The “Eat Nothing” Diet
Oh, celebrities. Or “celebrities,” if you prefer, since we’re talking about two of the Real Housewives, a phenomenon which I can’t even go into, since I don’t understand it at all. Anyway, two of these “housewives” shared their diets with two different tabloids last week. While posing for pictures in bikinis. Ready?
Michaele Salahi poses in a bikini for [InTouch] and then says she is not an anorexic and that she eats plenty and that if people would get out and move they would look just like her. Eating plenty huh? Want to know what she eats everyday? In the morning she has a bowl of cereal and at night she has a salad with some grilled chicken in it. No lunch or anything else the entire day. Umm, how does she even have the energy to move around…
Not to be outdone, Real Housewife Bethenny Frankel says the way she lost 33 pounds after pregnancy was to “Taste everything, eat nothing.” Umm, that sounds like one of the favorite tricks of anorexia. .. What [the tabloids] have done is put two incredibly skinny women in bikinis in their magazine and said they basically don’t eat. That is the only way you will look like them and the tabloids seem to be celebrating it. That is wrong, wrong wrong. If you are naturally skinny, then great. You are just as sexy as the curvy person or the overweight person. What I don’t like is they are saying the only way to be sexy is to be thin and to not eat. That is wrong.
I think we’re all pretty familiar with the hypocrisy of the tabloids by now. But still, as long as they keep printing this, it’s good to keep saying it: these messages are damaging and dangerous. And the Real Housewives may be, right at this very moment, the number one thing that’s holding back contemporary feminism. Well, them and Heidi Montag.
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Celebrities, Eating Disorders, Feminism, Gossip, Magazines, TV
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Scary. What’s even scarier is that Bethanny is apparently touted as a “nutrition expert.” Correct me f I’m wrong, but I kinda thought you at least needed to get some actual nutrition into your system in order to be called an expert
And don’t forget Elizebeth Hurley skipping breakfast (and who knows what else).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/24/elizabeth-hurley-swears-b_n_692849.html
Promoting disordered eating. Who, us?
Peace,
Shannon
And they say it’s the fatties who have the problem with food.
My fiancé was really into Biggest Loser Australia a few weeks ago and watched it pretty much nonstop until he watched 4 seasons of it and couldn’t find anymore.
It was mentioned that the women were put on 1000 calorie diets and they were expected to exercise a minimum of 3 to 4 hours a day. I have no idea how they would have the energy to do all that exercise while starving. I brought it up on a health site with a lot of dieters and they all glossed over the obvious starvation, instead focusing on things like “no one has time to exercise like that”, not liking that they make exercise out to be punishment, and not liking that the contestants are no longer “normal overweight people”.
Criez and criez and criez.
Hi there!
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed lurking around your blog for the past few months. Your content is relevant, and your commentary (and commenters) are smart and amusing and usually spot-on.
Though I’m bummed to see Bethenny Frankel on here, as I feel that quote may have been taken out of context. “Taste everything, eat nothing” is one of ten tips and strategies for balanced and deprivation-free eating. In her book, she suggests one “taste everything, eat nothing” when it comes to less healthy foods (like fried appetizers and chocolate desserts), while filling up on “good investments” like veggies, whole grains and lean protein.
Having said that, the message that comes across in this tabloid article is certainly dangerous. And it seems a lot of the content on television is stunting contemporary feminism. Good thing we’ve got so many cool blogs on the interwebmachine (:
I don’t know. I think it’s better when they actually admit that you have to starve yourself to be skinny, rather than claim that these women eat anything they want and still look like this.
The media’s intense focus on dieting to be skinny and look ‘hot’, and to hell with health is certainly harmful and just plain depressing, but if I have to pick the lesser of two evils, I prefer the one that’s more truthful.
Pft, A, sounds like promoting eating disorders to me, context or no context. Especially since you are only allowed to eat ‘good, safe’ foods and are ‘allowed’ to taste, but not eat, the ‘bad’. That is not normal, or desirable, behaviour; it’s disordered.
May I say that no one is telling anyone who didn’t specifically solicit her advice what or how much to eat?
I would usually just have silently condemned the tabloids and moved on, but I happen to feel very grateful for Frankel because her book (and this particular strategy, actually) helped me overcome the eating disorder I’ve had since I was eight. I’m sorry if that makes my newer, more balanced eating abnormal, undesirable and disordered in your eyes, (I know it certainly isn’t perfect,) but normal means different things for different people.
My God. I was just thinking this morning how much having a sandwich makes a difference to how hungry I am. I used to have a class at 10:30, and my teacher asked me to eat ebfore I came so I wasn’t rumbling in her class.
A bowl of cereal until dinner? I’d lose my mind!
I thought that Bethenny Frankel was breastfeeding. I have no idea how she produced/is producing enough milk for her daughter if she’s starving herself.
@A, this type of advice is what causes eating disorders in many women, including me. It took years for me to overcome these ridiculous ideal and messages about food and eating. I’m glad that you feel that this type of advice has helped you, but the evidence is the this sort of thing damages girls and women.
