Or, more accurately, what not to eat. Because it seems like every food is potentially evil. I've recently been upping my fruit intake, after keeping a food diary for a fortnight and realising that one orange does not a healthy diet make. But then the man at the gym said to me 'oh, be careful not to eat too much fruit, I mean, too many apples will still make you fat.' Right. Great. Christ, what is OK to eat then?
Not being particularly well off, I don't dine mid-week on roasted grouse or poach up a side of salmon for dinner. But I can't abide the pre-packaged ready meals that you can get - a plate of fresh cooked food, frozen for your convenience, ready for the microwave to nuke the last few vitamins and flavour molecules away. Somewhere in the middle must surely be the safe ground, where a healthy balanced diet is easily achievable?
Well, not if you ever read a womens' magazine its not. Eating bread, of course, is pretty much equivalent to eating lard and any form of potato is just asking for bingo wings and flabby thighs. We should all be able to subsist on quinoa, cottage cheese and wheatgrass through the day, with a fruit and bran based breakfast. Every time I see a "14 day bikini diet" advertised on a magazine, I can predict that salmon, skinless chicken breast and cottage cheese will feature heavily - and I am very rarely wrong. But when theres not a whole lot of cash to spare on luxuries like eating, its quite natural to need to eat things that fill you up and don't cost half your salary: pasta; baked potatoes; bread. All the foods that we women are told will pile on the pounds and result in you becoming a bed-bound whale that has to have the living room wall removed by firemen to get you out of the house and into hospital for the inevitable gastric band surgery.
And the horror that is WeightWatchers... I don't even know where to start. I think the company is dangerously irresponsible, taking money from vulnerable and unhappy women and shaming them into thinking that losing those few pounds will change their lives, without taking any responsibility for educating them on balance and variety of diet. My friend came home one day and was preparing her WeightWatchers ready-meal in the microwave - the fridge was stocked with salad, cucumber, tomatoes - and when I asked did WeightWatchers not encourage you to eat salads, she said "well, yes they are point-free". Point free?! Where is the encouragement to eat a varied healthy mix of foods? Why do these weekly meetings not include discussions on how much more delicious a plastic pre-packaged meal with the WeightWatchers trademark would taste if you had some fresh salad or vegetables on the side? Because then you might actually get involved in preparing the food yourself and then the marketing of the branded products would all be wasted because you wouldn't need it anymore - you could buy ingredients and cook with them.
SlimFast... another horrific slap in the face for anyone over a size 8 and feeling the need to conform to the picture perfect images in the adverts - here you go, lets remove all the nutrients, vitamins and fresh food from your diet and replace it with this synthetic milk mixture. You can buy our "snacks" too.. though you might find they are actually higher in calories than most other snacks available on the market. This will mean you won't lose too much weight or suffer any unfortunate side affects (malnutrition or scurvy, for example) but you will carry on buying our weight loss products and filling our pockets with your lovely money, thank you very much. This brings to mind one of the most wonderful books ever written, 'Good Omens' by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. In it, they reinvent the Four Horseman of the Apocalyspe as modern interpretations of the original - War, Famine, Pollution & Death. This quote reminds me so very much of SlimFast:
Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW (TM). CHOW (TM) contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweetener, mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, coloring, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn’t matter how much you ate, you lost weight.
…
He followed CHOW (TM) with SNACKS (TM) — junk food made from real junk.
MEALS (TM) was Sable’s latest brainwave.
MEALS (TM) was CHOW (TM) with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS (TM) you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.
Good Omens Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett C 1990
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Omens-Neil-Gaiman/dp/0552137030/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346082134&sr=8-1
As a woman I am expected to want to be slim - the magazines marketed directly at my demographic assume that as I weigh more than the average eight-year old child, then I must want to lose weight (and if not the natural way, then theres always cosmetic surgery! more to follow on that subject no doubt). I want to be healthy, I want to be fit enough to climb the stairs without risking coronary, I dont want to take to my bed with a packet of digestives and cry the weekend away in misery because I am not what the magazines think I should want to be. But I do want to be allowed to have a sandwich for my lunch every day without this being considered tantamount to self-harm, and if I want to eat cheesecake then I bloody well will.
K x
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