In the latter scenario, food is not an enemy to overcome, nor are your eating proclivities a sign of weakness. Instead, eating well is celebrated, an integral part of the fabric of a well-lived life.
If this appeals to you, here are some suggestions to support an attitude shift.
Get connected to the source of your food.
Start by buying foods that help you feel connected to their source in places that provide friendly interaction. Farmers’ markets are an ideal way to shop, providing a direct sense of where your food comes from. Many farmers’ markets also include music and other entertainment. (If you don’t know of a farmers’ market in your area, the USDA maintains a list of markets online at
www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets/map.htm
.)
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is another great option. Under this model, you “invest” in a local farm through a monthly payment, helping ensure its ability to continue producing healthy, delicious vegetables and other foods. In return, you get regular deliveries of fresh seasonal produce. You get exquisite produce, support farmers with a real commitment to the land, and often wind up paying far below retail prices. Many CSAs also provide great recipes to accompany the produce, helping you to try new seasonal foods in ways in which you may not be familiar. (LocalHarvest has a searchable online database of CSA farms at
www.localharvest.org/csa
.)
Farmers’ markets and CSAs help you get higher quality ingredients. You get fruits and vegetables bred for taste, allowed to ripen in the field, and brought directly to you. No long-distance shipping, no gassing to stimulate the ripening process, no sitting in storage for weeks. The taste difference will knock your socks off.
Learn to enjoy cooking
. Too often, preparing “real” food is viewed as drudgery, to be avoided when possible. That’s why we so often turn to processed foods. But if you approach cooking with the right attitude, you’ll find it’s not work at all, but a pleasant way to unwind after a stressful day, to exercise your creativity, to spend some quality time with friends, family—even your kids. Find a couple of cookbooks you like, subscribe to a cooking magazine, take a cooking class, or curl up and get some tips from a television chef. Before you know it, you’ll be dicing, slicing, and sautéing like a pro, creating stuff dictated by
your
tastes.
Go for variety.
Eating the same thing all the time dulls your senses. Instead, prepare a variety of foods for meals, and when you eat, don’t eat all of one thing and then all of another. Mix it up! Try exploring different cultural traditions to expand your horizons.
Enjoy food in a peaceful, loving environment.
How you respond to food is strongly influenced by the context in which you eat. And there’s no better context for eating than eating with people you love. In fact, sharing a meal is so important to Greeks that they call someone a friend by saying they have shared bread with each other. In the United States, the family dinner is one surefire way to reduce the risk that your kids will engage in risky behavior. So no matter how challenging it is to schedule it around work, sports practices, and other commitments, resolve to share meals with your family or friends. Set a ground rule: No fighting. The dinner table should be a peaceful place where everyone can connect. Conflicts can be resolved in a way that everyone feels respected. If you need some help making that happen, get it. Family should be about love and support.
It’s also a good idea to create a ritual around eating. Rituals help provide meaning to everything we do, even the ordinary. In my family, we take a few moments to let go of our day and become present with one another by holding hands and enjoying a moment of silence before eating. We use this time in whatever way we find helpful. Sometimes I do a short meditation to empty my mind, other times I focus on my appreciation for what I have, including my family and lovingly prepared food. To foster shared community, my son then asks a question that we all answer. The typical question is “What made you happy today?” We also acknowledge the food, and whoever cooked that night often talks a bit about the ingredients or preparation.
An added bonus to all this is that talking helps you eat slower, giving your hunger/satiety signals time to kick in. Which brings me to the next suggestion.
Slow down.
Eat slowly, allowing the food to mix throughout your mouth. The longer you chew, the more taste cells are exposed. As food becomes liquefied, additional molecules vaporize, increasing the aromas and helping make the flavor more intense and complex. Take a cue from a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, designed to employ all senses: Watch and listen as the tea pours, feel the heat from the cup, smell the aromas of the tea, then, finally, taste the tea.
Pay attention to presentation.
It’s no secret that how food looks affects our willingness to eat it and our enjoyment. That’s why professional chefs spend as much thought and energy on presentation as they do on preparation. So rather than just plunking down the food on plates, arrange it prettily, sit down to a table set with real cutlery and plates, maybe some flowers, and light some candles—even if it’s just a typical Tuesday night. Be particularly attentive to aromas: The cat box next to the table isn’t going to help your appetite or enjoyment.
Conclusion
The best attitude toward eating is not one of denial and restriction. The best approach is one that cultivates pleasures and honors food and the act of nourishing yourself. By becoming more attentive to and respectful of your food and the eating process, you will be drawn to more wholesome choices, learn to better appreciate the flavorful nuances of nutritious foods, and be able to better hear your body’s signals of hunger and fullness. All of which will, in turn, help you in your quest to maintain a healthy weight.
TWELVE
Solving the Weight “Problem”
Identifying the Problem
The path that eventually led to this book began with a simple question: How can I lose weight? The more I examined the science and the deeper I probed, the more I realized how misguided even my most basic assumptions about weight had been. The problem was not that my weight was too high. The problem was the assumptions I had about my weight.
