Calorie counts in college dining halls

Over on the Academy of Eating Disorders listserv, there's been a discussion going about whether it's good (or even just OK) to post calorie counts for food served on campus. I've listened with interest, and a growing sense of frustration and horror, as both researchers and clinicians debate the pros and cons.

What most of them seem to be missing--or deliberately downplaying--is the damage these calorie listings can do, not just for people with eating disorders but for everyone. And especially women. About three-quarters of women say their eating is disordered in some way, and my personal experience (for myself and watching my friends and acquaintances) certainly bears this out.

It gets right up my nose to hear the sometimes pompous arguments made by academics and researchers on an issue like this. Statements like this one: "Awareness doesn't equal obsession." Um, maybe not if you're a 40-year-old male doctor who's never had an eating issue. If you're a woman in today's culture? I beg to differ. Many years ago when I "did" Weight Watchers I was aware that eating on the WW meal plan simply replaced one food issue with another. Instead of constant anxiety about how much and what I was eating and whether I was gaining or losing weight, I became a good little obsessive weigher of foods and follower of instructions. In nine months on the program I never deviated from it once. Not even for a bite. This was a testament not to my willpower or moral virtue but to the deep level of obsession that being hyper-aware of my calorie intake inspired in me.

I'm quite sure I'm not alone in this.

Which is why I was happy to see this article, written by a senior at Yale, arguing against listing calorie counts for food served on campus.

In theory, maybe "awareness" of calories isn't a bad thing. In reality, I can't see the upside.

AED

I was looking forward to live video blogging from the Academy of Eating Disorders conference in Mexico. Alas, it was canceled due to the swine flu epidemic. A good call, but a tough one for AED. Thanks to Judy Banker and all who had to make this difficult decision.

Why Hillary Clinton should stick to talking about things she knows about

Because of obligatory and, frankly, stupid references like this one, where she compares climate change to losing weight.

I"m with you on foreign policy, Hillary. But please, do all of us women a favor and shut up already about the dieting.

**Thanks, Jane, for pointing this out to me!

Models without makeup! Or Photoshopping!

I love Bitch magazine. And I love it even more for this blog post, pointing out how this month's French Elle features models without makeup, Photoshopping, or other digital manipulations to make them look unreal.


As the Bitch blogger points out, these models are still thin, white, and have gorgeous bone structure.

Hey--at least it's a small counterbalance to the obscenely unnatural images we're bombarded with night and day. A new visual reference point.

I'll take it. For now.

Too fat to fly (but not too tall?)

My daughter took a flight recently and sat next to a man who she guessed was over seven feet tall. No lie. And because there was no elbow rest between their seats, she spent the flight hunched into a corner of her seat.

You can be damn sure this gentleman was not charged for two seats. And yet anyone who now flies United who takes up more than his or her allotted seat centimeters due to weight will be charged for two seats. So flying fat will cost you double, but flying tall won't.

I find United's new policy offensive and discriminatory on many levels. If you do too, consider following the directions in the form letter below, which was created by Marilyn Wann, to protest. Because you better believe that if United gets away with this, all the major carriers will start imposing a fat flyers' penalty. And who's to say what's "too fat" to fly with a single ticket? Down the line, could ticket agents be whipping out BMI charts when you get your boarding pass? I put nothing past this fatphobic society (and the airlines desperation to turn a profit).


Hi:

United Airlines is the last of the major carriers to announce proudly a policy of charging fat passengers double.

They say they received 700 complaints last year (out of 80 million passengers carried) from thin people who did not like having a fat person sit next to them and perhaps take up some of their seat space.

I am convinced that the 700 fat seatmates who didn't complain were not too happy about the situation, either. People in the fat pride community have decided to try and beat that 700 complaints statistic.

I'm writing to ask you and the people you know to complain at United.com about this costly and discriminatory targeting of one demographic group. If this policy stands, it means fat people have less right to interstate air travel than other people. Everybody deserves a safe and comfortable chair on an airplane, at an affordable price!

Here's the link for Customer Relations.

Expect to be asked to fill in some irksome required fields:
- If you don't have a United frequent flier number, you can use mine: 00229870823.
- For flight info, I just put 4/15/2009 (the day United announced its policy).
- For departure and return cities, I put San Francisco in both slots.

Please copy your complaint letter to my e-mail address, so we can keep count as we approach and pass 700.

Thanks tons! - [insert your name and e-mail address]

--Marilyn

I cried

This video has gone viral*, so you've probably seen it already. If you haven't, watch it now.

