Herculodge

Confronting the Spoiled Baby

 

As I thought more and more about my new rule of eating no more than 3,000 calories a day and the mathematical formulation that would presumably give me success, I was struck by the fact that my biggest impediment to achieving any of my goals, including my weight loss, was the spoiled baby that raged inside me. This new self-imposed boundary resulted in an internal hissy fit. I found myself reacting to the 3,000-calorie limit as if it were some insurmountable task, some trauma, some injury from which I could never recover. I was acting as if the very word “limit” was a strain to my psyche and I resented this boundary, this 3,000 calorie threshold, which was rather generous when I considered many less fortunate souls with slower metabolisms and less active lifestyles than mine must limit their calories to 1,200 a day. In fact, 3,000 calories a day, often considered 500-1,000 more than an adult needs, is quite lavish.

I will even go so far as to say the 3,000 calorie limit does not even constitute dieting. I was whining like a big baby for nothing. The struggle I was having was not, objectively speaking, with limiting my calories to 3,000 a day, which is a number too high to worry about. The problem was the spoiled baby I had to contend with. My obsession with the idea of being limited on a diet freaked me out because I am both anxious and spoiled. Therefore, overcoming my eating problem pointed to overcoming something far more significant than my undesired body weight. Succeeding at keeping my calories under 3,000 was about building my character, making me less self-indulgent, less helpless, less spoiled, less babyish.

My quest to keep my calories at 3,000, then, is more than a physical quest; it is a moral one and to be successful on my quest I must do the following: 

1. Get a calorie counter and know how many calories I am eating per meal. To be sure my calorie count is accurate, I must assiduously record everything I eat in a journal.  I ended up getting The Calorie King Calorie Fat & Carbohydrate Counter based on a recommendation by Jillian Michaels, a personal trainer who has a radio show in Los Angeles.
2. Every day I must eat 200 calories a day of “indulgent” food such as chocolate or ice cream in order to fool my brain into thinking I am not on a diet per se.
3. Eat 3 meals that are 700 calories and 3 snacks that are about 250.
4. If I become anxious and this anxiety compels me to eat, I must purge my oral fixation by chomping on celery, carrots, and maybe apples, bearing in mind that this “chomping session” must be added to my calorie intake and is therefore not a “free for all.” Thus if I eat 300 calories of carrots, one of my meals will have to be reduced from 700 to 400.

 

My anxiety about keeping my calories at the astronomically high 3,000 mark points to some serious psychological weaknesses I needed to address: 

1. My good fortune has allowed me to become dependent on the rich array of food choices that are available to me.
2. I did not wake up spoiled. Rather, I gradually became spoiled and only now do I know I am shackled to my self-indulgences when the condition has become so bad as to make 3,000 calories a day feel like a trauma when in fact it is not.
3. My fear that I can not limit my calories points to learned helplessness, a condition that, like being spoiled, has grown gradually. 

To conclude, my 3,000 calories limit is, when looked at objectively, hardly a program that can be characterized as arduous, austere, or punishing. The problem lies in my head and I need to conquer my eating excesses so that I not only achieve my desired weight but to build my character in such a way that I can feel proud, mature, confident—a man in control, a man who knows how to enjoy life within the proper boundaries. If I can not live within boundaries, then I am going to suffer the fate of those bratty children who could not control theirs in the classic 1972 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I have to look at the film’s moral lesson to not act like an incontinent spoiled brat. I have to act like—no, actually be—a man. 

Reversing the Slow Sojourn to Fat City

 

All my life I have heard about the frog in a pot of water who dies not by suddenly being scalded but in the comfort of sitting in room-temperature water that slowly warms until the frog is boiled to death. I suppose that analogy explains a lot of human folly, including the manner in which we wake up one morning to find ourselves fat. Complacency, laxity, and bad habits slowly take their toll until we find, to our horror, that we look horrible and sometimes feel helpless to do anything about it.

I was heading in that direction after my dramatic weight loss, slowly inching my way back to Fat City. Fueled by the humiliation of being too heavy, especially by that image of the Overfed American in the hotel window, I was able to succumb to the rigors of the diet, but after I got my weight down, I grew more and more lax. That was the beginning of seeing my weight creep up to unacceptable levels.

