Before I start a range war, let me say that I love dogs and cats.  I had both growing up, and the only reason I don’t still have both is that my son is terrified of dogs.  (He’s not all that wild about the cat, but he and the cat manage some sort of detente by pretending that the other doesn’t exist.)  Plus, and this is where the eating philosophy comes in, you can leave a cat for the weekend with a bowl of food and water (and a litter box).  Not a dog.

Preying Together as a Family

In the dim reaches of their ancestral history, dogs and cats developed radically different eating styles because they had radically different hunting styles.  Canines hunt in packs.  They surround, drive, and wear down their prey until the prey are too tired to fight back or evade attack any longer.  This method allows a pack of hungry wolves to routinely bring down prey that are physically much larger than a wolf.  Once the, say, moose is brought down, it’s every wolf for himself, and the faster you can eat, the more of the moose you’ll get.  The wolves will eat until every scrap of moose is gone, then gnaw on the bones and sniff the ground hopefully for a stray moose morsel.

This behavior is still instinctive for your dog, so when you put food in his bowl, he will eat it down to the last scrap, lick the bowl, then give you the “hungry eyes” in case he can catch you in a weak moment.

(This is hugely oversimplified, because there are incredible social complexities at work, but that would take waaaaay too long to explain.  If you are inherently fascinated by the ancestral roots of your pet’s behavior, I recommend the books by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, specifically The Hidden Life of Dogs and The Tribe of Tiger.)

This behavior is still instinctive for your dog, so when you put food in his bowl, he will eat it down to the last scrap, lick the bowl, then give you the “hungry eyes” in case he can catch you in a weak moment.  If you were going away for the weekend, and you tried to leave out enough dog food for your whole trip, chances are good that your dog would eat it all, throw up, and since you’re not there to clean it up and he’s a dog, eat it again.  If he’s an older dog and his appetite isn’t what it used to be, you’ll come back to find your dog happily mesmerized by the neighborhood wildlife eating out of his bowl.  (In my neighborhood, oudoor pet dishes draw birds and squirrels by day and raccoons and possums by night.  It’s kind of a hoot to watch two raccoons sitting back on their haunches, reaching into the bowl, and snacking on kibble like they’re bored cocktail party guests around the nut bowl.)  In his mind, they’re pack members, and hey, they’ve got to eat, too.

Alone at the Top of the Food Chain

Not so the feline.  Cats hunt alone, by a combination of stealth and speed.  A cat doesn’t have to share its kill unless it’s feeding offspring or the pride leader.  (This is why your cat brings you “treats” when she hunts.  It’s a compliment.  Be polite, say thank you, and throw the lizard half or mouse parts in the trash when Kitty isn’t looking.)  As a result, cats only hunt when they’re hungry.  I spotted a feral cat hunting in my yard, which alarmed me, because I habitually put food out for birds and other wildlife, and I didn’t want to entice them into a trap.  Instead of constantly “shooing” the cat, I put out a bowl of cat kibble.  It took only two days for “Outside Kitty” to realize that food she didn’t have to chase was the way to go.  The squirrels still let me know when OK is around, but the wildlife can now feed happily within a few feet of the cat, and as long as the cat has kibble, she doesn’t bat at eyelash at the birds.

That same weekend getaway is a breeze with a cat.  Put out a demand feeder, a large bowl of water, and a litter box, and Kitty will nibble when she’s hungry, drink when she’s thirsty, then wander off for a nap, and return when she’s hungry again.  (The often solitary existence made it safer for felines to bury their scat so as not to betray their presence to enemies; canines enjoyed the safety of the pack and felt perfectly at ease pooping wherever they liked.)  You may have to put up with “drama cat” behavior or poop in punitive places when you return, but you won’t have to worry that Kitty went hungry.

The Tao of Meow

So what does this mean for us?  Somehow, we have learned to eat like dogs.  Maybe it’s instinctive famine-proofing behavior, or the result of living in extended family groups where there’s competition for the food.  Maybe it’s our mothers telling us about the starving children in impoverished countries.  Whatever caused it, we all seem to be the punch line of the “seafood diet” joke.  When we see food, we eat it.  It doesn’t matter if we’re hungry, and it often doesn’t matter if we really want it.  How many times have you taken a snack from a nut dish or candy dish, or sampled a plate of hors d’oeuvres, and eaten something that you wouldn’t have stood up and walked into the kitchen for?  If your waiter didn’t bring you chips and salsa for free when you sat down at a Mexican restaurant, would you order them and pay for them?  Probably not, yet you’ll eat until the chips are gone, and if your dinner isn’t there by that time, you’ll ask for another basket of chips.  You may have consumed a meal’s worth of calories before your meal ever arrives.

Try to start eating like a cat.  Go to where the food is only when you’re actually hungry, not bored or self-conscious.  (If you’re at a cocktail party and you have a drink or a plate of canapés in your hand, you look occupied, and your hands are busy.)  Put away nut bowls and candy dishes.  Put the cookie jar on the highest shelf where it’s hopefully “out of sight, out of mind” and at worst, you’ll have to expend some effort and climb for it.  If your house is like mine, the kitchen is smack in the middle of where most of the living goes on (the laptop I’m typing on is on the breakfast table), so make sure actual edibles are put behind closed, non-see-through doors.