If you have, maybe you had the same reaction to it that I did. Watching this video made me bawl. Not a polite little trickle of tears but a full-blown sobbing meltdown.

It's not just because Susan Boyle has an amazing voice, though she does. It's not just because the poshly hateful judges on the U.K.'s version of American Idol got their expectations upset, though they did, and I was thrilled about it.

It's because this video highlights--painfully, vividly, undeniably--just how far our obsession with appearance extends, and how much we punish one another and ourselves for how we look.

Watching this reminded me all too viscerally of how I felt about myself as a teenager and young woman: Unattractive, and ashamed of it. Hideous outside and, therefore, inside too. I've grown up since then, thank goodness. I've made peace with myself both inside and out. I no longer feel hideously unattractive (though there are moments). Most of all, I think--I hope--I've learned to temper my own judgmentalism about other people based on how they look.

I cried partly in awe of Susan Boyle's sassy spirit. She didn't creep onto that stage; she took it over. I love how she blows kisses at the audience on her way out--she might have given them all the finger, but she's much classier than that.

Do yourself a favor. Give this a look. Think about it.

*Normally I would have embedded the video, but YouTube is preventing it from being embedded. I wonder why.

Develop your inner skeptic

I love this little critical thinking project, created by a guy named Frank Baker who has made it his mission to teach young people (and us old people, too) to think more critically about media messages. Baker put together a fabulous page of links to diet and weight-loss ads to help teachers show kids just how manipulative, treacherous, and false such ads can be. Very cool. He also gives some background on how the Federal Trade Commission's guidelines for ads like these. Which, frankly, shocked me, though it shouldn't have. But somehow I am always surprised when people acknowledge they're lying.

Take a little cruise through the site and you'll wonder why we tolerate deceptive advertising like this. Baker's point is that it's our job to read between the lines and become better media critics--a conclusion I agree with whole-heartedly. (But these ads still piss me off.) I plan to find a way to bring this into some of my classes next year.

Nice going, Frank!

Remember days like this?

Wishing you all a happy holiday and a return to the innocent enjoyment of food that tastes good enough to really get into.

Argh!

This is exactly the kind of story that makes me wish the New York Times really would close the Boston Globe, as they've been threatening. Not to blame the messenger or anything.

But come on--has it really come to this? This fall, Massachusetts schools will send home "weight reports" with students in first, fourth, seventh, and tenth grades, which will, according to this story, alert parents "if their child weighs to much or too little."

Multiple levels of Argh! apply here. Too much or too little according to whom? Will this be another episode in the Annals of Administrators Acting as Doctors? Who, exactly, will become the Weight Police?

Authorities in Mass. promise that the new reports will "provide suggestions on where to turn for help." I'd love to see them. No, wait, I've already seen them! Because there's nothing concrete or new here. We can predict that the state's suggestions on how to "help" kids who weigh "too much" will not be helpful at all, because, um, read the news, people--we don't know how to make people thinner. Even if we all agreed that everyone should weigh a certain weight, we haven't the faintest idea on how to get them to weigh that for more than a month or two.

Have these folks not seen the research on how dieting makes you fatter? Do they think they know something the rest of us don't know?

The geniuses behind this legislation dismiss worries that the new mandate will trigger eating disorders. That's pretty ignorant. I'm guessing they have no idea how toxic the dialogue gets around food and weight, especially in middle school. My 8th grader tells me that body bashing is "a bonding experience" among the girls in her class; if you don't join in, you're not one of the group. Swell. I think a mandate like this will really help, don't you?

Please go to the article and leave a comment. Please, if you live in Massachusetts, write to your legislators. (Here's a list with links.) Let your voice be heard on this one.

When meds make you fat, part 2

I don't know how I missed it, but this week's New York Times "Well" column covers the same territory as my last post.

Head on over there, if you haven't already, and add your comments to the mix. You'll find a few that make you want to bang your head, but more that are genuinely confused and curious. They could use your expertise. :)

Full

Lunch today was a delicious salad nicoise, not unlike the one pictured here. I ate nearly all of it, stopping because I was full.

Why am I telling you this? Because it's been about 7 months since I have eaten and felt full. Not because I'm starving myself but because I've been taking an anti-depressant that messes with my metabolism. I knew it would have this effect. I knew this intellectually, but still, over the last few months, I've struggled with various kinds of fallout from never feeling full.

You eat more when you don't feel full. Especially if you are, like me, a person who likes food and likes to eat. Normally food stops tasting good as you begin to feel full. But if you never feel full, the food keeps right on tasting good, and it's an effort of will and intellect to stop eating.