Then there was another factor that contributed to my slow weight-gain: I replaced the 6 miles of running per day in the summer of 2005 with power yoga, and my weight increased to 230 over the next four years. In spite of my added weight, I refused to go back to the running for several reasons. One, the running gave me shin splints, plantar fasciitis, lower back pain, chafing, and sometimes headaches. I was sick of applying gobs of Vaseline between my thighs and across my nipples before every run and putting my reeking ammonia-soaked gym clothes in the wash. I was sick of having to buy a new pair of $100 running shoes every three months. I was sick of catching colds and other viruses, including pink eye, from the gym’s filthy cardio machines. I was sick of having to take a two-hour nap after my 6-mile runs and still not feeling refreshed. And I was simply sick of the gym. I had been going to health clubs since 1974 at the age of 13 and by 2005 I had lost my tolerance for all the peacock strutters and self-ascribed training experts and other annoying gasbags who frequented the gym.  

But most compellingly of all, I quit the gym because I had fallen in love with power yoga, the way it made me feel, the way it afforded me flexibility that I never had before, and the freedom it gave me to exercise at home.  Before I did yoga, I could not turn my head when moving my car in reverse without feeling a sharp pain in my neck. After doing yoga for a few months, the sharp neck pain had vanished.

However, yoga has one disadvantage. It does not not burn calories like running. My one-hour treadmill runs resulted in a expenditure of 1,200 calories. In contrast, my yoga workouts burned about half that. To increase the calorie-burn of my workouts, I have made it more rigorous by incorporating high-rep dumbbell and medicine ball exercises into my power yoga routine, which I perform for an hour five or six days a week.

But in spite of my combination of power yoga, medicine balls, and dumbbells, which burn between 700-800 calories per hour workout, my weight has crept up to 230.

Another thing I miss about the running is the safety net it affords me. If I indulge in some dessert or other, I can simply run it off. Without the running, I have the heightened anxiety that no matter how hard I work-out, one or two slices of boysenberry pie with vanilla ice cream could set me back for weeks.

This is the condition I find myself in August of 2008. Four years after reaching my target weight of 210, I’ve allowed myself to eat about 3,700 calories a day, resulting in a weight-gain of 20 pounds, the mid-way point of the 259-pound Overfed American traipsing around the Kauai Sheraton Inn.

Knowing this makes me very anxious. Something must be done. I do not want to be like the average American troglodyte who indulges his appetites without thought. I want to be in control of my life. I need a boundary in a country that embraces reckless excess. One boundary that I think I might be able to live with is 3,000 calories a day. It’s a good number for me. I’ve been stuck at 230 for about a year now so apparently 3,700 calories maintains my current weight provided I continue my intense home-exercise routine.

Getting my weight down should be a very simple math problem: There are 3,600 calories in a pound of fat. If I keep my calories at 3,000, that will be 4,900 fewer calories a week than I am currently consuming. Over six months, or 24 weeks, that would be 117,600 fewer calories consumed, which divided by 3,600 is 32.7 pounds of fat.

This number amazes me. I have to tell it to myself again and again. If I simply stick to 3,000 calories a day for six months and continue my current training, my weight will go from 230 to 198 pounds. That’s more than 10 pounds beyond my target weight. More importantly, I will no longer be marching toward Fat City. I’ll be marching to a much better place, a land of boundaries, discipline, self-control, and the self-confidence that comes from having a lean, muscular physique. Suddenly, my “vision” of 3,000 Calories a Day seems like a miracle and bringing it to fruition seems like the difference between heaven and hell. 

The Overfed American

 

The other day, I heard Dr. Dean Edell say on the radio that the average American consumes 3,700 calories a day, which he said is a huge amount and explains why so many Americans are fat. I’m a bit alarmed to consider that 3,700 calories is about the amount I ingest on a daily basis, give or take a few. And this number explains why at 46 years of age my 230-pound bodyweight is 20-30 pounds heavier than I want it to be for appearance and health reasons.

I’ve been working out most of my life. At 13, I was a Junior Olympic Weightlifting champion. At 19, I was second place in Mr. Teenage San Francisco. I know the confidence and satisfaction associated with looking muscular and lean and I know, ever since my metabolism slowed down in my early thirties, the chagrin and displeasure of having a Pillsbury Dough Boy coat of flab over my frame.

