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August 8, 2005

Campaign for Real Rants

Well now we know the truth. While she appears to be a mild-mannered, sweet Canadian Mum -- she even owns a children's clothing store! -- the Mother of MR is in fact capable of fire breathing ranting just like her unusual offspring! I knew he got it from somewhere!

I think that's a good thing, because I enjoy impassioned debate. Most of my best friends are people who have strong beliefs and express them. In the blog, I deal with issues that are very emotional, for me and for everyone else. It's bound to touch a few nerves, and I'd argue that that's a good thing.

However, I do think I may have been misread. When I read MoMR's Rant (now she has her own Rant! Isn't that cute! Mother and son have matching rants!) I find I don't disagree with a word she said. In fact, I strongly agree with all, except perhaps for what I would call a misunderstanding of my original post.

At no point did I say that simply looking like a model is a guarantee of health. I said that for many women (and I am apparently not one of them) doing serious CR will result in looking like a model. Many models are indeed unhealthy (as are many doctors, for that matter) and I do not advocate smoking, taking dangerous drugs, or dating Hugh Grant, as some models have been known to do. My problem with the Dove ad campaign is it's title, implying that thin is not real. For some people, thin is very real. In fact, several of my CR brothers and sisters have recently and quite independent of each other shared with me growing concerns as they get pressure from their friends and family to gain weight. So characterizing people as somehow not real because they are thin is not fair.

I also think it does a disservice to the very people who do suffer in the battle with weight. MoMR's discussion of the misinformation about health and nutrition with which people have been bombarded is right on target, and very well said. If you look back at my blog entries, especially on the old blog, you'll find long discourses on the misinformation that I lived by before I discovered CR. I am not a naturally skinny person by any stretch of the imagination, and until I started CR, I battled my weight my entire life. I tried all sorts of diets, from Atkins to Ornish to Weight Watchers. I found them either hard to stick to, crazy, or both. Weight Watchers I think can be great when done by the book, which means getting your servings of calcium, lowfat protein, fruits and veggies everyday, the way my mom did it. Certainly there are people out there who lose weight by eating only 21 points a day of junk, but Weight Watchers as taught in the classes (I know because I attended WW for several months pre-CR) does not support that kind of unhealthy lifestyle, any more than CR folk advocate eating nothing but 1200 calories of rolled oat disks (there is someone on the list who does this and gets a good yelling at from MR everytime he posts... "Eat some ***&*%*ing vegetables!")

Point being, I don't blame people for being the victims of misinformation... the entire reason why I write the blog is to provide people with tools to make a healthy lifestyle easier! I certainly wouldn't be able to do CR the way MR does: between not having the patience to chop vegetables for hours and having a job that requires me to eat socially, travel a lot, and eat on the run, his style would just not be possible. Even my fairly easy breezy brand of CR is hard for me at times of stress or lots of travel or really good restaurant eating. And you see the struggles I have when I try to take my calorie intake even lower. So I'm in no way blaming people who struggle with weight, the misinformation ocean that we swim in when it comes to diet and nutrition, or a desperate craving for a fungus-based meat substitute. I've been there, and recently.

However, I don't think that the solution to the problem lies in trying to change society's ideals of beauty to conform to the growing unhealthiness of the population. It's average to have cholesterol of 200 -- but it's not healthy. It's average to have about $4000 in credit card debt, but it's not a good idea. It's average to be overweight, but instead of trying to make people feel better by describing it as "real" and therefore somehow preferable to the "unreal" ideal of being thin, let's actually help people feel better by giving people the tools they need to achieve healthier weights, through healthy means (no cocaine or dating rockstars allowed!)

MoMR is quite correct that the tools have not been available, and are to a large extent still not available to many people. One of my motivations in writing the blog has always been to provide ways of doing CR or just cutting your calorie intake back and improving your health that are possible for most anyone. An MR-like lifestyle is neither possible nor desirable for most folks, but throwing together a green salad with a side of cottage cheese and taking it to work for lunch is pretty do-able. Substituting greens or zucchini for pasta in lasagna is a whole lot easier than making megamuffins (and I *really* mean that, after watching MR slave over a hot stove in a hot kitchen for the better part of a day to make a delicious batch for the party!). Making normal, yummy, easy, cheap food is my specialty. I don't have the patience to do otherwise, and until MR moved here, all my money was going to plane tickets to Canada, so I really couldn't afford all that guava.

It has always seemed to me that the food industry and the weight loss industry work together to create people who have unhealthy eating habits that will result in obesity unless you are one of those genetically skinny people (and even those people tend to gain weight eventually as they age). Look at how kids are becoming addicted to sugar and saturated fats right in the school cafeteria! Then they can pay a lot of money for diet scams that are pretty much guaranteed not to work. They can also pay a lot for gym memberships that they then won't want to use because it's too upsetting to stare at oneself in all those mirrors when one is overweight. When I was at my high pre-CR weight, I did not go to the gym because I just didn't want to look at myself in workout clothes all the time. And because I hated the radio station they had on, but that's a different rant.