I say that I knew this medication would have this effect. What I actually mean is that I think it has this effect on me (and on others). But part of me didn't buy it. On some level I've been flagellating myself for the last few months for eating so much and never feeling satisfied.

We do such a good job in this culture of conflating appetite with gluttony, with greed, with being out of control in a scary way; I don't know if it's possible to think of appetite in neutral terms. Certainly it isn't for me. Certainly it's been tough to say to myself, "The little thingy in my brain that signals satiety is not working right now." Much easier to say to myself, "What a greedy, insatiable fill in the blank I am."

So along with that feeling of fullness today came another feeling: relief. It feels good to feel full. It's satisfying.

But it's disturbing to feel this kind of relief. I may very well have to back on this medication, or one like it, in the not too distant future. Part of me says unh-unh, never doing that again, I don't care what the consequences are. But is that really true? Would I rather be thinner and more depressed? Thinner and more anxious?

The questions make me think back to this study, which found that people would rather give up years of their life, be severely depressed, lose a limb, go blind, be unable to have children, if they could only be thin.

I think of myself as smarter than that. And yet--it feels good to be full again.

Listen up

A few weeks ago I did a radio interview for a show called "A Touch of Grey." You can now hear the interview online here. (Scroll down to "Harriet Brown.")

If you haven't written an Amazon review of Feed Me! yet, I'd love it if you would. (Even if you didn't like the book.)

Happy spring!

Al has ham. Al is a fat cat. As is a sad fat cat.

Thanks to blog reader Joan M. for sending me the following:
I have a 5 year old and I am teaching her to read. I have a program made by a company called Frontline Phonics. They have a book called "Ham and Jam": Al is a cat (happy smiling cat), Al has ham (happy cat eating), Al has jam (happy cat eating), Al has ham and jam, Al is a fat cat (cat now has distended belly and is frowning), Al is a sad fat cat, Al ran. Al ran and ran. (cat on the treadmill) Al is a cat. (happy thin cat again)

And the questions that the parents are suppossed to ask after they have read the book are: What made Al so fat? What did Al eat first? What did Al do to become thin again? Why is Al smiling?

Talk about teaching kids while they are young to associate fat and sadness and thin with being happy.

Let's tell the story another way:

Harriet is a blogger. Harriet reads about books like this. Harriet feels sad. Harriet feels mad! Harriet's head feels like it might explode. Harriet swears at the screen. Bad screen. Bad books. Bad thinking.

Any of you come across similarly egregious books aimed at early readers? Inquiring minds want to know.

Kudos to Salon and Kate Harding

for this piece on the new study just out from England that may finally shut down the "Anorexia is the mother's fault!" argument. (You have to register on the site to see it, but you can get a free day pass.)

The study looks at brain development in utero, and reinforces the notion that genetics and neurobiology are the biggest culprits when it comes to why some kids develop eating disorders. As Harding writes:

Ian Frampton, a pediatric psychology consultant and co-author of a study to be presented at a conference at the Institute of Education in London this week, says, "Our research shows that certain kids' brains develop in such a way that makes them more vulnerable to the more commonly known risk factors for eating disorders, such as the size-zero debate, media representations of very skinny women and bad parents." The Guardian reports that based on "in-depth neuropsychological testing" on over 200 anorexia patients in the UK, US, and Norway, Frampton and his colleagues found "about 70% of the patients had suffered damage to their neurotransmitters, which help brain cells communicate with each other, had undergone subtle changes in the structure of their brains, or both." In the past, researchers often assumed that anorexia causes changes to sufferers' brains, but these findings suggest that it works the other way around.

One caveat: If you value your sanity, don't read the comments. Unless a huge surge of adrenaline would be a positive development in your evening.

*Full disclosure: Harding mentions Feed Me! in the piece. Thanks, Kate!

Help for bulimia

I know from personal experience how family-based treatment (FBT, also known as the Maudsley approach) can work in treating anorexia. I'm thrilled that the evidence is mounting for its effectiveness with bulimia, too, especially for teens with bulimia.

But don't take it from me! Maudsley Parents has been putting together information on bulimia and its treatment, which you can see here.

Both Stanford University (where Dr. Lock teaches and researchers) and the University of Chicago (where Dr. le Grange is based) are recruiting teens for bulimia studies right now.

Here's a video of Dr. James Lock, who literally wrote the books (along with Daniel le Grange) in the U.S. on FBT, talking about bulimia:

Rant ho

Now that we bloggers have come to represent the new media, we get a lot of the same kinds of PR stuff that used to go to newspapers and magazines--press releases about new products, upcoming events, etc. Occasionally I find something of interest.

