“Although we learned long ago to abandon magical thinking in connection with weather, crops, the care of animals, and other natural phenomena, it still has us in its grip when we think of diet.”
—Ruth Gay, “Fear of Food,”
from The American Scholar, 1976
“The amount of misinformation about nutrition that is circulated widely, especially by those who profit from doing so, is overwhelming.”
—researcher A. E. Harper, University of Wisconsin
My most vivid childhood memory of eating took place at my grandparents’ house. My family ate dinner there every Friday night, and it was the highlight of my week. Not only did I get to spend time with my grandparents, whom I adored, but my grandmother was an excellent cook who catered to my sister’s and my tastes. (For years I thought chickens had four wings; my grandmother always bought extra, knowing wings were my favorite part.)
This night I must have been around ten. I already felt too fat, though photos from that time show a short girl with curly dark hair and a perfectly ordinary body. We said the blessing over the challah and passed it around the table. My grandfather smeared margarine on his slice and urged me to do the same. “Come on, doll,” he said. “Try it with some margarine.” I shook my head—I liked my challah plain—and as I lifted the slice to my mouth, he said chidingly, “Looks like you’re putting on some weight there.” I remember sitting there, the bread halfway to my mouth, thinking even at ten years old Now what do I do?
I’d forgotten that experience until the day years later when the therapist asked What if you were OK with your body the way it is right now? And then it began to pop into my head at random moments, that vision of a young girl at the family dinner table, caught in the suddenly forbidden act of eating, frozen in shame and confusion. I still thought the therapist had misjudged me. I still thought she was insane. But for the first time in a long time, I found myself examining the roles food had played in my life. It took until I was thirty-eight years old to really bear down and think about the ways food—what I ate and how much—affected how I felt about my body. The subject had been so painful for so long that I’d literally taught myself to think around it. Now, though, I forced myself to sit down and consider how food made me feel. I had a ridiculously hard time getting myself to focus on it. My mind kept wanting to slide away, wander off into some immediate distraction, which told me how important the question was and how long I’d been burying it.
Eventually I was able to sit still long enough to come up with an answer: when I ate too much, I felt bloated and huge. When I ate too little, my body felt light and clean, but also, often, shaky and weak. The really puzzling thing, I realized, was that I’d had both sets of feelings at exactly the same weight. Today I might feel enormous; tomorrow I might feel svelte. But how could that be? It made no sense.
And, I realized, there were moments when I felt reasonably good about my body. That came as a bit of a shock, to be honest; I was so used to automatically ragging on myself I’d forgotten I ever had other feelings. But those good moments could turn in a second to rank, rancid shame. My flesh seemed just too much—too soft, too white, too hairy, too corporeal. It wasn’t just my body that could provoke this shame, either; it was also my eating and not-eating and overeating, my anxiety about eating and the way food had come to dominate my entire life. I realized I was sick of it. I wished I didn’t have to eat, which was a supremely odd thought for someone who loved food. But it was true. It would be much easier to just not eat at all than to keep going around and around this cycle of eating and dieting, bingeing and starving.
It occurred to me for maybe the first time ever that I had absolutely no idea what normal eating was or how to do it. I’d tried to suss it out by watching my husband, who’s naturally wiry and athletic and who’s never counted a calorie in his life. But as a role model, he was no help. Sometimes he ate a lot, and a lot of foods I never touched: fettuccine Alfredo, bread slathered with butter, macaroni and cheese, huge bowls of ice cream with whipped cream on top. Fatty foods. Scary foods. Bad foods.
Other times he didn’t eat much at all—a peanut butter and jelly sandwich could keep him going for hours. I’d seen him forget to eat lunch, or postpone it when it wasn’t convenient or easy to eat. I never did that, not just because I got too hungry but because the experience of not having food when I wanted or needed it made me feel both physically shaky and anxious. The few times I’d had outpatient surgeries or procedures, the not-eating beforehand was by far the worst part of the whole thing. Even if I wasn’t physically hungry, that sense of deprivation sent panic screaming through my cells. And that shamed me, too, because I had plenty of meat on my bones. Missing a meal now and then should hardly matter. It would be good for me, wouldn’t it?
I felt like a fly struggling in a spider’s web, wrapping myself tighter the more I thrashed and flailed. So I went back to the therapist and put aside the question of weight, to focus instead on food. On, as she said, my relationship with food, a phrase that seemed oddly disturbing. I’d devoted so much energy to forgetting I had a relationship with food; why would I want to undo that now?
But I turned up for our next session with a box of crackers, as she’d requested. At least, she told me to bring in a food I felt neutral about, and that was easy to eat. So I opened my box of Saltines, took out a cracker, and got ready to eat it. The therapist instructed me to “explore” the cracker in as many ways as possible; so, even though I felt ridiculous, I sniffed it and struggled to come up with descriptive words for its smell (bready? bland? like cardboard?). I ran the tips of my fingers over it, felt its sharp corners, touched the salt crystals studding its surface. I looked at it just about every way you could look at a cracker, and just when I thought I couldn’t stand another minute of it, the therapist told me to break the cracker and put half in my mouth. “Don’t chew,” she ordered. “Just let it sit on your tongue.”