If you find yourself accidentally where the food is, try to think about reaching out for that tidbit you don’t want with your cat claws out.  Imagine retracting your claws before you do any damage.  Better yet, imagine trying to fit into one of those skin-tight catsuits that get inflicted on every actress unfortunate enough to be cast as Catwoman.  If you need a fun reminder, pick up one of the gazillion bracelets the Hello Kitty folks are licensing, like this one, and wear it on whichever hand you use to reach for snacks.

Unless you were raised in the workhouse with Oliver Twist, you have probably never been in a situation where you had to gobble down food before someone took it away from you.  Eating is not a race (and do not get me started on what I think of “competitive eating”–how many kinds of wrong is that?).  The more slowly and selectively you eat, the more time your brain has to tell your stomach (and your hand) that you don’t truly want another tempura shrimp or bite of fondue.  Be choosy.  Eat like a cat.  You don’t want to be a dog, do you?

 

Okay, I want to catch you before it gets close to New Year’s and you resolve to go out and buy lemon juice, cayenne pepper, or a bottle of Master Colon Wash, or worse, pay someone at a spa to starve and torture you.  There is NO evidence that any detox diet does a better job of cleaning out your body than it’s already doing.  Zero.  Zip.  Nada.  No doctor will suggest you starve and then gulp down laxatives, unless you’re having a medical exam.  I was a little alarmed when I saw that “Doctor Oz” was touting a “detox diet,” but it turns out that his idea of a detox diet is to stop eating potato chips and fast food, and start eating more broccoli.  I’m okay with that.

And colonics.  The mind reels.  I recently reached that age where my doctor suggested that I experience the joy and wonder of my first colonoscopy.  I dutifully got my enormous bucket of GoLikeMad (just add water, sugar-free lemonade, and a clear path to the nearest toilet), and I promise you, there was less than nothing left in my colon after that (and scarily enough, I have the pictures to prove it).  I’m happy to say that my innards are free of suspicious bits, and even happier to say that means I don’t have to have another colonoscopy for ten years.  It boggles my mind that healthy people pay to have this done to them, just because they feel a little bloaty.  You’d have to pay me to go through that again without a good reason.  And I’m talking diamonds and convertibles kind of pay.

The Ins and Outs of Environmental Toxins

First off, the world is not nearly as full of toxins as doomsayers would have you believe.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some scary things out there, but your skin keeps out most bad stuff, so we only have to worry about the stuff that we purposefully ingest.  And yippy skippy, our fabulous bodies generally know how to deal.  I grew up in the Los Angeles basin, and during the summer I practically lived in my swimming pool.  Between breathing the smog, and inhaling enough chlorine fumes to prompt an EPA investigation, I could barely draw breath by the end of the afternoon, and it hurt like crazy.  Yet somehow, when I woke up in the morning, my lungs were clear and happy, and out I went to spend another carefree day filling them with poison.  (And my lung function is fine, thanks for asking.)

Unless you live someplace like Bangladesh, where they’re currently having an arsenic crisis, your water is likely clean.  I drink mostly bottled water for taste reasons, not because I think my tap water is dangerous.  Ditto your food supply.  For the sheer volume of food produced and consumed in this country, disease outbreaks and recalls of tainted food are extremely rare.  If you are concerned with food safety, the time to do something about it is before it goes into your mouth.  Patronize local farmers’ markets and stores that carry local produce.  Carefully wash produce before eating it.  It’s better to put good stuff in than try to torture yourself thinking you can get bad stuff out faster.  At some point in your life, you probably will ingest something harmful, but if, like me, you’ve ever had food poisoning, you know how good your body is at getting rid of something it has determined is bad for you.

You are detoxing, 24/7.  Your circulatory system, working with your liver, kidneys, and GI tract, are hard at work, waking or sleeping, regulating everything your body needs and jettisoning everything it doesn’t.  Some things don’t wash out very easily, so your body locks them away in your liver in places so inaccessible it would put that warehouse with the Ark of the Covenant to shame, or “dead” tissue like your hair and fingernails (hence the whole “bald Britney” episode).  If any of the so-called “liver cleanse” programs or products actually could force your liver to give up everything it had tucked away, it would probably kill you.  Even the beneficial things stored in the liver, like Vitamin A, are toxic when taken too much at a time.  If you’ve truly been exposed to something that needs to be forcibly removed from your body, it will probably require chelation or plasmapheresis, in a hospital, surrounded by doctors.  Spicy lemonade will not cut it.

Avoiding Firebomb Solutions to Matchstick Problems

Drinking water is good for you, but too much, even of water, will damage or kill you.  Too little iron?  Anemia.  Too much? Iron poisoning.  Too little food?  Starvation.  Too much?  Obesity-related illness.  Most things we put in our bodies are needed in particular amounts, and too much or too little is a problem.  Happily, our bodies have been forged in the fire of plagues, famines, unsanitary conditions, and outright stupidity to the point that you really have to work at damaging your body beyond its ability to heal.  The species would have been gone a long time ago if we couldn’t tolerate eating stuff that is not exactly optimally healthy.  Or even food.  Ask the mother of a small child how much dirt her kid has eaten.