No time did I experience this humiliation more than in the summer of 2003 at the age of 42. My wife Carrie and I were walking back from the brunch buffet at the Sheraton Inn in Kauai where I had just ingested a 3,000-calorie breakfast of macadamia nut pancakes, French toast made with Hawaiian sweet bread, turkey sausage patties, and scrambled eggs with melted cheddar all washed down with several tall glasses of freshly-squeezed orange juice. As I strutted my 259-pounds outside the buffet room and past a hotel window, I saw the reflection of a portly gentleman, dressed in safari shorts and a turquoise tank top, which sported the striking image of the iconic sea turtle. This unsightly man I gazed upon looked like the stereotype of an overfed American.

I walked closer toward the bloated image and I was overcome by the shock and anxiety that the reflection was not some other guy for whom I could judge with gleeful ridicule but me. I was that dude, the type of person that I had mocked and scorned most of my life.

This was a huge moment for me, what literary people might call an “epiphany,” and I was fortunate to have experienced it. Most people are denied, or deny themselves, such moments of clarity. It is my belief that something like 95% of the human race walk around Planet Earth with their heads up their butts and this is how they die—never knowing what the hell is really going on. But on that summer day in Kauai when I saw that the corpulent man in the window was in fact me, my head uncorked from my butt and I was able to see reality for what it really was. And this reality—me being a chubster—was totally unacceptable. Something had to be done.

Some might argue that I was perfectly fine. After all, my cholesterol was under 200, my blood pressure was normal, and I could run seven miles on the treadmill in under an hour. In fact, on another radio broadcast Dr. Edell reported a major study from obesity researcher MaryFran Sowers that concludes many overweight people are fit and don’t need to lose a pound in order to live long, healthy, functional lives. But this did not console me. Even if a doctor told me I could live a long, robust life at a bodyweight of 275 and indulge my eating passions with little or no restraint, I would balk at the offer since more than health I like to look good in a pair of jeans. I like my silk shirts to drape over broad shoulders and taper gracefully over a small waist. So let’s get this on the table right now: Getting my weight down to 210 or so is largely a vanity thing. It’s about self-image and self-confidence. Those are components of being healthy that the MaryFran Sowers study don’t account for. Looks matter. And so does the sense of having control of what one puts in one’s mouth, rather than the other way round in which the individual is a slave to the appetites.

Not wanting to look like the fat American I saw in the hotel window, I returned to Los Angeles from my Kauai vacation and curbed my dietary excesses by filling my belly with large amounts of  vegetables, mostly spinach and broccoli,  stopped drinking fruit juice (which has the sugar equivalent of soda pop) quit eating desserts, and kept my calories under 3,000 for a good year. During that time I lost 40 pounds as my weight steadily went down to about 210, which I consider my ideal weight. At the time, I was running 6 to 7 miles a day on the treadmill.

At 210, I had to buy new clothes. I was 42 years of age, but I looked far younger. People at the gym approached me, congratulated me on my weight-loss and asked me for advice on training and nutrition, as if my newly-acquired lean look credentialed me as some sort of benevolent dietary guru who holds the secrets of weight reduction. Alas, this adulation would prove short-lived.

Dietary Extremism and Confusion in the Age of "Nutritionism"

 

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan is full of wisdom and crucial truths about the way we eat. One thing I learned is that the food industry has obscured and complicated the definition of what constitutes food resulting in our eating of highly-profitable processed foodstuffs that we should not be eating and less profitable real food that we should. It is in the food industry’s interests, Pollan points out, to make us addicted to their synthetic foodstuffs, what he calls “edible foodlike substances,” while avoiding authentic food. This results in all kinds of dietary excesses. Clearly, the food industry’s interests are in conflict with our own. And it’s not just the food industry that wants us to be confused. Pollan explains that nutritionists and journalists “stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding the most elemental question an omnivore confronts.” And the question is what should we be eating?

Pollan is on a mission to save us from the confusion created by these institutions and to steer us away from “edible foodlike substances,” which he says provide the bulk of supermarket food. To avoid this processed foodlike matter, we should, he suggests, only shop at the far edges of the supermarket. These opposite ends showcase the animal proteins on one side and produce on the other. Pretty much everything in the middle is a forgery of what food should be. If we can focus on these opposite ends of the supermarket, we will be better prepared to follow his concise nutritional mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Of course, the food industry packages and markets their most profitable processed foods more aggressively and tries to take our focus off real food to the point that many of us don’t know what real food is.