I would have rolled my eyes if she wasn’t looking, but I did what she said, and immediately started to sweat. The cracker felt huge and heavy, swelling second by second on my tongue. I was going to choke on it. I needed to swallow it or spit it out. The therapist looked me in the eye, keeping me steady, and I managed to hold it in my mouth. Hours went by. Whole days and nights. Finally she nodded and I moved my jaw, intending to chew. But the cracker had melted to mush. The lump slid down my throat, and I startled both of us by bursting into tears.
“What happened?” she asked, and I tried to tell her about the feeling that I was about to choke, the sense of panic that rose in my throat, the grief and terror that came from sitting with half a Saltine in my mouth for what probably amounted to fifteen seconds but felt like an eternity. I couldn’t make coherent words, but I didn’t have to. She kept looking at me calmly, and slowly I felt calmer, too.
That was the beginning of our real work together. I spent the next ten years sitting across from her, taking my life apart and putting it back together, starting with that cracker. The act of eating, such a basic human experience, had become such a loaded, painful aspect of my life. And I knew even then I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. As M. F. K. Fischer wrote, “First we eat, then we do everything else.”
IMAGINE IF ONE of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers magically came to life in twenty-first-century America. Unless you’re descended from royalty—and maybe even if you are—she’d likely be stunned by the abundance, accessibility, and array of food in this time and place. You could, of course, tell her that hunger is still a problem here, that fifteen percent of all American families go hungry at least some of the time.1 And certainly malnutrition sickens and kills millions of people around the world. But here in the United States, where we spend about $4,300 per person each year on food,2 most of us get enough calories to survive.
Then imagine you go on to describe how we feel about food. On the one hand we celebrate it: we pore over lavish four-color cookbooks studded with food-porn-style photos. We read magazines and blogs devoted to the sensual pleasures of preparing and eating food. Many of us spend a fair amount of our discretionary income in restaurants ranging from McDonald’s to New York City’s Masa, which serves an omakase (chef’s choice) sushi menu that sets the average diner back about $1,200.
But then there’s the other side of the story. Many of us fear and struggle with food. Three-quarters of American women eat in a disordered way a lot of the time; another third have purged (through vomiting or laxatives) to control their weight, and that’s not counting anyone with an actual eating disorder diagnosis. My students aren’t surprised by these statistics; they’re living them. In one class where we talked about disordered eating, a young woman raised her hand and asked, “What is not-disordered eating?” That unleashed a torrent of confessions and questions from nearly everyone in the class. (For a good definition, see page 185.) A number of the young women (and a few of the guys) admitted eating only once a day, cutting out bread or other food groups altogether, avoiding anything with fat in it, spending two or more hours a day in the gym to “get rid” of the calories they did consume. These twenty-year-olds were just as tormented as I’d been at their ages. And like twenty-year-old me, they had no idea how to feed themselves well and feel good about it.
So yes, we’re confused and screwed-up and anxious about food, which is unsurprising given the mixed messages that bombard us: enjoy your food but not too much. Eat what you like but don’t get fat. Eat healthy but don’t deprive yourself. Eat this but not that—never ever eat that. You’ll die without food, but you’re eating yourself to death.
The nutritional wisdom du jour is no better. One day meat will kill you and the next it’ll add years to your life. Fat makes you sick and obese; no, it’s carbs that give you diabetes. No, make that sugar. Eggs raise your cholesterol. Or do they? Too much salt leads to stroke, but wait—it turns out too little salt may be even worse.
Once-reputable doctors like Mehmet Oz take to TV to hawk “miracle foods” like green coffee extract, guaranteed to trim your tummy. No wonder we use so much of our bandwidth worrying about what to eat—or, more to the point, what not to eat. No wonder a friend who was torn between loving to eat and longing to be thin once told me she fantasized about having her taste buds surgically removed so she wouldn’t have to choose.
At various times in my life I would have gladly joined her. If food was truly just fuel, nothing else, life would be so much simpler, especially in this era of thin-at-any-cost. But despite the views of food crusaders like Walter Willett, Brian Wansink, and even the popular Michael Pollan,* who encourage a fairly utilitarian perspective on eating, food is much, much more than the gas that fills our tanks. Food is nutrition, true, but it’s also love and community and ritual. The need to eat is one of the few experiences we all share. Coming together to prepare a meal, to serve it, to eat it, binds us to other people more often than sex and more closely than circumstance.
I didn’t realize how much social connection revolves around food until my daughter’s illness. For more than a year we didn’t invite people over for dinner, didn’t go out to eat, avoided brunches and lunches and backyard barbecues with friends and neighbors. Without a table full of other people to gather around, we didn’t gather. We felt isolated. We were isolated.
