Body 01 Jun 2010 03:29 pm
Why it’s the Stick’n'Twig Diet
There were some fabulous comments in reply to that last post, but I especially wanted to give time to Carol’s, because what she said stuck with me all day yesterday.
I’ve been calling this thing the Stick’n'Twig Diet in part just because I’m the sort of person who likes that kind of sarcasm, but also in large part as my secret homage to Tom, Josh’s late uncle. I’m sorry I never got to meet Tom, because from all I’ve heard, we would have gotten along like a house afire. Tom had an advanced case of some kind of cardiovascular disease and managed to control it astoundingly well through what I think was probably the Ornish diet. He wound up living several years longer than was predicted. The diet he was on was tough; sticking to it took a whole lot of discipline on his part. I admire his gumption and hope to emulate it, even while working within to a plan that is much less restrictive.
It’s also the “Stick’n'Twig Diet” because I chafe at some of the happy-clappy talk I’ve come across in regards to eating — you know, the sort of language you might come across in magazines aimed at an “Eat Pray Love” kind of audience. (Always with, “It’s not a diet!!” *twinkle* *sparkle* “It’s a way of life!!”) This not-a-diet diet culture bugs me. That stuff reads to me much like virtue language, which I grew up with and learned to thoroughly loathe. You know: good food! bad food! sin! guilt! woe! Except now it acquires a sort of psychobabble/enlightenment overlay. You know, I’m just losing weight. It isn’t a journey into wholeness. I was plenty whole to begin with.
I have to say, it also annoys me when I read, “You know, all that weight didn’t go on in a matter of weeks!!” Yeah, uh, thanks for the reminder that it’ll take a while to take it all off, but in my case, yeah, it kinda did. Triple irritation points if this is couched in language that implies that I have had a life of sinning but, if I am willing to devote my life to reverent obedience to the wisdom of my nutrition guru, I can be redeemed. Ugh. Ugh.
More subtly, I feel that I’d be selling myself a bit short if I started in on how I was adopting a whole new lifestyle. Not to blow my own horn, but — oh what the hell: my natural eating has been brilliant. Yeah, I had my mild fluctuations within roughly a ten-pound range, but in the grand scheme of things, my body’s food intuition has historically been pretty awesome under normal conditions. Consider: I had a disabling case of chronic fatigue syndrome and didn’t leave the BMI’s “normal” range; from what I can tell, that’s not usual. While I do have some old habits* that I want to return to, I really don’t think I have a lifetime of bad habits that I must overcome and jettison. It’s more like I’m choosing the subset of my habits that’ll do me the most good.
No, I respect my body’s intuition. I’ve been lucky. Given enough money for groceries and the absence of crushing stress, my appetites tend to be for pretty healthful foods in amounts roughly appropriate for homeostasis. It’s just that homeostasis isn’t the plan right now.
Calling it a diet — that’s just what works for me, with my own history and the particular ways in which my own psyche is torqued up. I think almost everybody is weird about food, weight, and weight-loss. You’d have to be pretty emotionally heroic not to be, in this culture.
* I do love those tomato-based dishes. A nice spicy batch of chickpeas and cauliflower smothered in a chunky, oniony tomato sauce redolent with turmeric and cumin… Yum. Sorry, Josh. You don’t have to eat any.
on 01 Jun 2010 at 6:13 pm 1.Sarah said …
Side Note: Your posts always remind me of Fairhaven, because that’s where I associate with intelligent thinking about important cultural personal issues. Thank you for pointing back to the comments after mine on your last post, or I might not have read them.
Main Note: I heard an NPR interview with an author Deborah Rhode today, about her book The Beauty Bias. Very interesting, confirming what we think we know in more substantive ways, and discussing the legal aspects of discrimination based on appearance.
Footnote: My dad says, “Any damn fool can starve to death.” Especially in normal cultural settings, I say, “Food has no moral value.”
on 01 Jun 2010 at 10:44 pm 2.Carol said …
I enjoyed this post too! Except now I am a little nervous, because you said it was a response to me, so I hope it showed that what I wrote earlier was just me talking about myself… – the only point where I was trying to compare/contrast was about how we had different experiences with people treating us differently in response to weight gain/loss. But 90% of what I wrote did not really relate to that, it was just me talking about personal issues… for example, I don’t expect anyone to share my personal hangup over the word “diet.”