The problem of what we should eat, and how much, is compounded, Pollan points out, by our once trustworthy parental guidance having been replaced in our current era, “The Age of Nutritionism,” by an unholy amalgam of food marketers, scientists, and government officials who impose upon us “ever shifting dietary guidelines, food-labeling rules, and perplexing pyramids.” These guidelines constantly change and often contradict the previous guidelines often resulting in public apathy and cynicism regarding the pursuit of healthy eating. Even worse, The Age of Nutritionism has over the last half century “actually made us less healthy and fatter.”

Pollan argues that we should not despair. There is a light and that light is beamed from what our mothers or our mother’s mothers ate for our dietary guidance because what they tended to eat was real food. And this is precisely Pollan’s purpose—“to offer a defense of food and the eating thereof.”

Not only is Pollan concerned with defining real food, he convincingly discerns real eating from mindless consumption and here of course his book intersects with Brian Wansink’s. Pollan quotes the eighteenth-century gastronomist, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin who distinguished from the human act of eating, a rich cultural event, with the manner in which animals “feed.”

Pollan is not exaggerating when he claims he must make a defense of food because real food is being attacked by the “Nutritional Industrial Complex,” which is attempting to obliterate real food by replacing it with the “ideology of nutritionsim,” a dangerous dogma comprised of three false tenets: One, nutrients are more important than food. Two, only the scientific community can grasp the highly-specialized world of nutritionism and we, the general public, are at their mercy to guide us. Three, eating is not a cultural act of celebration, as the anthropologists have taught us over the centuries, but a “narrow concept of physical health” in which all the soul and joy has been squeezed out of the act of eating, which is now a cold, technical activity. Worse, this obsession with “correct” eating has pushed us toward extremes that seriously compromise our health and happiness. As Pollan writes: “We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.”

To steer us back on course toward healthy moderation, Pollan examines the serious shortcomings of the Western diet described as “lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything—except vegetable, fruits, and whole grains.” This diet is so contrary to human health, according to Pollan, that no degree of adjusting it with nutritionism can render it suitable for our consumption. We must, Pollan argues, wean ourselves off of the Western diet altogether. In its place we must embrace the farmer’s market,  the “organic movement” and “local agriculture,” all of which are part of the “postindustrial era of food.” Eating local and organic foods, that is to say, eating real foods instead of industrialized processed foods, is the foundation for freeing ourselves from the Western diet. As a general rule, Pollan writes that we shouldn’t eat food that our great grandmother “wouldn’t recognize as food.” Additionally, we should avoid food products that contain unfamiliar ingredients and include high-fructose corn syrup. Another warning that the food we’re eating isn’t really food per se but a food product is when it boasts some health claim or other. This often means that the product was processed and the food industry is claiming that the process adds some nutritional value to the food, but what this really means is that a real food has been turned into a foodstuff. Perhaps the best way to eat real food is to avoid the supermarket and shop at the farmer’s market, which sells real food—produce—fruits, and vegetables. The farmer’s market features the very foods that are in line with Pollan’s mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Pollan’s crusade to turn eating into a celebratory cultural experience focused on real food makes him a torch-bearer of sanity and moderation in an age of misguided do-gooder nutritionists who, as Pollan shows, keep changing the rules, keep making us confused, keep stuffing substandard foodstuffs down our throats, and keep leading us down a path of dangerous dietary extremes.

 

 

The Best Diet Is the One You Don’t Know You’re On

 

Brian Wansink studies human eating behavior in “food psychology labs” in order to see the many variables that influence the choices we make, knowingly or more often mindlessly, when we eat. In his book Mindless Eating he writes that we make over 200 eating decisions every day and that most of us are not aware of these decisions. A lot of these choices are determined by “hidden persuaders,” little cues that can make the difference between a few hundred calories a day and that small difference can over the long-term result in several pounds of unwanted bodyweight.

In his quest to make us more mindful of the eating choices we make, he makes it clear that he wants to discourage us from going on any kind of crash diet. Laying out the purpose of his book, he writes: “This book is not about dietary extremism—just the opposite. It’s about reengineering your environment so that you can eat what you want without guilt and without gaining weight. It’s about reengineering your food life so that it is enjoyable and mindful.”

Mindless Eating differs from diet books in two important ways. One, there must be no drastic reduction of calories in order in order to prevent our metabolisms from resisting and going into outright shut-down mode. But even more importantly, his book does not emphasize physiology and nutrition as much as it focuses on psychology and marketing. And the best psychological state to be in when losing weight is to not consider it as part of a diet. One of Wansink’s major mantras is “The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on.”