So if you’re feeling like your engine isn’t running on all cylinders, here’s what you do.  Drink a glass of water, eat a salad, and walk around the block.  Resolve for a week to eat nothing from a fast food place and to get 8 hours of sleep every night.  If you’re really determined, avoid alcohol and caffeine for the week.  By the end of it, you will be every bit as cleansed as you would have been on a detox diet, and you won’t have a sore throat, a chapped backside, or a vitamin deficiency.  You might feel so good that you’ll make it a habit.

So, here we sit in the aftermath of our annual festival of gluttony, dreading getting on that bathroom scale.  That’s okay.  Never weigh yourself over the Thanksgiving weekend.  If you did commit an atrocity against your diet, there’s every possibility that you woke up the next day feeling bloated and awful to the point where you ate sparingly, if at all.  You probably also spent Thanksgiving sitting for long periods at the table, and later on the couch for conversation or football, so you woke up the next day with your body screaming at you to get out and move it.  Bodies are smart.  If only we listened to them more.

I was talking last night to a friend who has struggled with his weight over the past few years, but now has it under control.  We were discussing where our “line in the sand” is, namely, the weight that tells us it is time to stop eating and get our sorry butt some exercise until the scale shows us a lower number.  He said he weighs himself every day, sometimes more than once per day, to make sure he doesn’t cross the line.  I wished him a pleasant journey on his one-way trip to Neurosis City.

The Line You Won’t Cross

I absolutely believe we should all have a line in the sand.  For me, it’s my post-baby weight, which is the most I’ve ever weighed without having another person inside me.  When the number on the scale gets too close to the LITS number, it’s salads, cottage cheese, and daily exercise until that number drops by five pounds, then light-normal eating, yogurt for dessert, and every-other-day exercise until it drops by another five pounds.  If it went on fast, it will probably come off fast, because your body hasn’t yet had a chance to deposit those extra calories in long-term fat storage, so if you limit your intake and increase your energy requirements, your body should happily burn off that stuffing and pie.  The longer you put it off, the longer it will take to lose, because once you’ve added fat cells, your body really doesn’t want to let go without extraordinary efforts. 

 It’s (she says again) like your credit card debt.  Pay it off before the end of the month, and it’s a free one-payday advance; wait until January, and there’s interest added.  If you wait until after the holidays and make getting the weight off your New Year’s resolution, it could take twice as long as it would have if you’d just eaten sparingly during the week for the first couple weeks of December (you can wait until the leftovers are gone, but then, it’s time for the austerity plan).  And unless you live in a ski resort town (or Australia), January is already going to be miserable enough without having to live on lettuce and rice cakes while frowning at the bad weather.

What I don’t advise is weighing yourself daily.  We have eating patterns, and they pretty much follow our normal weekly schedule.  I know that I am more likely to go out with friends or make special meals for my family on the weekend, then eat lightly during the week.  So I weigh myself on Friday morning.  I doubtless took in extra calories over the past weekend, but fewer during the past week, so by Friday I’ve compensated for the previous weekend’s overages.  If you have to take clients to lunch during the week, but you go hiking on the weekends, you’ll have the opposite schedule; weigh yourself Monday morning, and you’ll know if the extra calories you burned over the weekend made up for the two-martini lunches the previous week.

If you weighed yourself every waking hour of every day for a week, you’d be astounded at how much your weight fluctuates based on when you go to the bathroom, how hydrated you are, whether you’ve been active or sedentary, and a host of other factors.  And that’s not even talking about the joy and wonder of what time of the month it is.  So I may step on the scale just because it’s there during the week, but the only number I pay attention to is the Friday morning number (but not this week!).  I know my weight can vary by several pounds and still not mean a thing, so panicking over “where did those two pounds come from?” is pointless.

Middle Management

I also have another LITS number– my waist measurement.  The negative impact on your health of carrying weight around your middle is pretty well established, so once a month, I check the tale of the tape.  The scientific data shows the general LITS number for women as 35 inches, but when mine hits 34, I know I’ve been sitting too long and it’s time to shake my booty along with everything else.  If you’re currently on a weight-loss program, you should absolutely be tracking your waist measurement as well as your weight, because often when you hit a weight plateau, your body is still making positive changes.  My husband has been working to get some weight off and reduce his “love handles,” and every time he starts to get discouraged because he hasn’t lost any weight for a couple of weeks, we’ll measure his waist and it will be another inch down.  He’s only lost about ten pounds since August, but he’s taken over four inches off his waist (and his blood test numbers have improved significantly).

Knowledge is power.  But it has to be meaningful knowledge, otherwise it’s just noise.  If you try to react to every little weight shift, you’ll make yourself crazy and accomplish nothing.  On the other hand, if you don’t establish some benchmark of where you should be (or where you want to be), you’ll go too long before you notice that your clothes don’t fit, and your road back (or forward) will be harder than it needs to be.  Pick up a good digital scale (so you can’t pretend to misread the dial) and a tape measure.  If you’re trying to lose rather than maintain, jot your numbers down on a calendar so you can track your progress.  Otherwise, know your LITS numbers and check in on them regularly, on a schedule that reflects your normal routine.  And act when the numbers tell you to act, not at some promised future date, or you’ll find that the line in the sand is so far down the beach behind you that you can’t even see it anymore.