The answer is not greater acceptance of the inevitable results of an unhealthy lifestyle. The answer is to demand, all of us, that the food industry, public health authorities, and school cafeterias stop feeding us gak, whether it's in the form of a cheeseburger or in the form of a food pyramid (or is it now a rhombus?) that is guaranteed to make anyone but the naturally skinny and the very athletic fat. How many servings a day of grains? Why??? No way!

Unfortunately, the idea that if you eat fewer calories, you'll lose weight and maybe even live longer, certainly avoid many heatlh problems, isn't likely to sell as many books as say, the Atkins diet. McDonald's doesn't offer the extra value meal with a super-sized order of broccoli because it won't sell.

My concern about the Dove press release that says:

"Models weigh an average of 23 percent less than the average woman. Twenty years ago, models weighed an average of 8 percent less."

is that it's misrepresenting the problem. Models may have gotten thinner, but the real problem is that the population at large has gotten a whole lot heavier. The press release makes it sound like the models have gotten thinner and thinner while everyone else has remained the same real weight. The average woman weighs a lot more today than the average woman did twenty years ago, and it's in large part due to just the kind of misinformation that MoMR cited. It's also due to a food industry that has figured out how to make its products cheaper and more addictive by adding tons of sugar and salt to everything. I believe in addressing that problem, not in pretending that the problem is all in our heads, or is a result of models being too skinny. While many models no doubt arrive at their thinness by very unhealthy means, the natural result of an extremely healthy lifestyle for many people will be what would now be considered extreme thinness. For men, the social pressure is already there to be big, bulky and muscular. For women, the pressure goes the opposite. I feel a lot of guilt about the fact that my CR brothers have to put up with being called freakishly skinny, while the CR sisters for the most part enjoy society's approval (up to a point, then we all get picked on for being too skinny, but I'm certainly not there yet.) It's a lot easier to practice CR when you aren't pedaling upstream against the current of society's ideals of beauty, and in that respect I think it can be easier for women. I'm in favor of keeping it that way. While thin doesn't always equal healthy, most people will lose considerable weight living a lifestyle that we now know to be life-enhancing and hopefully even life-extending. So let's encourage people to do that, and give them the tools to do that. That's what I try to do in some small way in the blog, and what I do when I refuse to serve gak to people who come to my house. I'd love to work on campaigns to pressure restaurants to offer more healthy choices, and to publish their calorie counts and nutrition info on the menu. Imagine! If every restaurant had the calorie count posted on their creamy artichoke spinach dip! The world would be a different place.

Besides, let's remember that these ads are for a firming cream! If you read the article in Slate that I originally cited, you'll note that the author makes this point. "Real" curves are great, but get rid of that cellulite! Is everyone okay with that???

Meanwhile, onto the last comment, by someone who didn't leave his or her name.

I’m finding it still seems to have crossed the line from critical to condescending, and I can’t think of a better way to turn people off to your actual message.

That may be. I clearly upset a lot of people, and whenever I do that, I'm always momentarily tempted to apologize to everyone profusely and retreat into talking only about food and recipes and how to turn a standard American dish into a piece of CR genius. But part of writing this blog for me is about being real, and that means saying what I think even when it makes people angry. That's scary at times since everyone I know reads the blog, including a lot of people I really like and respect. I hate offending people: as Jessica Simpson once said, "The real me is a Southern girl," and I can't stand the thought that people won't like me or will be mad at me because of something I wrote in the blog.

However, I think it's a risk I have to take. If I don't occasionally risk making you bloggiefriends mad, I run the risk of bleeding the life out of the blog, and destroying the thing that makes you read it in the first place. I'm not selling anything: you read the blog for free, and if you don't like it anymore you'll go away. I don't get paid a bounty for converting people to CR, so if I turn people off, so be it. It seems unlikely to me that someone who was on the verge of adopting CR would decide to eat a hot dog just cause I said something with which he or she disagreed. My recipes taste just as good, whether you agree with my philosophy or not. Lots of my fellow bloggers have expressed opinions with which I disagree, but I still consider them CR sisters and brothers cause when it comes down to it, the rest of the world thinks we're all freaks!

I'm glad I inspire strong feelings in my readers, and I'm even happier when they express themselves in comments, or better yet, by starting their own blogs! Rants are good... let's have more of them!

Meanwhile, has anybody tried the new Dove green soap? Now that's an ad campaign that works. I have been totally obsessed with buying green Dove ever since I first saw the "Gentle, meet fresh" billboard. The only problem is: it's made with green tea extract, and I'm afraid that if I smelled too much like the beverage he has every day at 11 am, MR might get confused and try to drink me.

Posted by april at August 8, 2005 7:55 AM

Comments

Posted by: Liz at August 9, 2005 10:06 AM

Posted by: Judith at August 10, 2005 11:44 AM

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