Normal eating.

“Who started the lie, anyway, that [we] shouldn’t have an appetite?“

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I have been thinking for some time about how we don’t know how to talk about our bodies. That the language we use (at least in the English-speaking and Hebrew- speaking worlds, where I can hold conversations and read what folks write) to discuss weight, shape, and health is so warped, so freighted with moral implication and the post-modern delusion that science grants us control, that it is no longer a vehicle for communication — because none of us really understands what everyone else is talking about. We may not even be sure about ourselves.

Most of the freight, of course, is dumped with a mighty THUMP on top of the seemingly benign issue of eating. Every living thing needs fuel to survive; the human animal feeds itself off and on over the course of 24 hours; the human lives another day.

“BUT NO!” I hear the voices that I suspect you hear as well, even as you read these words. “IT MATTERS WHAT WE EAT! DONUTS ARE NOT ASPARAGUS! BACON IS NOT LOW-FAT YOGURT!”

We can’t even state the most obvious fact about fueling our bodies without triggering the immediate response of our internalized social cues.

And of course, no one (least of all me) is suggesting that donuts = asparagus. It does matter what we eat. Some fuel is more useful, a more efficient way to help us survive not just today, but long-term. If, say, a wolf spends a season eating prey that has been infected with some sort of, I don’t know, vitamin-A destroying virus, it will not get what it needs from its fuel, and this will affect its health (assuming wolves need vitamin A). Same for us. If we don’t get enough of what we need, or too much of what we don’t, it will affect our health. The quality of the food we consume matters.

What I am suggesting is that we don’t have a truly functional, or even honest, way of sorting that out. We speak in broad generalizations, using language that suggests that “average” is a consistently useful concept ( “Do you know what ‘average’ means?” a professor once asked us back at Tel Aviv University. “Average means that you have one foot encased in ice and the other engulfed in flame, but on average, you feel comfortable.”), and pile so many value judgments on top of the whole steaming pile that we come away not knowing how to answer a simple queston: “What is normal eating?”

And so, finally, to my point – this is a post about someone else’s post: What Is Normal Eating? Indeed, it is a post about someone else’s post about other people’s posts. But stick with me!

Over at PsychCentral, author Margarita Tartakovsky, MS says this:

Today, the definition of normal eating is blurry. It’s gotten lost amid buzz words like “diet,” “restriction,” “willpower” and “flat abs.” It’s sandwiched between the sizable stacks of “shoulds”: I should diet. I should abstain from dessert. I should count calories. I should avoid “bad” foods. I should have an invisible stomach, smaller hips and thin thighs.

She goes on to quote Ellyn Satter, an author, dietician and clinical social worker who wrote the following very wise thing:

Normal eating is going to the table hungry and eating until you are satisfied. It is being able to choose food you like and eat it and truly get enough of it—not just stop eating because you think you should. Normal eating is being able to give some thought to your food selection so you get nutritious food, but not being so wary and restrictive that you miss out on enjoyable food. Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad or bored, or just because it feels good. Normal eating is mostly three meals a day, or four or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way. It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful. Normal eating is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. And it can be undereating at times and wishing you had more. Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating. Normal eating takes up some of your time and attention, but keeps its place as only one important area of your life.

Tartakovsky also quotes Karly Pitman (who is, apparently an “MT,” but I can’t figure out what that is! But as she, too, is wise, I’m cool with it), who writes, among many other smart things:

Who started the lie, anyway, that women shouldn’t have an appetite?… I have no qualms about getting a second helping, rather than undereating to be socially acceptable…. But eating normally is more than freeing yourself from food: it’s adding trust, an inner knowing that you’ll care for your body excellently in your food choices. It’s trusting that if you give yourself permission to have dessert, you’ll still eat vegetables. (Note: I paraphased that first bit a little above, because I wanted the men to keep reading. Sorry. Social conditioning, and all).

“Rather than undereating to be socially acceptable…. Eating normally is… adding trust, an inner knowing that you’ll care for your body.” These lines really struck me, because so much of how we deal with our bodies and food has far less to do with the self, or Truth, than with what others will think of us when they hear — and see — us.

We hear a lot about the “obesity epidemic,” even though the notion of an epidemic has been debunked by the very people still touting it (the CDC), among others. We have observed the continuing reification of the Body Mass Index, in spite of the fact the NIH panel that established BMI standards is significantly linked to the weight-lose industry, including pharmaceutical companies that specialize in weight loss drugs — and in spite of the fact that BMI flies in the face of common sense, being as how it “is interpreted using standard weight status categories that are the same for all ages and for both men and women” and takes neither ethnicity, nor muscle mass, nor bone density into consideration. (This woman, for instance, is BMI-overweight. As is this man). And as a society, we appear to have a genuine, visceral sense of outrage toward those who tip the scales a bit more than someone, somewhere said they should.

And thus, what should be a simple descriptor, “normal,” about an activity crucial to our survival, “eating,” becomes so much meaningless noise, lost in a roar of condemnation and shaming — when really, bottom line, it’s just food.

I’ll be honest: I don’t think we’ll figure this out in my lifetime. But I am hoping to provide my children — and most especially my daughter — with the mental and verbal tools to at least hack through the underbrush themselves, and possibly come out on the other side for their own kids. And to eat normally, myself.

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Credit where it’s due: I first found the Tartakovsky post at Jezebel, last week. (What? I still read the posts now and then!)

Also: Satter asks the the following be included when the above passage is quoted: “Copyright © 2009 by Ellyn Satter. Published at www.EllynSatter.com. For more eating competently (and for research backing up this advice), see Ellyn Satter’s Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family: How to Eat, How to Raise Good Eaters, How to Cook, Kelcy Press, 2008. Also see www.EllynSatter.com/shopping to purchase books and to review other resources.”
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UPDATE: This probably should have been tagged on to the end of my post about ruining my children’s summer, but it hadn’t been published yet, so here we have it, now! A Newsweek slide-show called “Fat on Film: What pop culture tells us about being obese in America.”

Posted by emilylhauser on September 3, 2009

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/normal-eating/