According to Wansink, the key to not knowing we’re dieting is to attack the “mindless margin.” This refers to the excess amount of calories, a few hundred usually, we eat a day, not due to hunger, but due to cues that tell us to keep eating. We may also without knowing eat a few hundred calories less and this too is the mindless margin. It is Wansink’s mission to show us the cues that make us eat both more and less every day and show how these few hundred calories add up over the years resulting in a significant weight gain or weight loss. If we want to achieve the latter, Wansink recommends that we learn to reengineer our eating cues so that we eat 100-200 calories less a day. He also of course shows us what signals will cause us to eat extra calories so that we can be mindful of these cues.

He conducts many studies showing what makes us eat more without our not even knowing it. For example, big portions in big bowls and on big plates encourage us to eat even when we would have had a sense of fullness by completing a smaller portion on a smaller dish. Getting free food causes us to overeat because we’re so many of us are programmed to get stuff for free even if it means eating stale, crappy tasting food and lots of it.

In addition to warning us of certain scenarios or conditions that might prompt us to overeat, he gives “Reengineering Strategies” to employ as we attack the mindless margin. His first one is worth the price of the book alone. We should consider eating 20 percent less food than we think we crave because in the end, Wansink writes, you won’t miss it. He writes, “In most of our studies, people can eat 20 percent less without noticing it. If they eat 30 percent less they realize it, but 20 percent is still under the radar screen.” This matter of eating 20 percent less is part of building the habit of eating until you’re 80 percent full, a technique employed, Wansink writes, by the Okinawans whose expression for this 80 percent stop-point is hara hachi bu.

Accompanying the 20 percent less principle is the principle of eating 20 percent more fruits and vegetables. Putting more low-calorie-dense foods in our gut, like most vegetables, gives us more volume and less calories. This principle is one encouraged by a diet book that Wansink actually likes and recommends—The Volumetrics Eating Plan by Dr. Barbara Rolls.

Showing us all the cues that contribute to mindless eating—such as eating mindlessly while watching TV or navigating across the Internet—and giving us dozens of “Reengineering Strategies” to cut into our mindless margin, Wansink has written a sane, scientifically- and psychologically-sound book that gives us the tools to escape the learned helplessness of futile diets and eat with pleasure in moderation.

For me, Mindless Eating is one of the two life savers in a myriad of phony diet books. The other is In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan. 

Dieting and Learned Helplessness

 

When it comes to food, it appears that Americans, collectively, have succumbed to learned helplessness. They cannot stop the compulsion to diet. Nor can they stop the compulsion to overeat. The two compulsions feed off one another and trap American eaters into a vicious cycle. This destructive cycle has short-circuited people’s metabolisms, brains, and overall attitudes towards eating.

Having short-circuited her own relationship with food as an anorexic, Caroline Knapp explains that the “more you meddle with a hunger, the more taboo and confusing it will become. Feed the body too little and then too much, feed it erratically, launch that maddening cycle of deprivation and overcompensation, and the sensation of physical hunger itself becomes divorced from the body, food loaded with alternative meanings: symbol of longing, symbol of constraint, form of torture, form of reward, source of anxiety, source of succor, measure of self-worth.”

How insidious and ironic it is that dieting contributes to our enslavement to this vicious cycle, yet the authors of diet books all promise salvation from this dietary prison. It seems that diet book authors create the mental illness and then promise the antidote. Freud distrusted religion for the same reason. He said religion poisoned our souls and then promised to cleanse us from the very poison it fostered. Likewise, diet book authors, creating the sickness and a feeble antidote, are the religious hacks of the modern age.

Relying on pseudo-science and outright fraud, these authors claim to have the Answer to our dieting woes. In an acute analysis of the fraud and ineptness of diet books, Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “The Pima Paradox” explains that diet book authors all claim to have a “Eureka Moment” in which the writer claims that his or her epiphany is superior to the dietary epiphanies of the competing diet book authors. In this quasi-religious narrative which borrows liberally from The Pilgrim’s Progress, the diet book author shows how he or she was mired in the darkness of misguided dieting and then through his or her own brilliance, serendipity, or both, found Gastronomical Truth and has become a self-anointed Dietary Guide.

