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.
A woman stands in front of a fridge at the office, staring down an actual raspberry cheesecake, and wavers. We hear her every fretful thought: "OK. What if I had just a small slice? I was good today, I deserve it! Or, I could have a medium slice and some celery sticks and they would cancel each other out, right? Or, OK, I could have one large slice and jog in place as I eat it. Or, OK, how about one large slice while jogging in place followed by eight celery…" Then the kicker: a coworker walks past, grabs a slenderizing Yoplait raspberry-cheesecake-flavored container, and smiles condescendingly. The shamed cheesecake-fantasizer grabs one too, and firmly closes the refrigerator door. Important fact: both women are normal weight.

Pretty standard, right?  But Yoplait has pulled the ad off the airwaves after the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) said it could serve as a trigger for those vulnerable to disordered eating by portraying their obsessional thinking as “normal.”  Turns out that the guilt-laden, supremely time-wasting inner monologue in the ad is a dead ringer for the actual tortured thought process of many anorexics and bulimics. Yoplait, in a flurry of remorse, withdrew the ad. “We had no idea,” the VP of corporate communications at General Mills told news outlets. “The thought had never occurred to anyone, and no one raised the point.”

Now, the libertarian, first-amendment-friendly part of me questions the legitimacy of this whole transaction—I mean, must liquor advertisers refrain from showing people enjoying drinking their product because a certain portion of the population is alcoholic? Must manufacturers of any product that uses sexual imagery and innuendo to sell its wares (and that is a very long list) be prevented from making sexy ads because a few people profess to be sex addicts? But that’s a (huge) topic for another day—or someone else’s blog.

What struck me about this little exercise in media influence was that “the thought [that the ad mimicked eating-disordered behavior] had never occurred to anyone.” Could that be because dividing foods and eating experiences into categories of “good” and “bad,” and obsessively debating whether one can/should/deserves to eat that piece of pie or [fill in your favorite “forbidden” food here], does not seem to most people to be neurotic or addictive or eating-disordered, but just, well, normal?

I can hear you saying: If that level of worry about indulging in caloric treats is so common, why are so many Americans so fat—and getting fatter every day? But (if you are saying that) what makes you think fat people don’t go through the same self-torture? Just because they may give in to their food lust (for, again, reasons beyond the scope of today’s column) doesn’t mean they haven’t indulged first in all manner of self-flagellation. And in fact, reams of research show that simply being a self-torturer about food—dieting, “going off” diets, excoriating oneself for “going off my diet”—makes it much more likely that a person will ultimately overeat, binge, and feel out of control about food.

In short, guilt and obsession are not the answer to America’s obesity problem—though they may serve to sell low-fat yogurt.  In fact, in some ways the opposite of guilt is the answer. If you eat at least a taste of what you really want, when you really want it, rather than some low-fat, ersatz, raspberry-cheesecake-flavored poor substitute for what you want, maybe you can end up being “normal” about food—that is, eating the right amount of food for your body’s needs without spending half your day worrying about it, and not getting either too fat or too thin.

A recent study about candy consumption suggested exactly that: Candy-eaters were found to weigh less, have a smaller waist circumference, and have lower levels of risk factors for heart disease and metabolic syndrome than people who never touched the stuff. Researchers speculated that candy-eaters (as opposed to candy-avoiders, presumably the dry drunks of the dietary world) understand “how to navigate the equation” of “balance, moderation, variety in the diet”—without beating themselves up about eating an occasional treat. Could it be this simple, then: Once a food is no longer forbidden, you can be normal about it? Make that all foods, and I think we’re onto something.