The Real Secret: More Is Less

The French have a saying, "bien dans sa peau." It means, literally, to feel good in one's skin. We have no equivalent saying; the very notion of feeling good about oneself is, well, Greek to us.
"...self-consciousness about our abs or butts or faces isn't just an individual preoccupation, it's almost a social dictate," to quote Huffington Post's very own Arianna.

Actually, it is a social dictate, according to a study in the June issue of the journal Body Image--a mandatory ritual known as "fat talk," as one of the study's authors, Denise Martz of Appalachian State University, explained: "We have found in our research that both male and female college students know the norm of fat talk--that females are supposed to say negative things about their bodies....Females like to support one another and fat talk elicits support. An example would be one saying, 'It's like, I'm so fat today,' and another would respond, 'No, you are not fat, you look great in those pants.'"

Sound tediously familiar? Women who express satisfaction with their bodies risk being ostracized and perceived as arrogant, according to Martz, who speculates that fat talk is a way of coping with our unrealistic cultural ideals. Why can't we settle for being healthy and fairly fit, instead of torturing ourselves because our thighs can never be thin enough? Because the fight against fat helps grease the wheels of commerce, that's why. There's a whole industry dedicated to making you feel bad about your body, and most of us buy into it; we reportedly spend some $33 billion a year on diet related products. But we just keep getting fatter.

The solution, according to the wildly successful, dangerously demented bestseller The Secret, is not to diet, but simply to stop looking at fat people. There are lots of theories floating around about what's causing the obesity epidemic; everything from a contagious bacteria to a chemical found in some plastics. But Rhonda Byrne, The Secret's author, has the most bizarre explanation yet: "...food is not responsible for putting on weight. It is your thought that food is responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight....if you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it."

Or just think about all those slender Sudanese. Call it the Darfur diet--think and grow thin! Byrne's book also applies an icky "spiritual" sheen to crass consumerism, à la the prosperity gospel, which preaches that God wants us all to be rich in wallet as well as in spirit. Apparently, Moses somehow overlooked the eleventh commandment: "Thou canst never be too rich nor too thin."

Byrne's promise that "the Law of Attraction" can bring you health, wealth and happiness has sent Americans to the bookstore in droves, making The Secret one of the fastest-selling self-help books ever. As Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly, told Newsweek, "Nobody ever went broke overestimating the desperate unhappiness of the American public."

It's good business to make us feel bad, because it makes us buy all kinds of things. But the stuff we buy doesn't seem to bring us any satisfaction, and may actually be making us feel worse, according to Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy. McKibben notes how much better off we are materially than we were a few decades ago, and then adds: "What's odd is, none of this stuff appears to have made us happier. All that material progress--and all the billions of barrels of oil and millions of acres of trees that it took to create it--seems not to have moved the satisfaction meter an inch......there have been steady decreases in the percentage of Americans who say that their marriages are happy, that they are satisfied with their jobs, that they find a great deal of pleasure in the place they live..."

McKibben, one of the key movers and shakers behind Step It Up 2007, the National Day of Climate Action happening April 14th, has been warning us about global warming for nearly two decades; his 1989 book The End of Nature is widely regarded as the first book on climate change written for the layperson.

Deep Economy is an equally seminal book, spelling out the disconnect between what we think we want and what really makes us happy. The things that give us the greatest pleasure can't be bought and sold. They are, as MasterCard would say, "priceless."

I wish Oprah would endorse this book, because it really could transform our lives with its "more is less" message. If the premise of The Secretis really true, I should be able to make Bill McKibben materialize on Oprah's sofa. I just have to keep picturing it.