Of course, these melodramatic narratives are all a sham as every year hundreds of diet books written by False Messiahs come and go. Even one of the more enduring messianic figures, the late Dr. Robert Atkins, peddler of the low-carb/high-protein diet, faded into dust. His acolytes finally tired of waking up to a breakfast of pork tenderloin and scrambled eggs and snacking on protein-enriched pork rinds. The low-carb stores that used to be on every block of my town are now closed.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t writers who can’t save us from the insanity of our eating. They don’t promise Eureka Moments. Nor do they promise dietary salvation. But they do show a sane approach to eating and as such they are the Light of the Food Writing World.

The two writers I am referring to are Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, and Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. After throwing out the slew of phony diet books from my bookshelves, I have relied on Wansink and Pollan, more than anyone else, to inform my approach to 3,000 Calories a Day.

 

If You Control Your Appetite, Are You Really Living?

 

In Caroline Knapp’s memoir Appetites, she writes about the calm, relief, and “transcendent solace” she experienced in her mid-twenties by starving herself: “The lure of starving—the baffling, seductive hook—was that is soothed, a balm of safety and containment that seemed to remove me from the ordinary, fraught world of human hunger and place me high above it, in a private kingdom of calm.” Retreating inside this “private kingdom,” Knapp was able to allay the overpowering anxiety that she could be overtaken at any moment by her hunger for food, lose all control, and lose her sense of self resulting in shame and disgrace.

To barricade herself from her pernicious hungers, she learned to rely on eating rituals: “For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times. I devoted a monumental amount of energy to this endeavor—thinking about food, resisting food, observing other people’s relationships with food, anticipating my own paltry indulgences in food—and this narrowed, specific, driven rigidity made me feel supremely safe: one concern, one feeling, everything else just background noise.”

Part of her compulsion to maintain an eating ritual is her acute sense of calorie-counting and her awareness of the consequences of eating foods that are high in calories. She writes about the self-loathing that results from eating a piece of cake: “These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake—add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem . . .”

When we micro-manage our slightest activity to “protect” ourselves or to instill discipline, we have to ask ourselves, are we really living?  I’m not just thinking about the way Knapp protects herself from the anxieties that erupt when she loses control of her eating, I’m thinking of other desires. Take, for example, a re-entry student who was enrolled in my college composition class several years ago. She was a single mother. Her husband had left her over ten years earlier when her daughter was one years old. She had never had a relationship since. She was protecting herself from getting hurt again, but she paid a price. She looked bitter and lonely, so much that when she walked into the classroom all the students would be quiet and look at her with unease. She had a dyspeptic, angry demeanor as if her face was broadcasting to the whole world that she was a pissed-off victim of her own prison. Her angry countenance barricaded her from other people, men specifically, to the point that she had reached the condition of being “undateable.” This is precisely what she wanted because by being undateable she would never get hurt again. She had successfully suppressed the urge to have intimacy in order to protect her feelings in the same way that Knapp had suppressed her appetite to protect herself from anxieties and a ruined self-esteem. But are we really alive if we successfully suppress our appetites in the purpose of protecting ourselves? Aren’t we really just creating a self-imposed prison and retreating into a smaller and smaller world? Aren't we seeking the oblivion that Tennessee Williams described when he indulged himself in his luxury hotel room or when I was a cardio junkie? 

I find myself haunted by these questions, for even though I do not, nor have I ever suffered anorexia, I do share some disturbing similarities with Knapp. Like her, I find myself overtaken by similar compulsions—the eating rituals, the calorie counting, the fear that indulgence will be followed by a sense of a degraded self. However, I feel balanced and moderated by my 3,000 Calories a Day. “There’s nothing anorexic or extreme or self-destructive about that,” I say to myself.  “Yes, I do share Knapp’s obsessive, anxious tendencies, but look, everybody, I’m eating 3,000 calories a day!”

Of course, my interior monologue belies the anxiety that my obsessive-compulsive nature could cause me to lose my equilibrium at any moment. Like her, I could be overtaken by hunger and devour a whole strawberry-rhubarb pie, an indulgence that would result in the need to go on an austere diet. In fact, that is exactly what happened to Knapp, both physically and psychologically. As she writes: “The dance of the hungry woman—two steps toward the refrigerator, one step back, that endless loop of hunger and indulgence and guilt—had ceased to be a game; some key middle ground between gluttony and restraint, a place that used to be easily accessible to me, had grown elusive and I didn’t know hoe to get back there.”