As the Krispy Kreme donut is to your diet, so the merchandise liquidator is to your budget.  These are stores that, rather than carrying a well-researched line of merchandise you’ll want and use, carry whatever they can get cheaply and unload to you quickly at a low price.  From the low-end Dollar Store, Dollar General, Poundland, etc. to warehouse wonderlands like Dirt Cheap, Treasure Hunt, Big Lots, etc., merchandise liquidators are out to make you an offer you can’t refuse.  And if things go well (for them), they’ll end up with your money and you’ll end up with a bunch of stuff, some of which you might actually want, and some of which will make you scratch your head and wonder what you were thinking.

I’ll tell you what you were thinking– you weren’t.  The industry relies on it.  Check out this website for a company that sells to liquidator chains.  Note the sentence, “Studies have demonstrated that items that have a retail of $20.00 or lower and that are considered functional, decorative or gift related, often appeal to Impulse Buyers.”  They have done extensive market research and concluded, rightly in many cases, that as long as it’s under $20 they can sell you almost anything that isn’t outright garbage.  If it’s more than $20, your brain will kick in and think, do I really want this?  Under $20, the “ooh, shiny” hits your animal brain and you rush like a magpie to take your treasure home.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t take many under-$20 bargains to run into serious money.

Portion Control For Impulse Buying

Now, just like I freely admit that I occasionally patronize my local Krispy Kreme, I also admit that I have spent many happy hours in Dirt Cheap stores.  I have some killer deals to show for it.  But I go in recognizing it for the potential mine field it is, armed with some questions:

“IS this a bargain?  Would I cheerfully pay twice as much for this?”
“Do I know right now where this is going (e.g., Mary will love this as her birthday gift, These shoes will be so cute with my little black dress, This is exactly what I’ve been looking for as a bedspread for the guest room, etc.)?”
“Will I be kicking myself tomorrow when I come back for this and it’s gone?”

If you can answer “yes” to all questions, it’s unlikely to be a purchase you’ll regret.  You should also go in with a hard budget, because five $10 deals still add up to $50.  Figure out ahead of time how much you can afford to spend, and prioritize your “deals” accordingly.

Between sales, discount chains like Walmart, and merchandise liquidators, we’ve become alarmingly unaware of what the stuff we buy is worth.  That allows liquidators to mix some low-end merchandise in with the bargains and maximize their profits.  Everything might be $10, but some of that $10 merchandise is worth $50, some of it is worth $10, and some is worth $5.  And unless you learn to look past the price to the actual worth, you may walk out of the uber-discount place having spent a fortune and saved precisely nothing.

Quality Before Price

My mother always said, “Buy the best quality you can afford, and then take good care of it.”  If you want a fun tee to wear to hand out Halloween candy (and possibly never again), by all means, buy it for $9.99 at Walmart.   If it’s going to be a staple of your wardrobe, you might want to learn what high-quality cotton feels like and what high-quality stitching looks like (go into a high-end store and handle the goods, even if you don’t intend to buy anything).  Otherwise, you’ll say bad words every time you wash the T-shirt, go to fold it, and realize that the seams no longer line up because the cheap fabric was stretched during manufacture.  Eventually, you’ll just throw it out and replace it, and if you don’t replace it with something of higher quality, you’ll start the cycle again.  Spend a little more for something that is worth a little more, and you’ll have a garment you’ll enjoy for years.  Concentrate on wardrobe basics that won’t go out of style quickly–solid tees, tailored shirts, silk blouses, basic jeans, slacks, blazers, coats.  If it’s this season’s must-have novelty item (and you must have it), get it as cheaply as you can, because the odds that you’ll be wearing it beyond a few months are low.

The same thing is true for your home items.  I still have the Sunbeam mixer my mother bought in the 50s, so when I bought my first mixer, I bought a Sunbeam.  After not one but two Sunbeams had burned out motors on me (I use my mixer a lot), I was forced to conclude that “they weren’t makin’ ’em like they used to” and I bit the bullet and bought a KitchenAid, which has given me hundreds of hours of trouble-free service.  It cost three times what the Sunbeam cost, but by now I figure I’d be on my eighth or ninth Sunbeam, so I’m actually still ahead with the higher-quality purchase.

By all means, try to make your best deal on the items you truly want and need.  If you’re flexible about, say, color, you can go to your local car dealership and ask to see what the dealers are driving; buy a dealer model and even if he’s only driven it off the lot once, they have to sell it as dealer-used.  Dealer’s cars are usually fully-loaded, and normally still under full “new” factory warranty, but thousands of dollars cheaper than the cars that haven’t left the lot.  It’s a good way to get more car for less money.  Don’t ever spend more than you have to, but never be afraid to spend a little more to get a lot more quality.  No matter how cheap “cheap” is, three times “cheap” is usually still more than one times “nice,” and not nearly as satisfying.

 

I have a good friend with whom I used to go to lunch often.  We both worked in Downtown Highrise Hell, and when one of us was having a bad day, we’d call the other one and give the code word that meant, “Horrible morning– must have alcohol, gripe time, and retail therapy.”  We eventually decided that though the alcohol and gripe time was sometimes a necessity (as a socially acceptable alternative to homicide), we needed to either stop the shopping or start looking for divorce attorneys.