The story I wanted to tell was partly about how having a sibling who bordered on being anorexic influenced my feelings about dieting. But more than that, it was about how strange it was that I could be so blind to how my family history influenced my feelings. That’s what I find fascinating. I mean, I do think of myself as a reasonably introspective person who isn’t an idiot. Yet here’s a connection that would have leapt out at me in a heartbeat if it was someone else’s life, and I was really slow to make it about my own.
Like you said, these issues are just hugely pervasive nowadays.
Sarah, I LOVE that quote from your dad. In turn, I’ll share my grandfather’s Sunday dinner quote: “I have had sufficiency of your abundancy, and any more would be redundancy.”
on 02 Jun 2010 at 12:45 am 3.Cam Sculpin said …
I feel a little dorky now — it’s a reply in that I was struck hard by your phobia of the word “diet” and how it shed a sudden light on my mirror-image phobia of “not a diet but a lifestyle change”. Which I made clearer in a sentence that I cut, meaning to paste it in elsewhere. Whoops.
I would bet that a lot of folks share that hangup about “diet”. A lot.
My own family history influences me a lot here too. If a person really believes that food is good or bad, that can grow into a lifestyle of its own — a crappy one. I grew up in a lifestyle that taught me that it was worrisome to have people watch me eat, because food was that fraught. (Not that I realized that for years and years. These connections are hard to make.) I fought to root that virtue nonsense out of my head; the idea of possibly risking the opening of a tiny chink in my armor against it has me going, “Oh hell no!”
For me — and possibly only for me — there is a short series of steps from, “lifestyle change,” to, “I’ll change my life,” to,”Screw you pious fuckers, I’m having a cupcake! I’m having six! I’m still awesome! Yeah, I said it, awesome! Try and stop me! HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH *burp* HAH HAH HAH HAH… urgh.” Who am I yelling at there? Yeah, I don’t know either. Anyway, it’s paying off for me to be careful to draw a distinction between doing and becoming. To my mind, a diet is something I do; a lifestyle is more like something I become.
I kind of knew this already, but Carol, your comment really brought it home for me at a more conscious level. Thank you.
Sarah, I don’t know that I’d absolutely agree that food has no moral value — e.g., factory farmed meat squicks me out at least as much as anything else produced in ways that I’d consider harmful — but whatever moral value it has is sure not determined by its caloric value. And you’re right, this does feel pretty Fairhaveny!
Dangit, I got no familial Sunday dinner quotes. Not off the top of my head, anyway. So I’ll share somebody else’s mother’s quote, which I love: “Don’t stick your hand in the crazy.” (Thanks, V! So useful!)
on 02 Jun 2010 at 8:54 am 4.Ian said …
Cam, the word “diet” is one of my societal pet peeves, and I hope I can adequately explain why. This goes straight to the “lifestyle change” thing you rail against, so hopefully I can explain it in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a pious fucker.
For most Americans, there is no inbuilt sense of what’s good food. Most people don’t seem to have any kind of feeling that they shouldn’t be eating a bag of Cheetos and a 64 oz Coke for dinner, or if they did have that feeling, it was crushed out of them in early childhood. It’s just what people eat, and that’s obviously true, because you have to go out of your way to find a green vegetable, but Cheetos are available in damn near every store.
So, for people who have that kind of relationship with food, losing weight (and keeping it off) *does* mean a lifestyle change. They have to be made to understand that a diet of fat, salt and sugar isn’t a healthy one. It’s a tasty one, to be sure, but it’s no way to live. Most people have no conception about that.
The only way they can lose weight is to fundamentally alter how they eat, for the rest of their lives. I can say all this because I was (sort of) one of those people, despite all my parents tried to teach me. I didn’t even have anything crushed out of me, I knew from the start that whole grain this and raw that and local the other thing were good for me. I guess I rebelled, and went after the garbage food out of protest.
Then, hah, surprise! I gained weight. I didn’t gain a ton, I was never really “fat,” but I was definitely leaning towards chubby, which wasn’t helped by my desk-work day job.
I made two self-discoveries (well, three, but one’s not very diet-related) that helped me work back down to a reasonable size: the first was that I was eating about twice the portion size I needed to. Every meal, I’d come away feeling stuffed and kind of uncomfortable — a feeling our society celebrates, by the way. I was also aiming too squarely at bad food, which was the second realization. Once I realized these things, I had to yank hard on my own reins to get my head turned to where it should be: eat half a portion; be willing to leave food on the plate; quit stuffing myself with crap, stuff myself with good food if I have to stuff myself with anything.