The social aspects of eating made my daughter’s recovery tougher at first. Early on she avoided any event where food would be served, afraid to eat and self-conscious about her fear. And since just about every gathering involved food, she wound up alone a lot. It was months before she could eat with friends, and even then it was a struggle. A few years later, when she was further along in recovery, eating with good friends actually helped her through some bumpy moments.
Which makes perfect sense to Montana-based psychologist and evolutionary biologist Shan Guisinger, who’s come up with an intriguing theory about how early humans ate and why some people develop anorexia nervosa. Our ancestors were nomadic foragers, says Guisinger, following the food sources from place to place. She believes anorexia may have been an adaptation to periodic episodes of famine: most humans without enough food get hungry and weak. People with anorexia, on the other hand, become almost manically hyperactive, full of restless energy. They don’t see themselves as too thin or think they have a problem. Their terror of food and eating seems to propel them despite the lack of enough calories—at least for a while.
Guisinger’s theory is that people with the anorexic adaptation could lead a tribe to food when everyone else was too weak to think clearly or want to move. Once they found new food sources and regained strength, she says, the group would draw the person with anorexia back into health through the social routines of eating3—by including her, encouraging her, and supporting her eating until she’d regained weight and strength.
Our current anxieties around food and eating are, of course, nowhere near as severe as the ones that characterize anorexia nervosa. But our cultural attitudes around food are scarily reminiscent of those pathologies. “We’ve all been traumatized at least a little bit with regard to our eating,” says Ellyn Satter, a registered dietitian and therapist who’s written a number of books on children and eating.
A few years ago, Satter told me a story that made her point all too well. For many years her clinical practice in Madison, Wisconsin, focused on helping parents and kids deal with food, weight, and eating. One mom brought in a seven-month-old girl who was eating well and whose weight was steady. The problem, said the mom, was that the baby loved food too much. She would literally moan with pleasure and wiggle her legs as she ate. The mother was mortified by the moaning and, more important, scared of her daughter’s appetite, afraid the girl would eat so much she’d become obese.
That story seems both relatable and terribly sad to me. Before my daughters were born, I used to worry about what traits they might inherit from me and their father, good and bad. I thought they might get my curly hair and passion for writing. I hoped they wouldn’t inherit my anxiety disorder or tendency to gain weight because I didn’t want them to suffer the way I had. I didn’t want them to feel crippled or consumed by body anxieties, and I also didn’t want them to be rejected or bullied because they weren’t thin enough.
This is, of course, a common fear among parents. We want our children to be accepted and appreciated for who they are. We want to protect them from harm, including the kinds of harm people inflict on one another. A few years ago, when Rebecca Puhl, the deputy director of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, surveyed parents about the reasons kids and teens are bullied, weight concerns topped the list, far outweighing other potential sources of bullying like physical disability, race, class, or sexual orientation.4 Tellingly, parents with thin kids worried about weight bullying, too, though not as much as parents of overweight or obese kids. No one really feels safe from such public criticism. We’re all only five pounds away from being called out for being too fat.
So I understand that mother’s fear of her baby’s appetite. I even understand (sort of) why Dara-Lynn Weiss put her seven-year-old daughter on a diet (though I have more trouble understanding why she wrote about it in such painful detail for Vogue and later in a book). I understand the impulse behind Weiss’s actions; I just wish she’d done a little more research first, investigated other possibilities beyond dieting..
If I hadn’t been actively researching weight and health, I might have been one of those parents who preached the good food/bad food dichotomy and encouraged her daughters to “watch their weight.” Maybe I, too, would have delivered the same mixed messages around food that my sister and I got at home. Growing up, we ate Tastykakes and drank diet soda with every meal. My mother kept the upright freezer full of desserts but locked it and hid the key. She commented freely and critically about what my sister and I ate and how much we weighed, and once went so far as to fill an empty ice cream container with garbage and put it back in the freezer, where she knew my sister would open it. (Inside, she placed a note reading “Gotcha!” I’m still trying to figure out what that meant. I caught you eating? I caught you enjoying your food? Sacrilege.) She herself dieted on and off until practically the day she died, recording her weight each morning on a chart in the bathroom, losing the same twenty-five pounds or so over and over.
I know what it’s like to be afraid of food—of my own response to it, anyway. My personal experiences with dieting, restrained eating, and the bingeing that inevitably followed made me feel like I couldn’t control my appetite, that once unleashed it might literally devour everything in sight. Now I know all too well that fear leads only to more fear, more disordered eating, more health problems. We bounce from one extreme to the other, eating nothing but salad and fruit one week (and feeling oh-so-virtuous for doing it), then inhaling nachos and cupcakes the next in a vicious and self-perpetuating cycle of defiance and despair.
Our personal fears about food have morphed into powerful cultural anxieties. Google the phrase “eating ourselves to death” and you’ll see what I mean. Most of us believe the reason we’re fatter than we used to be, as a culture, is that we eat too much and too many of the wrong things. That sounds reasonable, and it meshes with the “calories in, calories out” truism we’re used to hearing. But despite the appealingly transparent logic of this proposition—eating too many calories is making us fat, so all we have to do is eat less—the reality is not so simple.