What was wrong with shopping together?  Almost everything.  First, we’d usually had cocktails, so our critical reasoning was a little less sharp than it might have been.  Second, we’d spent our lunch conversation being supportive of one another, as in,  “I don’t know how you put up with those people, you deserve to be treated so much better.”  Take a little righteous indignation and a sympathetic girlfriend shopping, and between the three of you, you’ll decide that you need, want, and above all, deserve that designer gown that costs an entire paycheck.

Enter QVC, the Home Shopping Network, and all those other channels whose sole goal in life is to separate you from as much of your money as possible.  You know it’s a bad idea, right?  Like eating a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts by yourself?  But you still can’t fight it?  There’s help.  Let’s look at some of the techniques they’re using to short-circuit your common sense, so maybe you’ll spot them in the future…

Friends: 

Notice how there’s rarely one person selling you someone?  Usually two?  This serves a couple of functions.  First, it puts you in a “just friends having a chat” mindset instead of one where you might actually evaluate their statements for content.  Second, and more importantly, it allows them to sneak in phrases like, “That’s right” and, “I know” until you begin to feel out-of-touch if you don’t agree with their opinions.  Sad as it sounds, no matter how ugly that piece of jewelry is, if they hammer at you for ten minutes gushing, “Isn’t it beautiful?”  “I know, have you ever seen anything like it?  I bet it’s going to be very popular!”  “That’s right, <number in the hundreds> people have already called in!” you are going to question your own taste before you question theirs.  It’s brainwashing.  It’s all the worst things about shopping with a friend without the one good thing, that your actual friend doesn’t get paid to make you spend money.

Experts: 

Depending on what’s being sold, they may interview “experts” to assure you that you are placing your health and your family’s at risk unless you buy <X> immediately.  Infomercials take this to the extreme by designing a set to look like a news program so you’ll unconsciously accept that the content is non-fiction.  Katie Couric wouldn’t lie.

Adrenaline rush: 

People who audition for shopping networks don’t have to know a thing about the product (in fact, it’s often better if they don’t, so they can be astonished by the presenter), but they must have one skill– the ability to NEVER stop talking.  Silence will literally never fall.  If it looks like the host is about to pass out from lack of oxygen, the presenter will jump in over the host’s patter with the next amazing feature of the product.  This creates a “runaway train” feel that has been successful for centuries in allowing auctioneers to get people to pay too much for an item.  You don’t want to fall off the train, and you don’t want to get left behind.  It gets worse near the end of a presentation segment where they actually put a countdown clock on the screen to let you know how quickly TIME IS RUNNING OUT.  This is also where they’ll stick in the helpful suggestion that this would make a perfect gift, so you should buy several.  They know that you have totally abandoned reason by this point, so if they suggest you get an extra set of steak knives to use as lawn ornaments, you won’t hesitate.

False scarcity: 

You have to buy NOW because we only have a few, the mold is being retired, she’s not going to make any more for at least two years, this payment plan is only available for the next ten minutes.  It’s absolutely critical that they convince you to buy it now, because if you don’t, you might go online and discover that there are hundreds of them available for cheaper.  Or worse, you may take a breath and decide you don’t really need a sterling silver eyeball after all (I’m not kidding, a sterling silver eyeball).

If you can’t break the home-shopping viewing habit, get some real value from it.  Invite some friends over and turn it into a drinking game or QVC Bingo.  Take one drink or cover a square every time you hear one of these phrases:

“One-time only”
“Oh my gosh/goodness”
“Have you ever seen”
“We have never before”
“It’s unbelievable”
“What you get/you also get”
“Only <number less than 10> left”

Cover center square or take two drinks for “SOLD OUT.”  You’ll enjoy it just as much, and you will have more money (and less junk) to show for it.

I can remember, many years ago when it was age-appropriate, reading an article in Seventeen Magazine.  It was memorable, I suppose, because it was the first time I recall feeling a sense of outrage at the less-than-subtle suggestion that I wasn’t good enough because I didn’t look like the model on the magazine cover.  I had been through a doughy phase at around 13-14, but I was back to a normal weight by 16.  But still, I was a 16-year-old girl.

The article directed, “Stand in front of a full-length mirror naked.  Frankly assess any less-than-perfect parts.”  Excuse me?  Did you just, actually, advise an entire class of the most obsessed-and-critical-of-their-bodies humans (teenage girls) to scrutinize every inch of those bodies, and judge them against a standard of perfection?  Is this the article that launched a thousand eating disorders?

The Relentless Message That You’re Not Thin Enough

With a few well-meaning hiccups like the “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty” and Tyra Banks’ complaint that even her thighs had been airbrushed smaller for an ad, the media has been presenting us with unrealistic “standard” images for decades.  It is incredibly ironic that the web address campaignforrealbeauty.com has been abandoned by the Dove folks and purchased by, you guessed it, a weight loss program.  Sigh.

