An "A" paper should take intellectual risks, take the reader out of his or her comfort zone of trite, safe assumptions and create new insights. The following essay, "Dieting Drama Queens," succeeds at being insightful as the writer condemns most dieters as frauds who, motivated by "juvenile fantasies," are looking for attention more than they are weight loss. One of the pleasures of the following essay is its mean, scabrous, pungent, almost satirical tone, so strong that the reader can actually hear the writer's powerful voice.
Dieting Drama Queens
One of the major purposes of literature, philosophy, and religion is to show us a way out of our self-centeredness, for our chronic naval gazing stunts our growth and imprisons us in our own private hell from which escape is nearly impossible. Sadly, two of America’s favorite pastimes, overeating and dieting, are not opposite drives at all, but are rooted in the same miserable condition of self-centeredness and loneliness. Eating obsessively becomes a way of pampering the bored self while chronic dieting becomes a way of undergoing an adolescent drama that the dieter believes will result in him being lavished with the attention of others. In fact, the dieter’s presumed objectives to lose weight and to improve fitness are secondary to his need to become the center of everyone else’s attention because he believes his going on a diet suddenly makes him special and by adhering to this or that fashionable diet he now has a conversation piece that he did not have before. If you have any doubts about the inflated self-regard that dieting affords, look at the TV show The Biggest Loser, which indulges the fantasies of the most egregious narcissist. The show features dieters, standing before a live audience, after a week of brutal working out and dieting. Magnified over a dozen times on a giant video screen, they step on a scale as millions of earnest TV viewers watch how many pounds of fat they have dropped. The contestants’ exhibition of weight loss is followed by a roar of applause, a massive gush of approval that propels the dieters to continue with their success. If only the rest of us aspiring dieters could have such a show, where every pound dropped and every tempting bite of ice cream shunned is followed by a collective American Hug of Support. I’m sure many of us then would at last find the motivation we’ve been looking for.
For those of us who do not have the advantage of a million strong support system, we still feel compelled to join the latest diet trend because going on the latest diet fad, like watching American Idol, gives us something to talk about at the water cooler. If we don’t watch American Idol or go on the South Beach diet during the height of its popularity, we will suffer a certain ostracism because these popular movements have become a common currency of shared experience that unites Americans. To be left out of the conversation is one of our biggest fears. To be the center of conversation our deepest striving.
Dieting from a motivation of self-centeredness wouldn’t be all bad if diets actually worked, but they clearly do not. Studies show that over 95% of dieters actually gain weight six months after initiating their diet and screw up their metabolism, slowing it down to famine mode, resulting in even more weight gain. That diets don’t work becomes even more evident when we consider that thousands of dieting books are published every year precisely because none of them are effective. If a diet book actually worked, we’d all buy the same book and no other diet books would be able to compete with it. The futility of dieting becomes even more evident when we consider the latest research published in The New England Journal of Medicine by the renowned researcher Dr. Jules Hirsch who has discovered something he calls “Set Point,” the body weight all of us are predisposed to stabilizing at. No matter how much we exercise or diet, he says, we will inevitably return to our Set Point. Too much dieting and exercise and our metabolism slows down to compensate. Too little dieting and exercise and our metabolism speeds up. If what Dr. Hirsch says is true—and my own experience supports his thesis—then we should be skeptical of all the fad diets that promise to defy our Set Point.
Clearly, the scientific knowledge and empirical evidence points to the futility of dieting, yet many people feel compelled to go on new diets all the time, not because they work, but because these compulsive dieters are addicted to the drama and attention that going on a diet provides them. I hate to break the bad news but these chronic dieters are spending money on diet programs that don’t work in part because the dieters are incurably immature and self-centered. They don’t need a diet book; what they need is a book that will liberate them from their immaturity, their loneliness, and their self-absorption.
Until they read such a book, however, they will be stuck on a variety diets and weight-loss methods, which appeal to a variety of juvenile fantasies. Most low-carb diets, for example, purportedly allow the dieter to return to his caveman roots since his diet now essentially consists of meat. He will gorge on fatty organs, gizzards, kidneys, livers, not to mention the usual staple of steaks, ribs, and chops. He will ignore the danger of all the saturated fat he consumes since he will convince himself that he is “returning to his natural state” when Neanderthals dragged three-ton wooly mammoths back to the cave and assimilated the fats without the aid of Lipitor. His large-browed ancestors didn’t need to worry about cholesterol checks and HDL-LDL ratios, the modern-day dieter says to himself, so why should I? What he forgets is that the typical Neanderthal didn’t have to worry about hardening of the arteries since his life expectancy, shortened by the likelihood of tribal warfare or being pounced on by a saber-toothed tiger, was the ripe age of nineteen.
Another juvenile fantasy is to spend the rest of your life eating the vice of your choice, be it ice cream, cookies, cupcakes, pizza, or peanut butter. There are diet doctors who take your favorite food, mix a few vitamins and protein powder in them, call it their “formula,” and charge you exorbitant fees to eat so you can gobble on cookies or cupcakes throughout the day. How long one can eat the same food depends on the severity of one’s food fixation. I suppose there are some who would be content to spend the rest of their lives eating bowls of ice cream fortified with essential proteins, vitamins, and minerals, but I imagine their need to lose weight is eclipsed by severe psychological problems, for which there may be no cure.
The psychological imbalances that compel people to go on the hundreds of sham diets that are constantly being marketed should be the focus our attention, not the diets themselves. One of the major diet motivations is an acute sense of loneliness. The dieter feels that by adhering to a diet, he is joining a club in which likeminded souls, as enlightened as he is, are joined in the same struggle. At the same time, the non-dieters, that is to say, the non-believers, are to be shunned for surely they will pose a bad influence on the dieter and impede his objective to lose weight. Joining a club with well-defined requirements that establish an Us-Vs.-Them mentality is a strong tribalistic urge that the lonely dieter embraces with all his being.
Indeed, the Us-Vs. Them streak that pervades many dieters makes certain diets almost religious in their scope. As Malcolm Gladwell writes in his New Yorker essay “The Pima Paradox,” the “diet-book genre” must contain a “Eureka Moment,” that is, the author must establish a narrative in his book that shows how he languished in Darkness and then found the Light, namely, his or her diet plan, which of course is nothing less than a panacea. Thus the diet—whether it be eating raw or organic foods or low-carb or Pritikin or Scarsdale—becomes a form of religious conversion in which the dieter joins a new religious order.
Perhaps this need to join a tribe compels dieters to fail so that they must always go on a new diet and find a new community and thus establish their sense of belonging all over again. In this sense, then, we can say that dieting can become as much as an addiction as chocolate, caviar, or Camembert. The addicted dieter must always fail to meet his weight goals so that he can go on yet another diet in order to fill the void and to make friends all over again.
This isn’t to say that the chronic dieter is insincere in his motivations. It’s just that he has unconscious motivations that he does not see and these motivations, to always be dieting for the sake of attention and belonging, often interfere with his motivation to effectively keep his weight off so that he can finally stop dieting. These contrary impulses leave the chronic dieter fat and gullible for new diets, for which there seems to be a never-ending supply.
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