For one thing, nutritional science is more presumption than prescription. We know a lot about the general principles of nutrition, but we’re more or less guessing about what particular individuals need to be healthy. “We make all these recommendations, with all this apparent scientific precision, but when it comes down to it, we don’t know how much fat someone should have in their diet,” says the University of North Carolina’s Asheley Skinner. “We don’t know how many months or years with high cholesterol will cause heart disease. We argue like we know what we’re talking about, but we don’t.” As I’m writing this, for instance, a new international study of 100,000 people, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that eating too little salt may be just as dangerous as eating too much. The arguments over salt guidelines will likely go on for years. Meanwhile, what do we do?
Alyssa, thirty-one, works at a natural foods store on Long Island.
The first time I became really conscious of my weight was around eighth grade. Somebody made a comment about how my thinner sister would probably be a model but they never had to worry about me clearing a plate. I didn’t go on a diet, but I exercised quietly in my room a lot. I didn’t see it as an avenue to health. I saw it as something I had to do to get smaller.
The first time I went on a diet I was twenty-one. In three months I lost twenty-five pounds, and everyone was raving, “You look amazing!” That kind of fed me. But of course I gained it back. When I lived in New Paltz, I started running on beautiful mountain roads. Once this car full of college kids drove by, and a guy leaned out and said, “Keep running, flabby, you have a long way to go.” I remember stopping and laughing because clearly I was exercising right then.
The second time I went on Weight Watchers the weight didn’t come off as quick, and I wasn’t as disciplined. I went back and forth between counting calories, trying to eat really healthy, and then the second a cheeseburger was put in front of me I would eat it. Things were either really good or really bad. I lost all balance.
I started working at a health food store and eating all this healthy whole food. I didn’t count a single calorie and actually lost twenty pounds the first year. Then somebody made a comment about how much weight I’d lost, and I felt pressured to lose more. I started counting calories, and the weight just came back.
The worst part about Weight Watchers from a health standpoint is I ate more garbage on the plan than I did not counting calories at all. I ate so much crap, just to get the lower calorie counts. I’ve taken diet pills and done Engine 2. Eventually I started feeling like, Why am I spending so much time on this? I joined Tumblr and started following body positivity blogs, and it’s funny—when you change your media environment and expose yourself to more than just the same three skinny white girls all the time, you put a lot less pressure on yourself.
It’s still a daily struggle for me. Some days I feel amazing, and some days I don’t want anyone to look at me. But I wore shorts this summer—I hadn’t worn them in years—and I felt great.
Nutritional science is especially weak on issues of weight. Much of the research assumes, for example, that if a fat person drops enough weight, he or she will become “healthy” in the same way as a thin person, and will be able to eat and exercise like someone who’s naturally thin. But that’s not how it works. “We’re putting people through something we know will probably not be successful,” says Skinner. “And who knows what we’re doing to their metabolisms in the process?”
We do have an idea about that, actually, thanks to an idealistic senator from South Dakota named George McGovern who was worried about hunger in America. In 1968, he created and chaired a special Senate committee—the US Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, informally known as the McGovern committee—to work on the problem. Over the next few years, the committee organized a conference on nutrition, food, and health, and gathered testimony on the subject from experts, teachers, doctors, academics, nongovernmental organizations, and citizens.
In 1974, McGovern broadened the committee’s mandate to include setting national policy around nutrition—specifically, helping Americans eat less to avoid chronic diseases. His intentions were good; as he told attendees at the Church World Service conference nearly thirty years later, “I hope someday we will be able to proclaim that we have banished hunger in the United States, and that we’ve been able to bring nutrition and health to the whole world.” But the committee’s 1977 recommendations, while well-meaning and even logical, were not grounded in strong science.
For instance, the committee set detailed guidelines for how much fat, carbohydrates, cholesterol, sugar, and salt ordinary Americans should consume. Two of those dietary goals were to cut fat to 30 percent of a person’s intake, and raise carbohydrates to about 60 percent, despite a complete lack of compelling evidence for those cutoffs.5 The 1977 report set in motion a national experiment in eating that people like cardiologist Arthur Agatston, who created the South Beach Diet, believe contributed to or even triggered the so-called obesity epidemic.6 It ushered in the era that brought us such cognitively dissonant “foods” as fat-free brownies and cheeses, and helped create a nation of lipophobes. And it set the stage for the government’s Dietary Guidelines for America, first issued in 1980 and updated every five years, which have also come under fire for being driven more by politics than science. (The latest iteration led to the creation of the government’s “My Plate” recommendations of five food groups that are part of a “healthy diet”: fruits, vegetables, grains, protein foods, and dairy. Presumably everything else is not part of a healthy diet.)7
The McGovern committee’s recommendations on fat were based loosely on research done by Ancel Keys, a physiologist and researcher at the University of Minnesota who spent a long and fascinating career exploring the relationship between nutrition and health. One of Keys’s most important research projects, in fact, laid the groundwork for the modern understanding of anorexia nervosa as a physiological, not just psychological, disease.* In a study that would never be approved by institutional review boards today, Keys took thirty-six healthy young conscientious objectors and subjected them to an experiment in starvation. For three months he merely observed them, cataloguing their physical and psychological conditions, creating a kind of baseline for the experiment. For the next six months he starved them, feeding them so little that each man lost a quarter of his body weight. (This may not sound like much, but consider that a 160-pound man would have dropped 40 pounds in six months.) For the final three months, Keys and his team re-fed the men, all the while observing and meticulously recording the minutiae of their physical and psychological health.