I’m not the first to point out that equating skinny with beautiful is a 20th-century concept.  The painting above, Rubens’ Venus at the Mirror (1615), shows a vastly different standard of feminine perfection.  Now I admit, Rubens was famous for liking some meat on his women, but art pretty much up to the 20th century depicted nude women as anything but skinny.  The damsel in Millais’ Knight Errant (1870), below, looks a lot like me.  A LOT.  In fact, only the sure and certain knowledge that I was not alive in 1870 assures me that I didn’t have one too many and pose for it in a weak moment.

Somewhere between about 1910, when women had chucked their corsets and bustles and remembered what their bodies actually looked like, and the deprivations of the First World War and the 1918 Flu pandemic, women just got skinnier.  Then the fashion houses started designing for that shape, and the new Hollywood cultural machine made it the look.  And we, unfortunately, have never looked back.

The thing I find oddest in today’s world is the idea of implants.   Butts and boobs are made almost entirely of fat, so women who starve themselves down to a size zero find that they no longer look like women.  But instead of embracing the bean-pole look like our flapper forebears did, they have surgeons stick bags of fluid inside them to put back the lumps they dieted off.  C’mon girls, eat a cookie and save yourself $15,000 and the risks of general anesthesia.   Sheesh.

A New Message

So here’s my anti-Seventeen suggestion.  After a nice, relaxing hot bath or shower, towel off and look at yourself in a full-length mirror naked.  Not bad, huh?  A lot of us forget that the rolls we notice and get depressed about when we undress at night are created or at least enhanced by the elastic in our bras and panties and the waistbands  in our clothes and pantyhose.  (Don’t get me started about those hideous sports bras and spandex cycle shorts The Biggest Loser has the women wear at weigh-ins.)  The rope around the waist of the bound damsel is definitely accentuating her tummy pooch.  (That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.)  Give your body a chance to erase those “squish” lines and you may find that you don’t look nearly as bad naked as you might have thought.  Consult your significant other– it might lead to an interesting evening.

If you look in the mirror and your first thought is still “Michelin Man,” it’s time to talk to your doctor.  Studies continue to support the idea that carrying weight around your waist is an indicator for serious health problems.  I know I am fortunate that owing to a certain Latin heritage, I put most of my excess weight in my rear (where happily, I don’t have to look at it very often).  If you wear yours like an inner tube, you need to “woman up” and address it.  Your doctor is the place to start; you may end up with a diet and exercise program, but there may be thyroid or other endocrine issues in play.  Healthy first, shapely second.

“Perfect” has always been, and always will be, an unattainable standard.  Not only does it change with the fashion of the day, but with the advent of PhotoShop, Perfect is now more than ever something completely unreal.  Until some Matrix-esque future time when we’re all just lumps in a tube and our body images are avatars programmed inside a computer, we can’t look however we imagine.  So it’s time we approach our naked selves not from the “God, my thighs are huge” end of the ratings continuum, but from the “If I were a guy, I’d tap that” end.  Men are remarkably uncritical when presented with a slightly damp naked woman, and it’s about time we were, too.

 

Can someone explain to me what the heck a meal replacement is?  Who came up with this nom de cuisine?  There’s now an entire class of food items which, as far as I can tell, are simply food that you eat in place of other food.  Isn’t that called a choice?

No, I get it, really.  It’s a marketing technique for making you feel better about paying three times as much as it’s obviously worth for a canned shake or chewy bar, just because someone tossed a little protein powder and bran in it and told you that you could eat in in place of a presumably higher-calorie meal.  I bet if I put a Snickers bar under a heat lamp and melted the chocolate on the top just a bit, I could sprinkle on some bran and have something much better tasting (I don’t really need the protein powder because, hey, it’s already got peanuts in it).  I’d probably be happier skipping lunch in favor of something I truly enjoyed.

Chocolate-Covered Sawdust is Still Sawdust

Ever since the introduction of Metrecal in 1959, various companies have been offering pre-packaged solutions to your diet dilemma.  They all try to convince you that their product will satisfy you enough to skip breakfast or lunch, and those pounds will just magically fall off as you substitute a 200-or-less calorie bar or shake for a 600 calorie meal.  Nice theory.  Sadly, reality follows a different script.

In the first place, there’s a volume problem here.  If you have been accustomed to having two eggs, toast, and hash browns every morning and a burger, fries, and a shake at lunch, you have trained your stomach to expect a pretty large volume of food.  I don’t care what super-secret patented blend of protein and fiber is on offer from your magic bar;  it’s going into your stomach, and your stomach is going to say, “Where’s the REST OF IT?”  Oh, of course, the directions on the label say “Be sure to drink a full glass of water with this product.”  Yeah, that’s going to make all the difference.  How about starting out with one egg and no hash browns, and skip the fries at lunch.  You might be able to do that.

Secondly, everybody’s metabolism sings its own tune.  Eating protein for me is like holding a match to the newspaper of my hunger.  In less than two hours, I am going to be ravenous and looking for anything to shove in my mouth.  On the other hand, if I have a cookie, or for that matter, nothing, I’ll probably work through lunchtime without even knowing it, feeling not the slightest pang.  Experiment for yourself.  Next week, try having your coffee or tea in the morning and on Monday, have nothing else.  On Tuesday, have an egg; Wednesday, a high-protein cereal, Thursday, whole grain cereal or toast, and on Friday, some really sugary cereal or donut.  See when you feel hungry, and what your energy level is like.  You’ll probably find that one or two of the choices make your body a lot happier than the others, but nobody can tell you which ones are going to work for you.

