Positive Eating
How’s this for a concept: Enjoying food instead of dieting, because dieting doesn’t work. It’s a movement! It’s a zeitgeist! Or at least it’s an article in the New York Times:
After decades of obsessing about fat, calories and carbs, many dieters have made the unorthodox decision to simply enjoy food again. That doesn’t mean they’re giving up on health or even weight loss. Instead, consumers and nutritionists say they are seeing a shift toward “positive eating” — shunning deprivation diets and instead focusing on adding seasonal vegetables, nuts, berries and other healthful foods to their plates.
Adding healthful foods and not depriving themselves? Has the world GONE MAD?!
[T]he percentage of people who are dieting has declined — to 29 percent in 2007 from 33 percent in 2004.
Yes, clearly it has gone mad.
This article ties positive eating into the Slow Food movement and the idea of eating healthy, seasonal, locally grown food. Even Rachael Ray and Alice Waters chime in to say it’s all about cooking and enjoying food. (Rachael Ray defends the fact that she doesn’t include nutrition information on her recipes, which quite frankly I still disagree with. People need to know the nutritional content of their food for many reasons, not just “deprivation.”) It turns out they might not be wrong about the cooking thing, though:
[T]he more time people spend on tasks like food shopping, cooking and kitchen cleanup, the more likely they are to be of average weight… [P]eople of normal weight spend more time on meal-related tasks than people who are overweight or underweight.
The lesson here? Visit your local farmer’s market, eat locally, eat mindfully, enjoy your food, and don’t deprive yourself. Now isn’t that a refreshing message?
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Celebrities, Food, Health, Media, Science
Email us
file this one under, “duh! ya think?” that’s exactly what the message shoulda been all along…..
not too concerned ’bout the whole cooking prep and clean up” though…..but, at the same time….er, just ‘cos u may be over/under doesn’t mean u shirk your duties dammit!
now watch this y’all….now that there’s a report that dieting numbers have DECLINED…..the profiteers of the diet industry will ratchet up the already shrill cry of “thin thin thin”!
well….that’s bound to come anyway….as the holidaze approach us….
It’s what we’ve always known: why would any sane person want to do something where the first three letters spell “die”?
Oh, how awesome would it be were the DIEt industry to die a quick death?!?!?! Just, POOF, gone! Forever!
A girl can dream, right?
Maybe now we can start remembering how good real food is, and how much better it tastes than chemical reproductions.
Hah! I was just working up a post for my blog about this very thing, didn’t even know there was a news article (like it’s new info). Just knew it was working for me.
Not so sure about that last quote though. I spend a lot of time cooking, shopping and planning meals (including making my own whole wheat bread) and shocker… still fat.
Mimi
While I liked the sentiment of the article overall, it seems to me that the part about people who take the time to cook from scratch being thinner and healthier may have more to do with how much time and money they have than some mystical property of cooking.
And I get why you would want to see nutrition information on recipes, but frankly I prefer not to see it. After having dealt with orthorexia, I feel like I eat better when I’m not presented with the nutritional content of my food. It seems to me that if one is cooking at home, though, you can figure out roughly what’s in something, and if it’s suitible for a diabetic/crohns/other health issue that requires a special diet.
I’m with Mimi about that last bit. It kind of skirts over into, “If you’re fat, you’re doing SOMETHING wrong” territory. The rest of the article is a darn good start, though.
It’s hard not to dwell on the bad bits of the article–I, too, as an inveterate home meal preparer and grocery/market shopper extraordinaire, having learned such skills from my excellent parents, take exception to the notion that it is a magic formula for thinness (or even only important BECAUSE of thinness), considering that my whole family is fat–but it is, as one says, a start!
(I think that even I might have to use the order of operations just to figure out that previous sentence. Sorry!)
When I cook for myself, I don’t eact as much. The food is more satisfying and I enjoy the entire experience.
Unfortunately, I don’t cook for myself nearly as often. I tend to do the take out route much more than I should. BAD BAD BAD.
Carrie at ED Bites blog has a post on why it’s not actually that great to have the nutrition information directly available: http://ed-bites.blogspot.com/2008/09/because-normal-is-hard.html . Personally I think the nutrition information at restaurants and cafes should be available only if you ask, for this reason. And in recipe books? No. You have the list of ingredients right there, it’s not that hard to work out the basic nutrition of the recipe. Get one of those pocket nutrition guides and read it, and you should be able to guesstimate pretty well the details of any recipe.
This is pretty much what I’ve been doing for the past year, and I must say, it works well for me. I love being creative with cooking, and I’m doing more of it now that my hubby went vegetarian. It’s an interesting challenge to take favorites and find a way to make healthier versions that are still yummy.
Well it’s about time!
I was watching Gwyneth Paltrow on Oprah the other day and she said something interesting about how she got her body back into shape when Oprah asked if she dieted.
She said the moment she thinks of dieting or restricting her food or even starts obsessing with the scale she automatically starts putting on 5 pounds or more for no reason. So she stays away from diets except that she doesnt’ eat four legged animals.
So hopefully this idea with food that really starts becoming the norm because society is really getting twisted with it’s relationships with food.
Oh my god that is GREAT!!!!!! That is exactly what I have been trying to do with my blog spot and I feel much better for it. Those were some REALLY interesting facts though. Normal weight people spend more time making food and people dieting have decreased. YAY I bet that is the first time it has decreased since god knows how long. This is most excellent knews and probably has made my day. Im so happy.
Pingback: People are saying NO to diets « Food Chains
It’s a great concept, however it does seem like they’re adding a side note at the end about food prep & cleaning up, that the reason the people are healthier is not only cause they eat well, but they’re also busy-bodying themselves.
Basically, you’re virtuous if you move around, and you’re un-virtuous if you go out to a resturant, eat exactly the same kinds of foods mentioned within the article, but don’t run around doing kitchen work.
I’m sorry if it comes across like I’m nitpicking, but it seems like there is now a subsection of fat bias, exercise bias. If you’re not running around like a hampster on a wheel, with your treadmill for an hour a day, well what do you expect except to be fat and have poor health. People should be able to live their lives the way they choose, and not be talked down to like a idiot, because they are doing things other than exercising.
I’m not saying exercising isn’t important, but someone shouldn’t be treated as if they deserve being fat, because they’re not spending their every waking hour obsessing over how much they’ve exercised. A lot like how people are penalized for admitting they don’t spend every waking moment of their day obsessing over calories, which I belive was once called Anorexia. Now it seems to be called eating healthily.
They couldn’t do better than Rachael Ray for this? How about, maybe…oh, I don’t know…a real chef? With a voice that doesn’t make me want to gouge my eardrums out?
Great blog!
I’m going to look into this positive eating theory. Giving up food certainly doesn’t work for me. So it’s worth a try.