Peddling Anti-Diet Advice

I don't know why anyone would be interested in someone else's weight. If you are, stop it. The comparison game is a lose-lose for all. But this is my blog, so I get to talk about me. And today I'm going to talk about how pretty and smart I am, and how I beat the system.

As of today, I am officially at the same weight I was before I started dieting again. 130 pounds...only five more than before we set off for Japan last spring. (Yes, Sweetie did threaten to smash the scale with a hammer, but he didn't follow through). Now, the magazines will tell me those five pounds are a matter of life and death...or at least bliss and misery. But you know how I got down to 130? By not reading those magazines. And now that I've slipped into the intuitive eating groove, if I happen to see those food-is-your-enemy articles floating around the Internets, they look absolutely insane.

For example, take a look at a headline that made the rounds last week, summarized by a professional blogger for Glamour magazine:

Weight Loss News: Beware of This Kind of Breakfast

"Breakfast is healthy, right? Of course it is! But, be careful--researchers warn that if you approach your breakfast this way, you may have trouble losing weight and keeping it off...

We've all heard the news that breakfast eaters are more likely to lose weight and keep it off than non-breakfast eaters. But, that doesn't mean to go crazy on portion sizes in the morning, say researchers in Germany. A big breakfast may backfire.

They found that people who ate larger breakfasts didn't experience any greater energy level or a so-called hunger-blunting affect throughout the day compared to those who ate light breakfasts. And, the bigger breakfast eaters consumed 400+ more calories each day.

The bottom line for weight loss: Breakfast is healthy, but make sure you're eating some lean protein and whole grains, and try to keep your morning meal under 400 calories (tops)."

400 calories tops? Oh no, those breakfast sandwiches at Subway can be like 410! And I'd better start counting the calories in each spoonful of cereal, because just one extra Mini Wheat could push me right over the edge into forbidden territory.

Mock-worthy wording aside, the hullaballoo around this "news" is understandable. It's one of the top ten rules of journalism to never, ever read the scientific papers you're reporting on, because that would ruin the story. A couple seconds on Google revealed the following balloon-deflators:

• The study was performed on extremely obese patients only, who probably did not have good established nutrition and exercise habits. Exercise does a lot to stabilize appetite.


• The study judged the size of a breakfast by calories only. Obviously, a "big breakfast" of oatmeal and fruit is not equivalent to a big breakfast of apple fritters. The actual conclusion from this study may well have been that a big serving of sugar in the morning isn't healthy, which wouldn't be news at all.


• The participants in the study did not have regular eating schedules. The authors specifically pointed out that they did not control participants' diets, but rather let them keep journals of what they ate normally. The participants would often eat no breakfast one day, and an enormous one the next. Eating a lot on a starve-and-make-up-for-it cycle is VERY different from eating a reliably large breakfast every day.

I could go on, but I have your attention for a limited amount of time so I'll get to the sausage and eggs of it: making mountains out of scientific molehills is the journalist's job, so the panic-stricken tone and overblown headlines aren't particularly shocking to me. What really bothers me was not the run-of-the-mill premonitions of doom, but the reaction of the public to the news. Here's a sampling of comments that followed the article I quoted above:

"For breakfast at 7:30 or 8:00 I always take 2 hard boiled eggs, remove the yolks, and have 2 reduced fat/sodium sausage links. Then around 10 o'clock I have a low carb yogurt with 12 all natural unsalted almonds in it! Yumm :)"

"I've been eating those fiber rich banana pancakes, 200 calories, most often. Or I have a smoothie at 169 calories and a hard boiled egg at 70 more. I probably need to quit having coffee or have less because I add more sugar and calories with my skinny nonfat latte creamer. Sometimes I'm getting 2 servings at least so adding 60 calories from creamer."

"When I eat cereal I make sure to portion everything out in the measuring cup so that I'm not accidentally eating an extra 100 calories every morning. I find that no matter what I eat I am always hungry for a snack around 10 am"

Twelve unsalted almonds? Are you sure you really need all twelve, 'cause each one is adding like .6g of fat and that totally negates the effort you went through to remove those yolks. And you, #2, 60 extra calories from creamer? You stop that this instant! That's like putting a whole slice of cheese on your sandwich every day! Obviously, that last commenter just has no willpower. If I ate a perfectly level half cup of cereal without the accidental 100 calorie overdose in the morning, I wouldn't need a snack around 10am...because I would have cannibalized my co-workers by 9.

I make fun, but thoughts like this are actually really scary to me. They're the kinds of things I would say during my anorexic days, only to these women it's In-clique girl talk. I sarcastically advised the author of the second quote to abandon Satan's creamer, but other commenters were genuinely encouraging her ("I use a splash of fat free half and half as well as some Splenda. Only 10 calories and it does the trick!") A few even felt the need justify their "bad" behavior to a bunch of strangers on the internet:

"I had a big breakfast Sunday but..it was Sunday morning! Plus we ate around 10:30 so we weren't really hungry until later anyhow."

Please tell me this isn't normal. Please tell me the entire Western world hasn't been sucked in. Thousands of people can't be digging the yolks out of their eggs, portioning 169 calories of smoothie and sneaking looks at their figures in the mirror, right?

Wrong. I've seen the diet mill in action. The victims are unanimously more miserable, and mostly much larger, than me. Like my supervisor boasting to everyone at the party she made the roasted nuts with artificial sweetener, my boss chugging chemically fabricated Slim Fasts for lunch, or my friend picking at the pita and hummus platter in lieu of a substantial dinner. They're jealous of the people who can drink full-sugar juice and eat pizza whenever they want and still stay skinny. I want to tell them they're probably skinny not in spite of the juice and pizza, but because they eat whatever they want without worrying about it.

Unfortunately, we can't change the way the media writes or the way people think overnight. The best we can do is point out the ridiculousness of it all and hope that eventually, people learn to filter out reality from the stream of food-phobic nonsense.