More often, I cannot believe someone sent whatever it is my way. Take, for instance, the email I got today. Subject line (cue drumroll):

Could the Recession Be Making Us Fat?

Gee, I thought we were already too fat--in the midst of an obesity crisis, as a matter of fact. The recession's only been around a year at most. So, I don't know, no?

The email goes on with predictable idiocy to quote a nutritionist saying that in "uncertain times," people "crave rich foods." That's merely banal. The truly enraging part comes next:

"Eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia are also on the rise. "

Since the prevalence of anorexia and bulimia has been pretty constant for as long as we've been diagnosing them (about 1 percent for anorexia, 2 to 3 percent for bulimia), I'd love to know where this nutritionist is getting this shocking new information. Maybe from the bullshit fairy?

The journalist in me recognizes what we call "fudging" when I hear it, and this is pure fudge--the kind of unsupported generalization people offer up and that too many people believe because, um, it sounds like the fudger knows what he's talking about.

And here's the kicker:

"Both illnesses are tied to stress, depression and the need for control, which is a direct link to the sentiment of many Americans during this recession."

Oh really? Notice the fudging language here? EDs are "tied to" stress and depression. They sure are. So is cancer and heart disease. And then we get the twist of the knife--that old "need for control" crap that's been trotted out routinely ever since Hilde Bruch started writing about anorexia.

The whole thing is actually shopping this unnamed nutritionist as an authority on--wait for it--losing weight.

Yeah, this guy is a real authority, all right.

Note to PR flacks: Do the research before you send out crap like this. You're doing your clients way more harm than good.

Next time I'm naming names.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you

The world of eating disorders treatment is changing. Slowly. Infinitesimally. Minusculely. But change is creeping in.

Still, most ED patients and their families get smacked upside the head at some point with the old assumptions and stigmas about these illnesses.

Such as: Eating disorders are caused by cold or overcontrolling mothers; the child has no other way to establish a sense of autonomy, so she stops eating.

To their credit, many docs have left this one behind. Some say they've left it behind but still on some level believe it. And now I have an inkling into why: A friend who's in med school, and who just finished the hour or two devoted to talking about eating disorders in the curriculum, reports that this outdated and discredited point of view is still in the textbooks.

So on some level, these stigmas are still being perpetuated. Big surprise, I know. But you know, it was a surprise. I'm enough of a good girl academically that reading something in a book makes it shiny and important.

I feel pissed off and sad, though, at the thought that this kind of perspective is still living out there in print, for new generations of baby docs to read and take in. Especially since most of them get almost no training in treating eating disorders anyway. So this might be all they take away from med school on the subject. And it's wrong.

Of food revolutions and politics

This article in today's New York Times poses the question of whether the time is right at last for a revolution in the way we grow, buy, distribute, and eat food. A perfect storm of factors, argues the writer, is brewing to make this happen: Economic hardship, political leaders who value sustainability and an older-school farming ethos, and an ever-more-complex web of relationships between those who grow food and those who eat it.

Is it, as Michael Pollan has suggested, time for a reform of our entire food system? Is this the moment to move toward the Alice Waters model of growing and eating local? I hope so.




The agribusiness lobby has had Washington's ear for the last eight years. I hope the new administration can hear something else now--the concerns of small family farmers, organic farmers, parents who want to feed their children (and eat themselves) high-quality food. One of the biggest obstacles to meaningful food reform in this country has been the fact that only the relatively wealthy have access to good food. So I'd like to see policies that broaden that access and make it possible for poor and inner-city consumers to buy local fruits and veggies, organic meats, and food that's grown to taste good rather than to last 4 weeks in a crate on the back of a truck.

Why am I writing about this here, you might ask? Because eating local food, organic food, food that bloody well tastes good, is a crucial part of learning once more to celebrate and enjoy food. It's a back door into my obsession with the joys of eating and of being comfortable with your body.

OT: The Hebrew Mamita, Yo

Def poetry and you don't look Jewish. Rock it.

Here's one little gizmo I won't be buying

The HappyHR (I kid you not) continuously calculates the amount of calories you burn. Even, um, when you're asleep.

"Stay fit and be happy" is the slogan dreamed up by the Georgia Tech students who are building this gadget. I think they've got the wrong slogan there. How about "Think you're obsessive about eating now? Wait till you wear one of these babies."

I can already imagine the new eating disorder that will grow out of this. Calorexia, anyone?