This is your body on fat
“Are you trying to tempt me/ Because I come from the land of plenty?”
Maybe Men at Work was right: Is it to our peril that we live in a world of eternal bounty? In modern America, the cornucopia represents not Thanksgiving — a once-a-year explosion of every imaginable delicacy — but every day and everywhere. Even the poor are fat, in the United States.
How in the world did we get here? Why do some people get fat, and others stay thin? Why are Americans exploding like a hot-air balloon with its burner just switched on, and what can we do about it?
This month’s New Yorker has an extended rumination on the question of weight, centered around a review of William Leith’s The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict (Powell’s). The writer, Stephen Shapin, is skeptical (though less so than many) of the causative effect of excess weight on negative health. He suggests that this may be a high correlation without a causation, and that a third factor is at work: a culture totally incapable of regulating consumption, the legacy of a past when to be fat was a marker of wealth and power.
There’s something to Shapin’s hypothesis, and I think he outlines it best toward the end of the article:
As the economist David Cutler and his colleagues have shown, since the mid- nineteen-seventies the average American’s calorie intake has increased by about ten per cent and American food production per capita has increased by twenty per cent. Some commentators also blame lack of exercise, and our working lives have indeed become more sedentary, but we wind up running around more, and Cutler isn’t convinced by the evidence that our over-all levels of exercise have declined. Others blame burgeoning portion size for obesity, but Cutler disputes that, too. It’s not that we’re eating more at meals; it’s that we’re eating more often and what we’re eating is often calorie rich. We don’t eat meals; we snack, graze, and nosh. We’ve become an eat-on-the-run, absent-mindedly feeding, cup-holder culture. Technology has made calories bountiful, cheap, and easy to consume, while new patterns of work, residence, mobility, and child rearing have squeezed the time that we are able or willing to commit to family or communal meals.
[…]
Sometime in the postwar era, though, the domestic meal began its unremitting decline. Now, like many of us, Leith mostly eats standing up—no grandmother, no mother, often no one at all to witness “greed.” The individualization of eating has done much to cut us free of dietary limits. We’ve been told that an index of our times is that we “bowl alone”; something similar might be said of our gastronomic habits. We eat alone and we get fat together.
This dovetails with the inane but well-intentioned French Women Don’t Get Fat, (Powell’s) whose author, Mireille Guiliano, is insistent that the key to preserving your health and figure is to make mealtime a slow, patient ritual instead of a race to the bottom of the bowl, and to avoid eating outside of mealtimes. Essentially, then, both Shapin and Guiliano say that Mom was right, and you should take care with how you eat and the rest will come naturally.
The problem with these arguments, and the reason I think Americans need more transformation than just eating at a dinner table with others, is that they’re missing a variety of other factors. The overweight people I know always eat at a dinner table with their families or friends, and some of the slimmest and trimmest people I know eat in a hurry, on the run, while they head from Point A to Point B. And European urbanites are thin because they smoke constantly and walk everywhere, both of which raise the metabolism, presumably above the caloric value of the hilariously high-fat European diet. (Crème fraîche? Manchego-jamón hors d’oeuvres? Fish and chips? Wiener schnitzel? Please.)
I can speak from anecdotal experience here when I say that eating alone or together does not drive your weight. At 16 I was about 140 pounds; by 20 I was about 165; and all that time, I was eating with others. Living in New York, I lost 10 pounds eating alone, lost another 10 eating with my family in Phoenix, and then lost another 15 eating alone in Chicago. What you eat isn’t all that important, either: I now weigh 130 pounds (at 5’6”, that’s not even particularly thin) and I’ve recently reintroduced some dairy products into my diet, but I never gave up on beef or sausage, which are the keys to my Italian-esque kitchen repertoire.
The key is the lifestyle factors surrounding our eating, which have not been adjusted for a world of plenty. Or, really, they have been adjusted in precisely the wrong way: We now consume more calories and burn fewer calories than ever before.
Fundamentally something is broken. We burn hardly any calories above our basal metabolic rate, and that’s lower, too, because we’re so sedentary; we do hardly any aerobic activity at all; and when we buy pre-cooked food we take in more calories, because mass food production relies heavily on super-high-calorie food glues like corn byproducts. But I think I have a prescription for success, and it doesn’t require that much pain.
Don’t drive everywhere. I understand that maybe it’s a long way to work, and you can’t take the bus or train (or don’t have one). I’ll end up driving, I’m sure, this summer. But consider biking to the grocery store, the bank, or Starbucks, and you’ll burn off the calories in that grande skim latte while you’re at it.
Support and advocate for better mass transit, so you can help others burn calories in their lives. I’m not sure if anyone’s done any research on this, but I imagine a strong negative correlation between miles commuted by bus and train and BMI, controlled for income. We know that the rich are far less likely to be fat than the poor, mostly because they have personal trainers and health clubs and can buy a piece of fruit instead of a hot dog for a snack.
Take time, every day, to run, bike, or just plain walk somewhere. Even if it’s not to anywhere in particular. The frenetic pace of modern society is literally taking its toll on our health; we don’t take time to stop and smell the roses. Your grandmother was right. And she was probably healthier for it, in spite of the tsimmes and schmaltz-on-rye hors d’oeuvres.
Look at what you eat. Take a look at the calorie count of the store-bought, ready-made foods you have in hand. For what you get out of a pack of Hamburger Helper, once you add the meat, you might as well be eating twice as rich if you made it yourself. The answer is all of the stuff they use to make it stick together and taste good.
Take time to cook good food. I know it sounds hard to do, but it’s really not. Buy a slow cooker, and you can throw all of the ingredients in while you’re making breakfast and come home to a delicious hot dinner. Do extra cooking on the weekends, when you have time, and store it in the fridge for when you’re in a hurry. My pasta bolognese is really easy and I promise it’s tastier and better for you than any grocery store equivalent, but it takes time. You may just have to budget a few more minutes cooking and several fewer watching “SportsCenter.” It’s worth it.
When you eat out, eat well. Don’t drop in at the corner pizzeria for a slice on your way home, or pick up a Big Mac for lunch because you feel like it. If you must eat someone else’s cooking, upgrade a little and get something that tastes better. It, too, will probably be better for you than two plain slices or a Big Mac. You’ll also do it less often, because it costs more. Your body and your wallet will thank you if your eating-out budget covers two nice dinners with a glass of wine instead of five hamburgers and three Egg Mit Bagels. And this can be adjusted for budget: I spend a lot more on food than most people, but if your wallet will only get you to the Olive Garden or Chili’s, I promise their food is healthier than five meals at Burger King. (Caveat: T.G.I. Friday’s does not count. Unless you get pasta, their menu is astonishingly bad for you, loaded with superfluous calories.) Wouldn’t you rather spend your money on good food?
You know why I know all of these things work?
Because I used to wear a 32, and now I wear a 28, and all I did was exactly these things. I stopped eating breakfast at the coffee shop, stopped picking up dinner at Potbelly’s or Cosi or Panera, I walked more often, I exercised every day, and I took a long, hard look at what I was eating. The people who are right are the Slow Food people, who want you to take a breather from our frenetic pace and enjoy your dinner. Even if it’s alone.
That’s why. And it has nothing to do with whether you eat alone or together, whether you smoke or whether you use a cloth napkin.
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