Take Time Instead of Calories

Finally, mealtime, especially lunchtime, is more than just calorie intake.  If you work in an office and can’t see out a window, lunch may be your only chance to see the sun.  You can get away from intercoms and ringing phones.  You can window shop, read a book for fun, or talk to people about something other than work.  If you approach your lunch as a little vacation and soul-recharge time, you may find you don’t even care if you eat.  Want to feel even more virtuous?  Take a power walk, or hit the gym– how’s that for a meal replacement?

As I mentioned in If It’s Not Delicious, a fully-grown adult has very modest protein needs, and excess protein will make you fat just like any other nutrient.  If you aren’t truly hungry, there’s no reason to ingest a bar or shake because a clock says it’s a time when a lot of people are eating.  If you just want a snack, a candy bar is no worse for a healthy person than a protein bar, and fresh fruit is better than either of them.  And which would you rather have?  And a container of yogurt, even the yummy faux-dessert yogurts out there, is at least a real food, and not some scary franken-shake that probably contains ingredients you can neither identify nor pronounce.  Forget the meal replacements and go back to having snacks like you did as a kid.  You’ll take in fewer calories in the long run.

I have enough elderly relatives to know that supplement products like Ensure do a great service.  If you’re losing weight and becoming vitamin deficient because your appetite isn’t what it used to be, you’re probably not taking in enough calories at the meals you are eating, so replacing a meal is the worst possible idea.  But drinking or eating a supplement in addition to those meals is an efficient way to increase your calorie total.  So if your goal is to gain weight, a supplement might be a good idea.  But if you’re trying to lose weight, stick to real food with ingredients you can see, understand and control.  And eat, whether meal or snack, when you’re hungry, not when it’s time.  Maybe what you really need to replace is your schedule.

Consider this essay as “Garbage Disposal Behavior, Part Deux.”  In that essay, I cautioned against eating those last few leftovers rather than throwing them away or putting them away.  Now I want to shift the question– rather than “Should I take this last bite?” I want you to ask yourself, “Should I take this first bite?”

If you are a fully grown adult in reasonably good health, and you are not currently training for a marathon or attempting to build muscle mass for another athletic endeavor, your nutritional needs are pretty limited, especially when it comes to protein.  Once you have covered some minimal metabolic levels of essential amino acids and electrolytes, your body is just looking for energy, and for that it wants carbohydrates and fats.  Consider that people are sometimes kept alive for years on intravenous feeding, and the typical “recipe” for that diet is a portion of amino acids, an equal or larger portion of fats, and a triple portion (or more) of sugar.  (If you’re interested in this topic, search for “parenteral nutrition,” but if you don’t have a science background, your eyes are going to glaze over pretty fast.)

Does this mean I’m advocating a diet of 100% ice cream sundaes?  Of course not.  If you even think you could eat nothing but ice cream, try it.  I’m betting you don’t make it 48 hours before you’re craving a salad like you never have before.  Your body, and even your taste buds, are smarter than you think.  But beyond our basic metabolic needs, there isn’t really inherently good food and bad food.  There’s just food.  So maybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with that food.

Eating As a Sensual Pleasure

Many health professionals would like to get us to think about eating only to fuel our bodies, but they’re going to have about as much success as trying to get people to think about having sex only to make babies.  The truth is that we eat for pleasure.  Unfortunately, a lot of us are doing both, eating what we think we should eat AND eating what we want to eat.  You just don’t have the calories to spare for both.  Eating a spinach salad does not cancel out the Snickers bar, it just adds on (and if you had the hard-cooked eggs and bacon dressing on the salad, you were better off with the Snickers bar).  Are you eating soggy cereal because you’ve bought that whole “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” malarkey?  If it’s so important, why aren’t you eating something you’d enjoy?

Before the first bite goes in your mouth, ask yourself why you are eating it.  If the answer is something like, “I’m supposed to,” “It’s good for me,” or “It’s lunch time,” just stop.  (The exception here is water, water, water.  Nothing in your body runs properly without enough water.  Even if you don’t want it, drink it.)  If the answer is “I want it,” take a bite.  If it isn’t as good as you thought it would be, stop.  If it’s fabulous, take another bite.  Continue taking bites as long as you can truly say “This is fabulous” while it’s in your mouth.  When you can’t any longer, you’ve probably had enough.  Stop.  And don’t be afraid to spit something out into your napkin, even in public.  I do it all the time with candy from unmarked boxes.  Why would I go ahead and swallow 90-100 calories’ worth of rum-flavored soft center when I hate it?

You’ll find your portions, especially of very fatty foods, are going to get smaller and smaller.  Deep fried goodies are truly only wonderful within a few minutes of coming out of the fat, and they only stay that way while they are piping hot.  If the first french fry is great, eat it.  If the fifth one is cold and soggy, why would you eat it?  You’ll also find that you stop eating fried things that other people have gone out and picked up; the chance of it still being delicious by the time it gets to you is almost nil.  Fat, especially saturated fat, is “juicy” when it’s hot and fresh but turns “greasy” very quickly.  The same thing will be true of sweet desserts.  If the first bite is Heaven, great, but a little may go a long way.  If bite #4 is less than the bliss you got on the first bite, let it be your last one.