Keys’s observations turned a lot of the conventional wisdom around food and eating upside down. His subjects’ psychological well-being deteriorated along with their physical health. They became irritable, anxious, depressed, fatigued, socially withdrawn. They couldn’t concentrate. They obsessed over food and over the act of eating, spending hours on a tiny meal, cutting their portions into minuscule pieces, rearranging them on the plate, dousing them with salt and other condiments. They daydreamed about cooking, concocting elaborate mental meals; in fact, several of them with no previous interest in cooking went on to restaurant careers. Maybe the most surprising aspect of the experiment, though, was that the men’s symptoms hit their peak during the re-feeding phase, not the starvation phase. They showed nearly all the same behaviors as people with anorexia, including, for some, resisting food despite the fact that they were starving.
Keys’s research was important in part because it showed that malnutrition affects the entire organism, brain and mind as well as body. And it suggested that the traditional perspective on eating disorders—that they’re psychological diseases centered around issues of control and autonomy—was misleading, incomplete, or just plain wrong.*
His interest in food and its effects on human physiology and psychology continued, leading him down a different path in the 1950s and 1960s. Keys had also observed that as food became scarce in Europe during World War II, fewer people there died from heart disease. He concluded that higher levels of dietary fat and cholesterol were linked to heart disease, strokes, and death.8 Convinced that the correlation between levels of heart disease in developed countries, where diets tended to include more saturated fat, must be more than coincidental, Keys became a fervent anti-fat crusader, developing a formula (known as the “Keys equation”) that he claimed predicted how cholesterol would rise or fall depending on how much fat and cholesterol a person ate.9 His vilification of foods like eggs, butter, and meat triggered our current cultural fears around those foods, and still informs the way many of us eat, as the robust market for margarines and egg substitutes attests.
After the McGovern committee used Keys’s conclusions about food to shape their nutrition recommendations (eat less fat! eat more carbs!), American food producers and consumers jumped on the bandwagon. Nutrition writer Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, was later interviewed by Frontline about the recommendations. As he explained, “This belief set in that carbohydrates could be eaten to excess and wouldn’t cause weight gain, that they were both heart healthy and the ideal diet.”10 Low-fat foods became de rigueur, an automatic menu must-do. Only now, nearly forty years later, are we beginning to look a little harder at whether low-fat is always such a health imperative. And we’re realizing that the low-fat trend coincided nearly perfectly with the twenty years or so when Americans gained weight. Maybe our horror of fat has had some entirely unintended consequences.
WE’VE LEARNED A lot about the complexities of food, nutrition, and metabolism since Keys came up with his equation. But the way we eat—and the way we think about eating—lags seriously behind and reflects few of those nuances. Take the notion that we’re fatter now because we eat more. That idea is firmly established in the general population, and plenty of nutrition experts concur. Yet a number of studies have consistently found that we’re not eating substantially more than we did thirty or fifty years ago.11 In fact, children and teens in Western countries, especially girls, actually eat fewer calories now than in the past.12
Even if we were eating a little more than in the past, that still wouldn’t account for the weight gain trend because the relationship between what we eat and what we weigh is far more complex than calories in, calories out. Back in 1989, two of the best-respected weight researchers in the world, sociologist Jeffery Sobal and psychiatrist A. J. Stunkard, concluded, “Even when food intake and energy expenditure are carefully monitored in field studies, the relationship between energy intake and body weight is weak.”13 In other words, what you eat doesn’t necessarily correlate with what you weigh. Some people can take in 3,000 calories a day and never gain an ounce; others struggle to maintain their weight eating 1,200 calories a day. (And if you’ve gone around the dieting yo-yo a few times, that number may be even lower.) Other factors play more of a role than we think.
You and I might eat the exact same meal, but our bodies will handle the calories and nutrients very differently, thanks to a slew of elements including how well your thyroid works, the size and type of bacterial colonies in your intestines, how often you’ve dieted, your parents’ and grandparents’ weight, your genetic makeup, how much you exercise, and other factors.
Kelsey, twenty-five, is on staff at Johns Hopkins University.
I absolutely love food, all different kinds. I love fruit and chocolate and anything you can imagine. Unfortunately, I don’t really love what it does to my body. I would say my body type is average, maybe a little heavier. According to my doctor, though, I’m obese and need to lose twenty pounds.
It’s not like I haven’t tried to lose weight. I was a skinny little child but I thought I was fat, so I started dieting. I looked at my mom, who I love, but she’s an aerobics instructor, and she’s weighed the same thing since she was fifteen. I saw how proud she was of one of my sisters who was really thin and fit.