For me, this “middle ground” can be achieved by keeping my calories at or slightly under 3,000 calories a day. I look to my goal of 3,000 calories as a model of moderation helping me to avoid erring on the side of indulgence or deprivation. For me, then, the “transcendent solace” that Knapp describes doesn’t come from self-starvation but from moderation and this moderation is embodied by 3,000 Calories a Day.

 

 

The First Month of 3,000 Calories a Day

 

After a month of 3,000 Calories a Day, a goal that I maintain by keeping a daily food journal, my weight has gone from 231 to 224, a modest loss but a welcome one. I’m already able to fit into a few pairs of my “slender” pants. The weight loss is encouraging since my success rate at staying at or under the 3,000 calorie mark has been 48%, 15 out of 31 days. But the good news is that, except for the four days in Las Vegas when my calorie consumption was close to 4,000 a day, the other days I over-shot the 3,000 calorie mark only by a couple of hundred.

Another encouraging sign is that I’m getting better at keeping my goal. In the beginning I was making three crucial errors: eating too many foods at one meal, eating while I was cooking, and counting the calories after the meal rather than pre-planning the amount. As a result of these mistakes, the first twelve days of my food journal showed that I utterly failed to stay at or under 3,000 calories. Usually I hit the 3,300 mark. Then on Day 13 I hit 3,000. After that, I identified my three big mistakes and then I was successful 15 out of the last 19 days, close to 80% success rate. Another important note: I was very hard on myself in terms of counting calories so that whenever I was in doubt I would over-count the calories. What this means is that some of my “failed” days in which I went slightly over 3,000 I may in fact have stayed under the mark.

Another encouraging sign is that I find I can keep my calories between 2,700-3,000 without feeling punished or too hungry. However, I notice that any number below 2,600 and I feel a constant sense of hunger. I also notice that it doesn’t matter if I workout or not. My appetite is the same.

The worse thing about keeping a food journal is that I fear there’s something narcissistic and self-centered about it. I’d rather be someone who just “lives his life,” whatever that means, and doesn’t worry so much about what he eats. But it appears I have to be mindful, diligently so, about my eating. Otherwise, my weight will creep up to unacceptable levels.

This matter of controlling what I eat, and in turn, controlling myself, makes me wonder how healthy it is to be obsessively attuned to one’s appetites and I find myself thinking about a book I read a few years ago about desire in general and its connection to food. The book, titled Appetites, was written by Caroline Knapp, who struggled many years with anorexia and eventually overcame her mental disease with a wisdom and strength that helped her shed light on the hungers that often seem to overtake us. 

3,000 Calories a Day Is Not About Dieting—It’s About Growing Up

 

It’s true diets don’t work. The data shows that most of dieters fail to keep their weight off and most gain even more weight after six months. Worse, dieting, especially the kind that starves the body, short-circuits metabolisms so that they’re slower than before resulting in weight gain. 

My quest to embrace 3,000 Calories a Day therefore should not be looked upon as a diet. For one it does not involve the deprivation one associates with a diet. Deprivation is a relative term. A man who eats 4-5,000 calories a day may feel deprived if he must cut down his intake by 30-40%, but he is simply raging against the loss of indulging his infantile appetites. In fact, 3,000 calories is a generous allotment of food. Most diets are less than 2,000 calories and feel punitive. 

Secondly, exercising control over one’s desires is not some futile activity, but normal, healthy human behavior. As we grow from childhood to adulthood, our maturity is defined by our ability to put aside our short-term gratification and excess for our long-term goals. Our parents teach us this lesson by giving us a weekly allowance. We’re given a certain amount of money and we spend it little by little or all at once. We spend it recklessly or we save it and spend it on things we’ve decided we really want or need or both. We learn how to achieve a goal or indulge our whims and whine when we have no money left to go to the movies with friends. 

A lot of diets employ this type of responsibility exercise. People get a deck of cards worth a certain amount of points and every time they eat they are spending money, so to speak. A big-ticket item would be a slice of pecan pie, which is around 500 calories while a celery stalk is about two. 

Eating sensibly requires the same responsibility of budgeting wisely. No one says it’s impossible to learn to budget one’s money in a responsible manner. Therefore, no one should claim that responsible eating, represented by my limiting myself to 3,000 calories a day, is an impossibility.

