Is My Ass Really Fat?

Part II: The Diet That Just Won't Work For Me For So Many Reasons

One evening after the gym, my fitness buddy, Dana*, came over to my place for tea. While she sipped her pepermint tea, I downed a banana, a lotusnut "dim sum" bun, a bowl of pistachios and some tortilla chips with guacamole (homemade guacamole, natch), washed down with several glasses of mineral water. As I went to the fridge and got myself a tasty lemon yogurt, Dana freaked out and practically yelled, "Wow! You eat a lot! You eat even more than I do. Are you still going to have dinner after this?"

The truth was that yes, I was going to have dinner after this. That night I was going to have vegetable stir fry with egg over udon noodles. It's a nice, salty, starchy, tasty end to my workout routine. Dana, of course, was appalled, "Udon noodles? Those are full of carbs! You're going to eat all the calories you burned off at the gym. No wonder you never lose weight."

Try as I might, I can't not eat after I go to the gym, especially if I've been doing a weight-lifting-and-aerobics combo. I leave the gym and I'm ravenous. On a couple of occasions I've stopped by the Tim Horton's near the gym and bought myself a crueller. That drives Dana absolutely nuts because it's all carbs and fats, her mortal enemies. Dana prefers to patronize the hotdog vendor nearby. One time she tried to convince me to join her.

"I can't eat these sausages," I told Dana. "I don't know what's in them."

"I know what you mean. I don't know how many calories there are in one, either," Dana said. "But on the upside, even if there are a lot of calories, they're mostly from protein, so that's good. If you make this your supper, you're fine."

"That's not what I mean, hon. These sausages are made of mystery meat. I have no idea what they're actually made of and that makes me feel gross."

"And you know what's in a crueller?"

Touché.

This vignette prettymuch sums up how I feel about diets. I can't do diets. Dana is totally concerned with keeping her carb, fat and calorie intake low while keeping her protein intake high. She makes sure she knows what a portion size is. It's like one of those maximization/minimization problems you did in high school. Do I want my life to be like a maximization/minimization problem all the time? No.

Far worse than living life as if you were trapped in your high school textbook for eternity, is the fact that most dieters I know, Dana included, really don't care about what goes into their bodies. Dana doesn't care that the "yogurt" she buys needs to be pumped full of agar agar, guar gum and gelatin to give it the texture of yogurt. Nor does she care that the ingredient list for her low-fat, low-carb cheese takes up half the package. The important thing is that it fits her diet. Personally, I'll take the extra calories if that's what it takes to avoid the additives.

On a couple of occasions Dana has tasted my food. I buy organic yogurt. It's too high in fat and carbs for Dana to eat regularly, but she's tasted it once or twice. "Wow. This tastes really different. It's good," she said. "But it's too fatty. I can't eat this."

It's almost as if to diet means to eat crap. I have this book called, "Fighting the Freshman Fifteen: A College Woman's Guide To Getting Real About Food And Keeping The Pounds Off" (by Robyn Flipse, Three Rivers Press, 2002). It sucks. I got it for free because I was supposed to interview the authors for my radio show. Unfortunately, the publicist never got back to me so I never got a chance to ask the author,

• "Why do you emphasize thinness rather than health?"
• "Why does the cover show an anorexic woman on the cover? Or is she a pre-pubescent girl?"
• "Why do you de-emphasize fitness (only a few pages at the end of the book)?"
• "Why do you insist that young women keep a food diary, which may cause a young woman who is already stressed out to become obsessive about her food intake and risk deveoping an eating disorder?"

One day I actually tried out their food diary. I ate almost all my calories for the day at breakfast and all I had was two slices of whole-grain toast with nut butter and two glasses of orange juice. The book recommends eating processed cheese slices because you know exactly how many calories there are in each slice. That is not right. But I'm guessing that if I followed the book's food plan, I'd lose weight no problem. Apparently, for my activity level, I need 1600 calories per day to maintain my weight. To shed the extra twenty pounds, I'd need to eat even fewer calories. I personally don't think I could work out, but according to the book (p.131):

"No matter how many hours you spend at the gym and how few hours your boyfriend does, you cannot eat from the same plate, mouthful for mouthful...It's the gender differences that regulate height, lean body mass, and hormones that have given men a decided advantage at the table. Simply because they are male, they can stay in pretty good shape while eating like a locomotive and exerting very minimal amounts of energy. Women, on the other hand, must constantly tame their apetites and tone their muscles just to be entitled to a measly 1600 calories a day."

I'd argue with the book, but hey, I eat like a locomotive and I work out all the time and I'm still twenty pounds too heavy. Meanwhile, Dana is right on the money eating her low-everything food, taking her vitamins and spending an hour a day on the treadmill. It doesn't matter that my extra-bulky, muscular frame burns more calories while sitting on its ass than most people's, I'm a Big Fat Heffer Who Should Learn to Eat Less.

This is why diets don't work for me.

Next time in Part III of "Is My Ass Really Fat?"
"Just Because I'm Sweating Like a Pig Doesn't Mean I'm Out of Shape!"

*Dana is a composite of a few of my friends. No one person I know is that obsessed about food. Except for a chick I knew in the early 90's, but she had an eating disorder.