Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away--like the Chicago of my childhood--"home-made" almost always meant "superior," both nutritionally and gustatorily.  In fact, most food-industry mavens still seem to agree, judging from the plethora of putative "home-made" claims plastered all over seemingly factory-made products.  (Sometimes the more honest among them simply suggest, "Tastes like home-made!")

One school in Chicago, however, has bucked this tradition: the Little Village Academy, a K-through-8th-grade public school, now bans home-packed lunches.  Students must eat the food served in the cafeteria, Principal Elsa Carmona told "The Chicago Tribune," because "nutrition-wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school."  When kids brought their own goods, she went on, she saw lots of "bottles of soda and flaming hot chips" being unpacked for lunch.

So...does this mean cafeteria lunches have somehow metamorphosed from

From the "Duh" Department...

What I already knew: That when women talk about “feeling fat,” it makes them feel even fatter.  What I didn’t know: That even ivory-tower researchers can have a sense of humor.

The latter becomes clear when you see the title of a recent study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly: “If You’re Fat, Then I’m Humongous!”  Of course, in deference to the gods of jargon there is a more conventional subtitle: “Frequency, Content, and Impact of Fat Talk Among College Women.”

We all know fat talk.  Show me a woman who has never said her butt feels big and I’ll probably see: a) a supermodel—no wait, even they think their butts are huge; b) a member of an alien species from the fabled Planet of the Babes; c) someone who gave up long ago and evinces a passion for muumuus; d) a woman from the .001% of the population who grew up with a sane notion of body weight and size.  The befuddling question is: Why do even smart women do this?

For the record, the study’s startling findings included: college women who engaged in “fat talk” (disparaging their own bodies) are more dissatisfied with said bodies and also more likely to have “internalized an ultra-thin body ideal” than those who try not to fat talk quite as much.  Oh, and that 90% of college women engage in “fat talk.”  (Are 90% of college women fat?  Stupid question—of course they are!  Why else would they say they are?)   One more thing: That there was zero association between a woman’s actual body size and how often she complained about her body size to her friends.  You’ve seen that, too: the skinny bitch who bemoans her tummy/thighs/batwings.  She’s lucky to be alive, don’t you think?  Considering the 90% of whale-like college women just dying to sit on her and crush her to death.

The study did hold one surprise, though: even as it showed that fat-talkers felt worse about their bodies after an orgy of verbal self-flagellation, more than half the participants reported that they firmly believe fat-talk actually makes them feel better about their bodies.

So I ask you: is that why we do it?  We feel, in some proto-Puritan fashion, that beating up on ourselves, confessing our mortal and fleshly sins, will wash away the past and give us a fresh start on perfection?  (Tomorrow begins the diet…)  Or that we are finally reaching some kind of ironic acceptance after all, and dissing our saddlebags is proof of that?  Or that joining a sisterhood of self-confessed pudges has made us realize that we don’t give a damn about those 5, 10, 25 pounds after all?  (The standard response noted by the researchers, by the way, was to deny that the fat-talking friend was fat, “most typically leading to a back-and-forth conversation where each of two healthy weight peers denies the other is fat while claiming to be fat themselves.”)

The answer is: none of the above.  As the study ultimately showed, fat talk is negative, period.  Picture if you will a bunch of guys pounding beers and ogling girls, or pounding beers and watching basketball.  If the talk turns to looks, they’re either talking about chicks, or they’re dissing their friends’ looks—not their own (the diss bounces off like rubber, too).  “Hey man, those extra twenty-five pounds look good on you!”  “Larry, you’re getting a gut, bro!”

Of course when you say you’re fat, you feel fat.  How can your head be telling you that your body is just fine, thank you, if your mouth is trash-talking it?  Would you say those things about a friend?  (Well, maybe a bitch like me, but a real friend?)  Then be your own bff, and shut the hell up.