Let’s face the facts.
We’ve lost the war on obesity.
Fighting fat hasn’t made the fat go away. And being thinner, even if we knew how to successfully accomplish it, will not necessarily make us healthier or happier.
The war on obesity has taken its toll. Extensive “collateral damage” has resulted: Food and body preoccupation, self-hatred, eating disorders, discrimination, poor health. . . . Few of us are at peace with our bodies, whether because we’re fat or because we fear becoming fat.
Health at Every Size is the new peace movement.
Very simply, it acknowledges that good health can best be realized independent from considerations of size. It supports people—of all sizes—in addressing health directly by adopting healthy behaviors.
The only way to solve the weight problem is to stop making weight a problem—to stop judging ourselves and others by our size. Weight is not an effective measure of attractiveness, moral character, or health. The real enemy is weight stigma, for it is the stigmatization and fear of fat that causes the damage and deflects attention from true threats to our health and well-being.
The generational increase in weight, like the generational increase in height, results from the complex interaction between our changing environment and our genes. While it’s tempting to assume that gluttony or sloth—or lack thereof—determine our weight, the evidence shows that is simply not true. An individual’s weight merely reflects his or her particular biological response to these and other lifestyle and environmental factors.
In other words, some people are genetically predisposed to store fat under current lifestyle and environmental conditions while others—the minority—are less efficient at fat storage. While research suggests that those who exercise regularly may average a few pounds less than those who don’t, other research suggests that the eating habits of the fat and thin aren’t remarkably different.
“Overweight” and “obesity” are misnomers: Many individuals with those labels are neither over an appropriate and healthy weight nor medically at risk. If we simply redefine obesity using the criterion we assign to other disease—defining it instead at the point at which it promotes disease—the epidemic would vanish.
For many individuals, “overweight” or “obesity” is benign, and perhaps even represents an effect of
improved
nutrition. For some, it is a symptom of an underlying metabolic disorder or a result of imprudent lifestyle habits. Many thin people also have an underlying disorder (such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease) or those same imprudent lifestyle habits, but are simply less genetically predisposed to weight gain.
By encouraging positive health behaviors for people of all sizes, we can address real health concerns, giving both fat and thin people the support they deserve, and avoiding stigmatizing people and worsening the problem.
Solutions
How do we shift away from a weight-centered focus and toward embracing Health at Every Size—from fighting fat to fighting stigma and celebrating body diversity?
There are no easy solutions to a problem that is so deeply cultural and institutional.
Part of the solution is to challenge the system that profits from discontent about our weight and to fix the corruption in the scientific process. The convoluted relationships between private industry, academic research, government panels and task forces, and the wider public health establishment need to be more widely acknowledged and disentangled.
Another monumental task is to address the problems posed by the industrialization of our food, which has resulted in an abundance of cheap empty-calorie ingredients (among numerous other woes), encouraging consumption of health-damaging foods. Whenever people in cultures around the world give up their traditional foods and increase their consumption of processed food and industrial meat, there is a predictable rise in “diseases of affluence” such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.
We also need to address the social inequities that make healthy habits, such as access to nutritious food, safe recreation, and the time to enjoy both, particularly challenging for those with lower income.
Next, we need to stop making weight an official concern. Health officials, researchers, physicians, dietitians: Lay off the fat people. It is time for the health-industrial complex to acknowledge that science and reason do not support the value of a weight focus. We need to practice evidence-based medicine and use it as a basis for determining public health policy.
We can support this by adding weight as a protected category under anti-discrimination laws. Fat people deserve full personhood and the right to legal protection when that personhood is denied; the high prevalence of weight-based discrimination and the lack of recourse when it occurs are simply shameful.
As important as it is for industry and government to change their attitudes toward weight and health, we can’t look exclusively to them to provide the solution for our weight woes. That profit often motivates action, that the law sometimes prohibits corporations from prioritizing health over profit, that the government has limited ability to regulate, and that context dictates the meaning of lifestyle choices (meaning that the same habits affect us differently in moderation and in excess) requires us as consumers to take responsibility for our choices.
Some of the challenges to positive health behaviors result from modern conveniences, like processed food, television, even cars. In moderation, these are valuable, yet when teamed with one another or in large doses, each makes it harder to stay fit.
As Eric Oliver points out in his smart exposè,
Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic
, this is the paradox of progress. Modern life has brought us many advantages that at the same time undermine our needs. We were supposed to be empowered by not having to cultivate our food, cook all our meals, walk to our jobs, or exhaust ourselves in taking care of daily necessities. However, as freeing as our technological advances may be, they also make us vulnerable to health concerns (and at the same time promote weight gain in those genetically predisposed).
Consequently, we have to be a bit more purposeful in maintaining our health. This is particularly challenging in that individual daily decisions may not carry much meaning—an occasional donut will have little impact on my physical health—but it is when these habits become routine or are teamed with others that they become problematic.