Right. And we fat people are the ones who don’t get our pictures in magazines (much) because we’re supposedly setting bad examples.
@NinjaEema
To be totally honest the more ardently I defended this the more I felt like an pro-anorexia apologist, which I truly regret. Just because I like her and her book doesn’t make either a shining example of health.
Ideally celebrity diets wouldn’t be news and everybody’s body would be her/his own damn business. But alas…
@A – I can see where you’re coming from in this. What can seem like a glorious revelation for one person is just more of the same damn crap for another. I’m happy you’ve found a path that has been healthy for you. Really happy! A lot of people never find their way there.
But dude, yeah, only being allowed to “taste” the “bad foods” out there would be a one-way ticket on the bad-food-behavior choo-choo for me. (It gives me the mental image of gingerly picking up like… a fry drenched in gravy, licking it, and then tossing it over my shoulder and promply trying to forget about it. Is that how it’s supposed to work? Wait, I don’t really want to know how it’s supposed to work…) The best intentions can get wildly misinterpreted when not given enough explanation, or when viewed through the distorted lens of our culture.
Seriously, I can’t say I’m surprised. This is just like Meme Roth, “anyone can lose weight” “how much have you eaten today, Meme? “…” Furthermore, it’s exactly what I did to myself in high school. No breakfast, a fruit and a veggie for lunch (usually an apple and some carrot sticks) and whatever my family was having for dinner so they wouldn’t notice how little I was eating. I also played sports so I was “moving around” a lot. Did I lose weight? You betcha. Was I happy? No. Was I healthy? Hell no. Found that out the hard way when I started feeling really low energy.
It was a hard fought victory to get away from the toxic thinking that imposing those kinds of restrictions on myself are NOT healthy. But this is where the whole argument, according, to fat-phobics breaks down. Can you lose weight by denying yourself enough and torturing yourself enough? Yes, and that according to the fat-phobics is enough. But none of them seem to want to acknowledge that starvation is probably worse than an extra cookie or two and puts a lot of unneeded stress on the body and can even result in a worsening of the supposed “weight related health risks”. Not to mention, these new mothers just went through a body-racking experience giving birth and playing human incubator for nine months and now we’re telling them they are duty bound to put even MORE stress on their bodies just to conform to some crazy notion of “healthy”? Bad plan. Bad bad plan.
I’m worried that this kind of eating will come to be accepted as healthy eating, that society will think that a healthy amount of food is a small bowl of low-fat cereal with skimmed milk for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and grilled chicken/fish/tofu with steamed vegetables for dinner, with no snacks or “bad” foods or “junk” food *ever*, and that we as fatties will be even more condemned for what we eat than ever…
I like Bethenny (and I don’t endorse her not eating). And I am wanting to say that I was appalled at how she acted when she was pregnant – she was always moaning about being a “cow” and a “fat pig” and saying to her (lovely) fiancee Jason – I don’t see why you find this attractive. It was really offensive. As someone who had been a Bethenny supporter – it made me feel dirty. I guess she wouldn’t be able to “bear” having me in her vision.
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what disgust me most about such reports are our present societies loathing of baby weight. Why is something so natural and nurturing deemed disgusting? A woman’s body knows how to protect and nourish itself during and just after pregnancy, yet the current fashion is to fight right against nature.
As if it is shameful to be a fertile woman.
I would hate to bring a child into this world actively hating the flesh that gives it life.
These woman repulse me, regardless how strong such words are.
And so true, our bodies ought to be our own business, but were they ever? Probably not.
I can’t wait until the worshiping of these reality TV whores goes the way of the 90’s “Talk” shows. I truly despise these people. Who are they to be giving anyone advice about anything?
Was just talking to a colleague yesterday who is apparently on the HCG diet. Anyone heard of this? The diet consists of eating 500 calories per day (green veggies and lean protein) and you get 2 breadsticks or melba toasts. Plus you are taking hormone drops (hcg) which “fools” your body into thinking it is pregnant and burns fat. If you go over your 500 calories (i.e a failure day) you are supposed to make up for it by eating ONLY 6 small apples and drinking water over the course of the following day.
WACKADOODLE!
I read Bethanny’s book while I was actively engaged in my eating disorder last year and even though I used the tips I could recognize it was unsettling. You aren’t allowed to eat full portions of anything unless it’s lean protein, vegetables, or fruit and if you want anything else you can only eat 3 bites. That’s her rule – 3 bites. And there’s a rule where for example if you have cheese or dressing on your salad, forget about eating bread to make things ‘balance’. Things like that. You can tell from her own sample menus that the way she’s following her own rules basically boils down to eating near starvation level of calories.
If Bethanny is honestly happy and feels healthy eating that little every day good for her but I hate that she titled her book “naturally thin” and says in the book that everyone can be thin if you do it like she does (and also implies anyone that doesn’t is of course just eating too much). Well I know lots of naturally thin people, and they don’t have to make themselves crazy rules to make themselves stay that way. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
I don’t know – she seems like a nice person and I am sure she only means well, but I still think books like hers (as well as the many, many others similar) can have the potential to be dangerous and misleading about what is healthy eating.