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.