In my sophomore year of high school I wanted to look good for my ring dance, so I stopped eating. I told my mom it was because eating made me feel sick, which was partially the truth. I felt sick about what it was doing to my body. The saddest part is even though I was pale and had huge purple bags under my eyes, people told me how great I looked, and it made me feel good about myself. I looked sick, but because it’s what the models out there look like it’s considered beautiful, which I find absolutely disgusting.
Anyway, after I decided I needed food, I ate and ate and ate and ended up being twenty pounds heavier than when I started. So that didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. Today I am a little heavier, but I am confident most of the time. I have a boyfriend who loves my body, and I love my body. It might not be exactly what a woman is supposed to look like by American standards, but it’s mine, and I cherish it. I only wish more girls could feel the same.
One of those factors, interestingly, is pleasure, which appears to be an integral part of the metabolic process. The more we enjoy our food, the more efficiently our bodies make use of its nutrients. In a now-classic experiment done in the 1970s, researchers in Thailand and Sweden fed volunteers from each country identical spicy Thai meals, then measured how much iron each volunteer had absorbed from the meal. The Thai volunteers absorbed 50 percent more iron from the meal than the Swedes; the researchers hypothesized that being familiar with the food served, and liking it, helped the Thai women digest it more effectively. In the next phase of the study, researchers took the same meal, mushed it into paste, and fed it to the volunteers again. This time the Thai women absorbed a lot less of the iron than they had before, presumably because mush is not quite as appetizing as real food.14
This may seem strange, but consider that the digestive process actually begins before you even open your mouth. When we see and smell a meal that appeals to us, our salivary glands start working, getting ready to begin breaking down the first bite. When a meal doesn’t look or smell good (like the mush), it takes longer for those glands to kick into gear, and we don’t metabolize the food as completely.
So even if we could have our taste buds surgically removed, we wouldn’t really want to. Food looks, smells, and tastes good for the same reason the brain’s hypothalamus (a small neuro organ resembling a kernel of corn) sends out hunger signals to the body: to make sure we eat regularly, and enough, to survive and reproduce. Our current anxieties about eating and appetite often keep us from enjoying food—really enjoying it, I mean, not just wolfing down something forbidden—and, ironically, likely contribute to overeating. You can’t feel satisfied after a meal if you’re barely aware you’re eating it.
NOT LONG AGO, I sat next to a slender woman on a plane who spent most of the trip reading. Eventually we began to chat, and I asked about her book.
She looked up eagerly. “It’s all about how sugar is killing us,” she said. “Did you know it’s in practically everything we eat? And that’s what’s making us so fat?” She talked on and on, with the zeal of a recent convert, about how high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was poisoning our children, skewing our taste buds, and making us all obese. Well, making other people obese, anyway.
Both her subject and her enthusiasm felt painfully familiar. We’ve been looking for a weight scapegoat for years; wheat, in the form of gluten, and sugar, especially in the form of HFCS, are the latest in a long line of foods to vilify and cut out of our diets. A quick cruise through Amazon turns up pages and pages of book titles like Sugars and Flours: How They Make Us Crazy, Sick and Fat, and What to Do About It, or The Sugar Fix: The High-Fructose Fallout That Is Making You Fat, or Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health. The notion that our modern taste for processed foods, fast foods, and junk food is to blame for our weight issues has been promoted by a number of experts, like Harvard professor David Ludwig, author of a diet book called Ending the Food Fight: Guide Your Child to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food/Fake Food World. Ludwig believes that if we ate fewer refined grains (white flour, white pasta, cornmeal), sugars, and potato products, and made “a few other sensible lifestyle choices” (he doesn’t say what exactly), we’d all be thin.15 Or at least thinner. (Something that rarely comes up in this discussion is the fact that we eat way more fruits and vegetables than we did fifty years ago, now that we have access to them year-round.)16
Just to be clear: I’m not working for Big Food, and I’m not a fan of fast food or processed foods, maybe because I grew up eating great quantities of both (Hostess Sno Balls, Devil Dogs, Rice a Roni, Kentucky Fried Chicken—and these are just the first few that spring to mind). I don’t like the way they taste, in general, and I find they often make me sleepy. I haven’t drunk soda, sugared or diet, since I was sixteen, and I prefer water to juice and other caloric drinks. I eat a lot of fruits, vegetables, nuts, dairy, fish, chicken, and whole grains, not only because they’re nutritious but because I like the way they taste and how I feel when I eat them.
The phrase “processed foods” is actually a little misleading, since a lot of what we eat is processed in some way (hello bread, wine, cheese, pickles, chocolate, and cooking in general).17 Maybe it’s more useful to think about packaged or heavily processed foods, which have been part of our diet for longer than most of us know. Trans fats, for instance, a signature ingredient in heavily processed foods until recently, first hit the grocery store shelves in 1911, with the introduction of Crisco.18 Wonder bread, candy bars, commercial cereals, Velveeta, and other packaged foods have been around since the 1920s and 1930s. McDonald’s, founded in 1940 in San Bernardino, California, sold its billionth burger way back in 1963, nearly twenty years before our collective weight began to rise.* HFCS entered the food mainstream in the mid-1970s, though it’s certainly way more prevalent today than it was back then.