The third self-discovery, of course, was freaking out about the future of the world and getting on a bicycle, but like I said, that’s not so diet related. It sure did help me lose the fat, though (I’d say lose the weight, but my weight really hasn’t changed between losing fat and gaining muscle).
Anyway, I hope that puts some less-pious, more healthy context around making a “lifestyle change” vs. “going on a diet.”
on 02 Jun 2010 at 12:02 pm 5.Cam Sculpin said …
Your context ain’t my context, Ian. And it will probably never be my context.
But then, I’m lucky in that my fundamentals are good. In normal times, assuming I’m not trying to turn over a new leaf and go all self-consciously Healthy!New!Life!, I go after vegetables out of leftover teenage rebellion. My instincts are good because my body awareness is good. (Disability can give you that.) The only actual fundamental I’ve had to change was my habit of having great big bowls of brown rice with a little stuff on top; I can pretty much eat my own weight in complex carbs.
I did notice that you referred to “bad food”. It’s a cliche for a reason: there really is no such thing as bad food, except maybe for transfats. It’s just food. Some of it’s more useful than other food.
Even such a little touch of “should not eat” and “bad food” is something to which I’m hyper-sensitive. Because at a deep level, untouchable by rationality or other people’s contextualizing, I translate it straight into my mother’s vaguely Calvinistic idiom in which bad food is eaten by bad people. Good people eat good food. Therefore, bad food is delicious, because sin is delicious. If it weren’t bad for you, it wouldn’t taste so good. Good food has to be boring and depressing. Oh, the screwiness of this way of life.
I am probably psychologically stuck that way, and I think it’s okay. I’m not about to go trying to root around in my deep psychology just so I can more easily accommodate other people’s preferred ways of thinking about food. Not when I can just use my own way.
Calorie counting, for instance, I am chill with. It’s just technical. I can do technical. But I hear it drives some people crazy. Their deep context must be different from mine.
What I choose to let count here, in the end, is what we actually wind up putting into our bodies. Everything else is just headology. Headology is individual.
Part of my own headology has been to think of the diet as a sort of video game that I’m playing. I am my own tamagotchi. I hit my caloric marks every day and level up with every five pounds. Every level is a little harder, but that’s okay, because I’ve got new and better weapons — the +2 New Recipe of Deliciousness (seeking novelty in food is one of my habits) or the +1 Website of Organization or whatever.
If people want to say that they’re making a lifestyle change, I’m not criticizing them. People need to do what they need to do. My point here is that I’m not saying it. I do not say it and I will not say it. Food is such a delicate issue that we’ve all got psychological quirks about it, and that’s mine.
I do believe that in the end, it’s not necessarily any more psychologically healthy for every single person to say, “I’m making a positive lifestyle change!” than it is to say, “I’m going on a diet!” Both “diet” and “lifestyle” can be used for self-hatred, and are. And both can be used to support — for lack of a better way of saying it — an authentic self making self-aware, self-supportive choices around food.
Oh, and those pious fuckers? Imaginary. Dana Jack would call them the Over-Eye, the internalized, surveillant, moralistic voice of the culture at large.
My Over-Eye likes to thunder, “CHANGE YOUR LIFE, SINFUL AND FOOLISH CREATURE!” and I shout back at it, “I’m fine! You’re not powerful enough to make me believe otherwise! Screw you, cultural imperative!” The trick has been to find a way to say, “Screw you, cultural imperative!” that supports my well-being.
One way or another, though, no matter what tack our Over-Eye happens to take, we’ve all got to tell the culture to get stuffed. Because, oh boy, mainstream US culture’s food-related thinking is so not working for us.
on 03 Jun 2010 at 8:42 am 6.Ian said …
Agreed on all those points. I wasn’t trying to convert you to my way of thinking, just trying to explain why I think “lifestyle change” is a valid and important concept for many people. It worked for me. You should do (and obviously are doing) what works for you.
I like your way of thinking about what I call “bad food,” but that’s another personal thing — if I don’t refer to it as bad food in my head, I forget that it has the following qualities:
* Tastes good. Really good.
* Leaves me feeling like crap.
So it’s just my own shorthand for things I need to remember. Because the feeling like crap part always lasts far longer than the tasting good part, and the trade-off is less and less worthwhile for me these days. I’d mumble something about “moderation” here, but my self-control goes out the window when faced with a huge bag of deliciousness, even if I know it’ll leave me feeling poorly. Fortunately for me, I don’t have any value judgements attached to the word “bad” in this case, it’s just a description of its effect. Once again, not trying to make you change anything, just explain my own scattered brain.