Losing

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend time with a bunch of folks that I very rarely get to see. They were all at least marginally aware of my adventures in Paleo, and if they weren’t, my mom made sure they heard about it.

Of course, what everyone really wanted to hear about was not the RA remission but the weight loss. I’m totally a fan of that side effect, so I talked about my 25 pounds, and about finally discovering what being full felt like, and my mother invariably chimed in there with “It’s totally true! You should see it. She’s never eaten portions like these before!”

(A note, lest you get the wrong impression: My family is not neurotic about food. Rather the opposite - we LOVE food. We think about it, talk about it, and celebrate around it. None of us were more than average-American overweight before my little metabolic meltdown. Mom’s reaction was more surprise than approval. There was food left! Even after Dad finished! That never happens.)

And then, every time, something odd would happen. The people I was talking to would start to tell me why they couldn’t possibly do it. I’ve seen this almost every single time I’ve had this conversation. It’s not odd that people resist change. It’s not odd that people don’t want to give up beer and bread. But it’s odd that people think that this is a logical conversational gambit. I’m not a salesman. I’m not earning points for conversions. And in every case, I wasn’t the one to bring it up. (Although, to be fair, sometimes my mom was.)

So on the plane I started wondering about this. Why is “Oh I can’t do that, here’s why:” the response to “Hey I feel really good and have lost a bunch of weight with these guidelines.” And here’s my theory:

We get so many messages about eating being bad that we start to believe we can’t possibly be good

Think about it. Junk food is bad. Processed food is bad. GMO food is bad. Monoculture food is bad. Meat is bad. Carbs are bad. Fat is bad. Eggs are bad. Alcohol is bad. (And then we get to “bacon is bad” and the entire culture yells “Fuck it!” and orders more bacon.)

It’s this impossible weight to carry every time you put a bite of food in your mouth. Everything is wrong, bad, unhealthy, possibly immoral. Everyone who pays the least attention to these sorts of things (i.e. most American women) knows she’s doing the wrong thing every single time she eats. It’s almost impossible to avoid concluding that you’re just a bad person who does bad things and that’s the way it is.

And so when someone says, in effect, “Hey look, I’ve been a good person and you can see my reward!” (and yes, my jawline is totally a reward,) it would seem both unrealistic and arrogant to say “Oh wow, I’ll go be a good person too!” So they mutter and stammer and come up with excuses, because that huge weight of negativity makes it impossible to actually weigh a new diet on the merits.

I’ve spent years - most of my life, really - being interested in nutrition, educating myself, comparing claims and, recently, testing them. I don’t think about food in terms of “good” and “bad” - I just wonder what effect it will have on my body. But this is very much not a mainstream position, and I lost sight of that. So if I sound arrogant or sanctimonious about this stuff, I apologize. But I really do worry that moralizing about nutrition is making it emotionally impossible for people to try new things and find stuff that works for them.