I’m not arguing that heavily processed foods are good for us, or that I personally want to eat more of them (or think other people should). On the contrary: I tend to avoid them because they have little nutritional value and, to my palate, don’t taste good. Take HFCS, for example. Rats that are fed HFCS gain more weight and spike higher triglycerides than rats that are fed sucrose (table sugar), so HFCS may in fact be an endocrine disruptor that alters our metabolisms.19 Of course, we’re not rats, and animal studies can be misleading.20 But without question, we eat a lot more sugars of all kinds than we used to, thanks to the “food engineers” who know exactly how to manufacture “foods” that appeal to our palates. (A good account can be found in Michael Moss’s book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.)**
We may wind up banning HFCS (and I rather hope we do). But it’s worth remembering that despite our very human tendency to want a scapegoat, heavily processed foods are clearly not the sole drivers for diabetes, fatty liver disease, and other modern health concerns. Poverty, stigma, other endocrine disruptors and pollutants all play a role, and likely there are other factors involved as well. And something we miss when we focus on HFCS and Big Food is the long-term damage, both physical and psychological, that comes from being rigid, chaotic, and fearful about eating. As my students have pointed out, we have no idea these days how to eat with pleasure and not fall into guilt or self-loathing or dangerous weight-control behaviors. The notion that we need to consciously restrain our eating (or try to, and feel shame when we fail), that we need to practice constant vigilance around food, that we need to follow someone else’s food rules, whether they come from a diet manual, a nutritionist, or the New York Times, has become deeply embedded in our cultural psyche.
Those rules have made us worse off in every way imaginable. Dieting and the fear of food have made us fatter, sicker, more depressed and more obsessed.
NOT LONG AGO, a hypnotherapist named Iris Higgins published a letter in the Huffington Post that racked up more than twenty-three thousand shares on Facebook, which is where I came across it. The article was headlined “An Open Apology to All of My Weight Loss Clients,” and in it, Higgins wrote about her former job at a well-known commercial weight-loss clinic, where she taught her clients all sorts of tricks for staying on a 1,200-calorie meal plan. “Volumize with vegetables,” she wrote. “Start with a bowl of broth-based soup. Are you drinking enough water? Did you exercise enough?”
Higgins went on to apologize for things she did in the name of helping her clients lose weight. It’s a brutally frank catalogue that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever dieted, with or without a meal plan or company. She wrote that she regretted the “lies” she’d told her clients, like saying 1,200 calories a day was a healthy amount, and explained that she wasn’t cynically trying to trick them or sell them something:
I believed the lies we were fed as much as you did. And it wasn’t just the company feeding them to me. It was the doctors and registered dietitians on the medical advisory board. It was the media and magazines confirming what I was telling my clients. A palm-sized portion of lean chicken with half a sweet potato and a salad was PLENTY. No matter that you had “cravings” afterward. Cravings are a sign of underlying emotional issues. Yeah, sure they are. Except when they’re a sign that your body needs more food and you’re ignoring it. Then they’re a sign that your 1,200-calorie diet is horseshit. Then they’re a sign that you’ve been played.
After three years of working in weight loss, wrote Higgins, “I am sorry because many of you walked in healthy and walked out with disordered eating, disordered body image, and the feeling that you were a ‘failure.’ None of you ever failed. Ever. I failed you. The weight loss company failed you. Our society is failing you.”21
Higgins, who went on to publish several gluten-free cookbooks, had no formal nutrition training. That may have made it easier for her to critique what she saw as destructive food rules and eating patterns. Nutritionists and dietitians, on the other hand, are often more invested in the weight-loss paradigm and in a more black-and-white view of eating.* My interactions with nutritionists—usually with or on behalf of my daughter as she struggled with anorexia—have typically been unproductive or worse. Like the nutritionist I asked to explain to my daughter the science behind why the brain and body require fat. I hoped if my daughter understood cognitively why she needed to take in a certain amount of fat, she could use that knowledge to help fight the terror she felt as part of the eating disorder.
The nutritionist sat down with us, cleared her throat, and said, “Your brain and body need fat.” She paused. We waited. My daughter looked twitchy. The silence stretched on. The nutritionist tried again.
“You need fat in your body,” she started, and then said in a rush, “but not too much!”
Argh. I’m sure some professionals would have been able to give my daughter the scoop without panicking. But I also know many hold the same biases as this one, even if they don’t blurt them out. The idea that food has an inherent moral component, and that we do, too, when we eat it (or don’t), has become a meme, a contagious cultural idea that triggers an automatic response.
