I am often nauseated by the messages sent out in the media to women through television shows and advertising. What they present as good and bad for us shapes not just our buying habits and self-image but also how we see each other.
This topic came up in a recent conversation I had with Michelle May, MD, author of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat: How to Break Your Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle and Leslie Schilling, MA, RD, a Memphis-based registered dietitian specializing in eating disorders.
The two clinicians broke into a frenzy about how the diet food industry makes women feel so guilty about wanting a cookie that they become obsessed with food, creating the deprivation-craving-overeating cycles so many live with on a daily basis.
Dr. May gave me an example of how the diet food industry perpetuates the "good food-bad food = good girl-bad girl" concept using a recent commercial for Fiber One Brownies. The ad depicts a bouncer guarding a velvet curtain while the voice-over makes a dramatic claim: They've been off limits to dieters since time began. A dieter shoves the bouncer aside and peeks through the curtain to find women dancing in the aisle under colored disco lights, grabbing packaged brownies from a silver tray. As the renegade dieter takes a bite of the forbidden brownie, two men, one holding a head of iceberg lettuce, look on baffled. The look of ecstasy on her face says it all: The deprivation is over.
For decades, the food and diet industries have bombarded us with various versions of these conflicting messages: The foods women love are bad (or fattening, sinful, unhealthy) and women are bad if they eat them (weak-willed, guilty, unhealthy). We will rescue women with our diet versions of the bad foods so they can be and feel good (attractive, happy, virtuous). One blogger wrote, "Fiber one's 90 calorie brownies are literally the BEST thing that has ever happened to me." Really? Doesn't life have a lot more to offer than a diet brownie?
The message that women should always be dieting has become so ubiquitous that it is accepted as conventional wisdom. The "dieting is normal" message reverberates on the morning news talk shows, in doctor's offices, during Pilates class, and even at the family dinner table. When I got out of college, I remember visiting a friend I had not seen in years. We spent all of our time talking about our diets and weight loss and gains. Wasn't there anything else important to discuss?
"Women have been made to feel unworthy of real food," Schilling told me. "Food manufacturers, touting health, deceive the public about nutrition and appropriate food consumption. They take a highly processed food, replace the fat and sugar with sweeteners or spike it with fiber, and label it as healthy and guilt-free."
Where does the guilt come from? Schilling says, "The diet-food industry has evolved and expanded right along with the American waistline. If the products actually helped, wouldn't waistlines -- and the diet-food market -- be shrinking?"
Dr. May passionately added, "The implication that food is the enemy, and that women in particular, lack the ability to manage it has serious unintended consequences."
According to Dr. May, "Dieting often leads to feelings of deprivation, cravings, eventual giving in, guilt, and overeating." Dr. May coined this the eat-repent-repeat cycle. "Most people blame themselves for their perceived lack of willpower, or more accurately, won't-power. However, it is a predictable chain of events caused by this unnatural love-hate relationship with food."
Dr. May feels people should eat what they love. I argued that a lot of packaged foods people crave are made with ingredients that I feel are toxic, like corn syrup. Dr. May says that if you are less focused on "good" and "bad" foods and defining yourself by how you make these choices, it is easier to be in tune with what your body wants and needs. You naturally make better choices.
I have to say that as I have aged and quit worrying about being skinny, I am healthier, happier and look just fine in my clothes. I am coming to understand we are making girls, and now even boys, crazy over the obsession with weight loss that they carry into adulthood.
You may argue that there is a problem with obesity. That may or may not be another story. You can ask Dr. May about that.
May and Schilling offer these 10 tips for breaking the eat-repent-repeat cycle:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Marcia Reynolds writes for smart, strong goal-driven women. Her book, Wander Woman: How High-Achieving Women Find Contentment and Direction, is full of exercises and real stories designed to help you face your challenges and realize your potential in this crazy, busy world.
Follow Marcia Reynolds on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MarciaReynolds
I am grateful to no longer be the person who feels "diet brownies" will change my life. I find it empowering to remind myself each day "I take full responsibility for my life. I am the one who makes choices."
Re-read the 10 tips, they are all choices!
I commit myself to not let another person, a marketer, or anyone who gets my attention to judge what is or is not "allowed" for me.
It is my job to choose - and I choose me! I commit to my own self-care and help others (hopefully!) at my blog. www.mefirstblog.com
The more chemicals added, the less you can call it food. Our bodies are not designed to process chemicals, so eat real food. Actual sugar, real butter.
You'll not only get plenty of nutrients your body can absorb naturally, but you'll feel better physically, fuller at mealtimes and you'll sleep better as well.
The idea that we are to feel guilty for eating comes straight from the diet industry. Don't believe them.
There are resources online that can help you learn to prepare the foods that you love in ways that make them healthier for you. Learning new recipes and reading about food can empower you to love the food you eat and still make healthy choices.
One more note I'd like to make is that many people mistake thirst for hunger. Drinking more water helps your body function better, metabolize food, and you naturally eat less. Try making this one change before you change anything else about the way you eat, and you might be surprised how much it helps :)
4.Small, sustainable improvements in your eating are more effective than a drastic, temporary overhaul.
I've never bought into deprivation - knowing that any diet that makes me feel deprived is obviously not going to last. So, what I've been doing the past several years is gradually introducing new, healthier foods into my diet, so that I'm not as tempted to chow down on the chips, chocolate bars, and brownies (I still eat them, just not as often, and not as much).
Since I bring my own lunch to work anyway, I've found it quick, easy, and convenient to focus on eating healthily for the first half of the day. Homemade Green Smoothies for breakfast (5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables in a bottle). Today's lunch is rice, steamed broccoli, and curried lemon lentils (leftover from supper last night - delicious!). When I get home from work, I've eated well, and am less likely to be starving, ready to grab the first thing I see.
Simple advice, but it doesn't fuel a multi-billion dollar industry so it rarely gets said out loud.
More thoughts on life, health and happiness here: www.elizabethfarrar.com
we can have mercy and kindness for our guilt and its feelings, see that through those feelings, however clumsily, our guilt is trying to be a benefit to us. how you ever witnessed someone, who meant well, who wanted to help or impress someone, but they blunder and end up creating a mess instead? didn't you feel sorry for them? guilt is just like that. guilt itself, feels guilty about itself, and is trapped in always trying to be useful, to make amends for itself, to be redeemed by presenting itself in as "useful" way as it can. guilty feelings are like the haunting of a lonely, rejected ghost who really just needs our attention and affection and acknowledgement.
the sooner we sincerely assure that inner ghost that we call "our guilt" that it has done a good job in helping us see the error of our ways, and the sooner we sincerely thank our guilt for keeping on guard, the sooner our guilt can relax and feel good about itself and bask in our acceptance and acknowledgement, and enjoy a hard earned moment of security and peace.
mercy is the medicine.
Stand before your mirror, look yourself in the eye and say, " I'm a grown woman, and I will do as I damn well please. "
There. That should do it.
Why should foods and women labelled this way?