Rethink Yummy

You’ll also find that the more time you spend thinking about each bite, the more slowly you’ll eat, and the more time your brain will have to tell your stomach you’ve had enough.  Are you going to waste a lot of food?  Yep, especially until you learn to order based on what you want rather than on what you have customarily been served.  But consider it an object lesson.  Maybe you need the visual of throwing away plates of food to realize how much you’ve been eating that you neither wanted nor enjoyed.

If you honestly consult your taste buds for the “fabulous” entries and you can only think about desserts, it’s time for some research.  Try sushi, hit a tapas restaurant or someplace that will let you put together a plate of appetizer portions and see if there aren’t some little protein gems that you find fabulous.  Try interesting canapé recipes.   Experiment with new fruits and vegetables, and try a variety of salad dressings until you find one (or more) that makes you love every bite of that salad.  (My current favorites are Newman’s Own Light Lime Vinaigrette and Annie’s Naturals Gingerly Vinaigrette; they also make awesome marinades for chicken and pork, respectively.)  I happen to like cottage cheese, but when I treat it like dip and eat it with a flavor-packed cracker (my current favorite is Triscuit Cracked Pepper and Olive Oil), I love it.

If you are truly concerned that you are missing nutrients, take a multi-vitamin (it wouldn’t hurt even if you aren’t concerned).  If you have any diet-related health concerns, especially diabetic or glycemic problems, of course you have to eat within your doctor’s recommendations.  Your doctor will tell you what you can’t have, but be sure to ask what you can have, and you may find a way to work your favorite flavors into the medically-approved plan.  Make some new food relationships, and you may just find love after all.

Okay, I’m talking to the Moms out there, as well as those of you who eat mostly “meals for one”.  Take this one-question quiz:  When you have eaten enough to feel satisfied, and you notice that there is less than a cup or so left of whatever you ate, do you, A, carefully put it away in your refrigerator, B, throw it in the garbage disposal, or C, eat it?

I get it.  My mother was a child of the Depression, and she never threw anything away.  We had drawers full of paper clips, because she picked them up off the ground (“Look at that, somebody dropped a perfectly good paper clip and just left it!”).  I’m pretty sure she had grocery-store bags dating from the Carter administration.  I was raised on the adage, “As soon as you throw it away, you’ll need it,” as well as all those guilt-laden stories about starving children in impoverished countries.  I was trained not to throw “good food” away (or much of anything else).  Of course, I was also trained to clean out the refrigerator when those valuable leftovers became frightening science experiments, but our virtue was safe, because we didn’t throw the food away until it was bad.

On the other hand, it’s a lot of trouble to get out foil or a plastic container and put away a little bit of something, but you can hear your mother or grandmother delivering a lecture on waste inside your head, so rather than appear wasteful or admit you’re too tired or lazy to put away leftovers, you just eat them.  You take in calories from food you didn’t need, and didn’t really want.  Congratulations, you have successfully turned yourself into a garbage disposal.

Waste Not, Want Not, Whoa!

You know they belong in the garbage disposal.  You know that even if you put them carefully away, unless you make a plan for how you’re going to use them up, they’re going to turn colors and end up in the garbage disposal, hopefully before they achieve consciousness.  But somehow it seems evil to put them in the garbage disposal while they are edible.  Besides, we were trained to “clean our plates” and we got in trouble if we slipped some of it under a napkin, even if it was peas.  (My husband used to put his peas in his pockets, which was slightly more virtuous than his brother, who threw his behind the refrigerator.  Needless to say, I rarely serve peas.)

Let’s step out of our own kitchens for a minute and think about eating at a restaurant.  Answer the same question, do you clean your plate out of childhood habit, do you ask for a box, or do you let them take some of the food away to their garbage disposal?  One of the reasons Americans are getting fatter so quickly is that restaurant portions have grown to ridiculous amounts.  I have taken to ordering in most places with a mind to taking home fully half of what I’m served, unless they are flexible enough to serve me an appetizer portion as my entree.  (If I play my cards right at my favorite steak house, I can eat dinner and take home tomorrow’s breakfast and lunch, and sometimes dinner.)  Most people will ask for a box, which will likely suffer the same fate as most leftovers in your frig, and that’s assuming they make it home.  Ask the manager at your favorite restaurant how many boxes of leftovers they throw away because the patron left it on the table.  (It’s a lot.)  Most people who don’t ask for a box will leave some food on their plate.  Often, it’s the automatic sides, like the rice and beans at a Mexican restaurant.  You didn’t order it specifically, and you didn’t really want it, so it’s somehow okay to let it get thrown away.  Maybe it’s like peas.

One of the cardinal rules of weight control is to stop eating when you feel satisfied.  I actually enjoy finding creative ways to use up leftovers (check the Recipe tab for some of them!), but if you don’t, then skip the fuzzy mystery stage and just give yourself permission to throw the leftovers away.  And above all, do not treat yourself like a garbage disposal.  You are worth so much more than 49 cents worth of pasta, and sticking to your eating plan is a virtue in itself.  Yes, food is going to waste.  But at least it’s not going to waist.