I saw an extreme example of this when my daughter was sick. Certain foods were “safe,” and they were all low-fat or nonfat: pretzels, fat-free yogurt, grapes, carrot sticks, ramen noodles. Other foods terrified her, and they were usually the ones high in fats: avocados, cheese, any kind of dessert, pasta. Watching her made me realize I, too, thought of food in categories, though not nearly as rigidly or extremely as my daughter. For me, fruits and vegetables felt “safe,” while doughnuts and fettuccine Alfredo might as well have come packaged with a skull and crossbones. My internal good food/bad food meter was for a long time organized around the same general principles as my daughter’s, though calibrated differently. (For instance, I have no bad feelings about cake or pesto, both of which are higher in fat.)
Each of us probably has her own equivalent of doughnuts and fettuccine, foods we’ve come to think of as off-limits, untouchable, even dangerous. And there’s no question that there’s a lot of room for improvement in our national diet, especially among children. “If we look at behaviors, thin kids and overweight kids are not that different,” says UNC’s Asheley Skinner. “When it comes down to it, most kids in this country eat a crappy diet and don’t exercise enough.”
But much of what passes for nutrition education is essentially based around fear, on making us afraid of eating those less nutritious foods. And it’s worked, up to a point; many of us are afraid of those foods. That doesn’t mean we’ve become healthier eaters, though. On the contrary: As long as the discussion is framed as a dichotomy—food is good or bad, and we’re good or bad for eating a specific food—many of us will keep bouncing from one end of the spectrum to the other, depriving ourselves or overeating, eating “healthy” or “unhealthy.” Dichotomies by definition lack nuance; they’re meant to be black and white. But black-and-white thinking doesn’t work so well for humans. If it did, most of us would be following the USDA’s latest food recommendations (for better or worse) without complaint or deviation.
The good food/bad food dichotomy leads to other problems, too. The conflicting messages we get around food and eating have already raised our cultural anxiety about what to eat and how much and how to prepare it. Adding in a new set of rigid food rules can tip some people into orthorexia, an obsession with eating “healthy” or “clean” that can contribute to people becoming terrified of eating anything they consider unhealthy, processed, or “contaminated” with artificial ingredients. But you don’t have to officially be diagnosed with orthorexia to be vulnerable to some of those feelings.
Carolyn, a thirty-two-year-old in Sandpoint, Idaho, remembers the first time she decided to eat “clean” by cutting out an entire food group. She was five years old, and she gave up sugar after her first-grade gym teacher told her she was fat. A dozen diets and fifteen years later, a therapist threatened to stop working with her unless she changed her eating habits. “She told me, ‘You can’t possibly do psychological work unless you clean your body,’” recalls Carolyn. She starting eating only raw foods, becoming so restrictive she made rules for what her husband could and couldn’t eat or bring into the house. She joined Overeaters Anonymous, which exacerbated her rigidity around eating, and eventually became a sponsor. “I was taking phone calls at all hours,” she says now. “People would call and say, ‘I had a piece of gum and I found out it had sugar in it. What do I do?’”
Eventually Carolyn found a nutritionist who helped her begin to unpack her feelings and routines around eating. “It’s taken quite a few years to undo a lot of that mind-set of good and bad food, learning to eat again,” she says.
It takes time, in this culture, because so many factors reinforce the disordered eating default. One of those factors is the medicalization of obesity. As doctors have gotten more deeply involved and invested in diagnosing and treating weight issues, they’ve (inadvertently or not) reified the healthy/unhealthy dichotomy around food and eating. And they’ve brought their own particular set of conflicts and concerns into the conversation. It’s worth taking a look at how medicine and money have shaped our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors around food, eating, and weight.
*In her insightful book Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism, University of California–Santa Cruz professor Julie Guthman points out that Pollan’s book In Defense of Food advocates strategies like using smaller plates to trick yourself into eating less, and “reads like a diet book.” Much of Pollan’s work, she adds, seems “to suggest that if you act like him, by spending more money and time procuring, preparing, and eating food, you’ll be thin.” Which is, of course, completely untrue; I’ve never used a mix, eat few if any processed foods, cook everything from scratch, use local organic ingredients whenever possible, and have rarely in my life been thin.
*If you don’t want to wade through the whole 1,585-page study (why ever not?), check out the much more readable The Great Starvation Experiment: Ancel Keys and the Men Who Starved for Science, by Todd Tucker.
*Unfortunately, it took the therapeutic professions many decades to incorporate Keys’s findings into their understanding of eating disorders, and many therapists still resist the notion that the physiological process of starvation can affect thinking, feeling, and personality as well as physical well-being.
*French women may not get fat, but 2 percent of the French population eats at McDonald’s every day, and the fast-food chain is more profitable in France than anywhere else in Europe.
**The same manufacturers who design the foods we can’t stop eating often also produce diet foods. The Guardian’s Jacques Peretti wrote a thoughtful exposé of this mind-boggling contradiction. “The food industry has one ostensible objective—and that’s to sell food,” he wrote in 2013. “But by creating the ultimate oxymoron of diet food—something you eat to lose weight—it squared a seemingly impossible circle. And we bought it.”
*One notable exception is Michelle Allison, who practices in Canada and writes at www.fatnutritionist.com.