Possible unintended effects of posting calories in restaurants

The gist:

• People with low incomes need to get the most energy for their buck, so they tend to buy higher-calorie foods. (The ability to pay more money to get less energy really is a privilege.)
• Posting calorie counts in restaurants helps people with low incomes make the most economical decisions – that is, buying what they now know to be higher-calorie food.
• This is  a bad thing because high calorie = unhealthy. Who cares about poor people and what they can afford to eat?

Well, that was highly predictable.

Dieting and Hunger

Back for a moment; have been busy with little things like college and having a nervous breakdown. Fun times.

I’ve talked in the past about my tendency to not eat when I’m hungry when I’m stressed, depressed, or anxious. It’s been going full-force for the past week or so. I think every day I’ve eaten a few bites or less and a coffee for breakfast, and then when it comes around to lunch my stomach hurts too much to get much down (even if it looks appetizing, which it usually doesn’t). By the evening, when I’m back at home and don’t have to depend on planning ahead or working around my class schedule (which I don’t seem to have the presence of mind to manage), I usually manage to get a full meal into me even (mostly takeout, which worries me–first because my fruit and vegetable intake has been far less than balanced, and second because I feel like any day now my need to not spend money will override my need to feed myself), but it feels like too little, too late.

I’ve never dieted. And it occurred to me the other day–is this really what people do all the time, just to try to be thin? How can people stand it? I just want nothing more than to eat normally again and have this constant gnawing hunger go away.

Water Makes You Fat

Me: Why do I feel so hungry? [Rhetorical question; I had been sick the day before and hadn't eaten much, which explained the need to feed myself. I just felt like complaining.]

Mother: Sometimes when you feel hungry, you’re just thirsty.

Me: Sometimes, but that’s probably not true for me. I drink water all the time. [I have a chronic dry throat and I rarely drink non-water beverages; I just don't like them much.]

Mother: Maybe that’s why you’re hungry. You drink too much water and it stretches out your stomach.

Me: …

Diets: in which goodbyemyboy bitches about her family, and it won’t be the last time

(I wrote this during a long car ride and then got carsick. Fun times.)

Diets don’t work. Everybody knows that, even Weight Watchers. Dieting has become increasingly associated with yo-yoing and unhealthy eating habits. So why aren’t more people embracing Fat Acceptance and Health At Every Size?

Going back to that conversation with my mother, here are some things that she told me:

• My brother is “too heavy.” (True, if we’re going by BMI standards.)
• He eats a lot. (True, but he’s also a sixteen-year-old male athlete. He’d probably be in trouble if he didn’t eat a lot.)
• He eats too many eggs. (Apparently he’d been going to school early for extra help towards the end of last semester and buying breakfast there, which worked out to about four egg sandwiches a week. Only for the obese can four eggs a week be considered some huge excess.)
• He’d be better at sports if he lost weight. (Dude, his size is why he’s so awesome at what he does. I’ve seen, more than once, kids half his size rush him in lacrosse and literally bounce off and fall on their backs. It’s fucking hardcore.)
• It doesn’t matter that he’s healthy now, because The Dreaded Obesity will catch up to him later. That’s just the way it is.

And the crazy thing about all this is that she completely agreed with me that diets don’t work, that ~*~lifestyle changes~*~ like healthy eating habits (which she seems to be conflating with diet tricks like calorie reduction and filling up on low-calorie, bulky food, but that was an argument I wasn’t about to get into) and increasing physical activity may not result in weight loss but will improve health regardless–but she still insisted that weight loss is both possible and an imperitive.

The solution to this cognitive dissonance is, apparently, that she doesn’t expect him to drop 30 lbs. overnight–it should happen slowly, over time.

So apparently all that people have learned about diets not working is that diets do work if you call them ~*~lifestyle changes~*~ and lose weight slowly. We’ve got a long way to go.

Depression and My Eating Habits

When I’m depressed, I tend to stop eating. Most of the time I just don’t feel hungry, and when I do feel hungry I can’t bring myself to care. When I finally force myself to eat something, I don’t usually feel like cooking, so I eat what’s convenient rather than what my body needs–which leads to situations like in the previous post, where I’d go a whole day eating nothing but coffee cake, or, if I hadn’t baked anything, Kraft mac & cheese, or potato chips. Not more calories than usual–in many cases, less–but just too much of the same thing. I don’t believe foods are inherently “bad,” but eating an unvaried diet of mostly the same food group is, which is something I don’t do when I’m taking care of myself.

I know other people have gained weight from their depression without changing their eating habits, and I know that things like food, stress, and genetics have a complex and interconnected relationship when it comes to determining someone’s weight. But the overwhelming perception, in my experience, is that depressed people gain weight because they’re self-medicating with food. I remember telling a nurse once, when she raised “concern” about my weight gain, that I was struggling with depression. I didn’t even get to the part where I am recovering well (with some occasional setbacks), eating a healthy, balanced diet, and exercising, and that my weight is probably the most stable than it has been in the past year and a half, and I’m the healthiest I have been, before she started asking me about my overeating problem.

I don’t think people need an excuse to be fat. Even if weight weren’t influenced by genetics or other factors outside of people’s control, even if being fat was completely and totally a choice, it would be a person’s individual choice and not something for society to judge. But I do think it’s important to teach people that fat and weight gain is caused by things other than food, and that even when it is related to food the relationship is much more complex than “calories in, calories out,” and much more complex than the pictures of lazy gluttons choosing to stuff themselves or of mindless, passive consumers brainwashed by the evil fast food conglomerates–and to remind people that health is about your mind, not just your body.

That was a bit rambly, I think. I have grown frustrated lately, feeling myself falling back into the depression and realizing, now that I’m fully entrenched in the idea of intuitive eating (I’ve been doing it somewhat informally for at least a year now, but I’ve only fairly recently been able to put a name to it and truly separate it from the guilt-inducing ideas of “good” and “bad” foods) and have seen what benefits it gives me when I’m feeling healthy, how frustrating it is that when I’m depressed, intuitive eating doesn’t work.

Bad eating habits are not the same as binging

I cook for myself most of the time. Usually that means I have a lot of leftovers. If I end up having a day where I don’t feel like cooking, I’ll just eat those same leftovers for every single meal of the day. It’s not the healthiest eating habit in the world–especially if, as has happened once or twice in the midst of studying for finals, I go a whole day on nothing but coffee cake–but it’s not like I eat the same food every single day and it will never balance out. And you know what else? It’s not binging. I’m not eating more calories per day than usual (and in many cases I’m eating less, because I’m just sick of having the same thing but don’t feel like cooking something else–again, not the healthiest eating habit, but it happens). I’m not eating more than usual in one sitting. I just feel like I’m eating more than usual because I’m eating more than one helping of the same thing, so I can see the food disappearing faster than if I ate a little of three or four different things. It’s crazy that I have to remind myself that eating enough to fill my stomach–even if I eat a lot of the same kind of food–is not binging. But sometimes I still do.