 

Usually, people who are responsible in one area are responsible in other areas as well since the character trait of responsibility isn’t something one can usually compartmentalize. Rather, it is a personality trait that pervades all of one’s activities.

 

The inverse is also true. People who spend recklessly eat recklessly.

 

However, irresponsible people often play tricks in which they reward good behavior by trading it for bad behavior. Some people, for example, diet severely and compensate by spending too much. Other people spend too much and being surrounding by their consumer goods curbs their appetite for food. Finding escape in one indulgence in order to act responsibly in another is not what I’m trying to achieve by keeping my boundary at 3,000 calories. Exercising restraint in the matter of food intake should strengthen me to exercise restraint in all of my behavior.  This is my goal in pursuing my 3,000-Calorie Quest. 

 

 

It’s true diets don’t work. The data shows that most of dieters fail to keep their weight off and most gain even more weight after six months. Worse, dieting, especially the kind that starves the body, short-circuits metabolisms so that they’re slower than before resulting in weight gain. 

My quest to embrace 3,000 Calories a Day therefore should not be looked upon as a diet. For one it does not involve the deprivation one associates with a diet. Deprivation is a relative term. A man who eats 4-5,000 calories a day may feel deprived if he must cut down his intake by 30-40%, but he is simply raging against the loss of indulging his infantile appetites. In fact, 3,000 calories is a generous allotment of food. Most diets are less than 2,000 calories and feel punitive. 

Secondly, exercising control over one’s desires is not some futile activity, but normal, healthy human behavior. As we grow from childhood to adulthood, our maturity is defined by our ability to put aside our short-term gratification and excess for our long-term goals. Our parents teach us this lesson by giving us a weekly allowance. We’re given a certain amount of money and we spend it little by little or all at once. We spend it recklessly or we save it and spend it on things we’ve decided we really want or need or both. We learn how to achieve a goal or indulge our whims and whine when we have no money left to go to the movies with friends. 

A lot of diets employ this type of responsibility exercise. People get a deck of cards worth a certain amount of points and every time they eat they are spending money, so to speak. A big-ticket item would be a slice of pecan pie, which is around 500 calories while a celery stalk is about two. 

Eating sensibly requires the same responsibility of budgeting wisely. No one says it’s impossible to learn to budget one’s money in a responsible manner. Therefore, no one should claim that responsible eating, represented by my limiting myself to 3,000 calories a day, is an impossibility.

 

Usually, people who are responsible in one area are responsible in other areas as well since the character trait of responsibility isn’t something one can usually compartmentalize. Rather, it is a personality trait that pervades all of one’s activities.

 

The inverse is also true. People who spend recklessly eat recklessly.

 

However, irresponsible people often play tricks in which they reward good behavior by trading it for bad behavior. Some people, for example, diet severely and compensate by spending too much. Other people spend too much and being surrounding by their consumer goods curbs their appetite for food. Finding escape in one indulgence in order to act responsibly in another is not what I’m trying to achieve by keeping my boundary at 3,000 calories. Exercising restraint in the matter of food intake should strengthen me to exercise restraint in all of my behavior.  This is my goal in pursuing my 3,000-Calorie Quest. 

 

A Warped Physical Ideal Born from a Misguided Imagination

 

 

My quest for 3,000 Calories a Day is about accountability for what I eat and for maintaining moderation. I tend toward the extreme in everything I do and I’ve learned that obsession skews rational judgment. We tend to live in an extreme, either/or culture where we look upon ourselves as winners or losers, rich or poor, home-owners or renters, skinny beautiful people or fat ugly ones.  The irony is that when often pursue what think is the right side of the ledger with such intensity that the image we assume is desirable is often grotesque. I’m reminded of a story I once heard in the gym. I was in the middle of an earnest six-mile treadmill run at the gym when Laura, my former composition student who works as a personal trainer, came up to me and said she had a story she knew I’d like. I slowed down the treadmill considerably so that I could fully listen. 

The story happened a few days earlier in the women’s locker room.  Laura saw a seventy-five-year-old, artificially-tanned, bleach-blonde woman stripping out of her gym tights, and as she did, she revealed her spectacular, smooth, milky white silicone breast implants. Laura said that about ten other breast-augmented women, mostly in their early twenties, had their eyes fixed on the seventy-five-year-old’s nude body and all at once their jaws dropped. 

It wasn’t the upward-pointing, massive artificial breasts that made the old woman such a remarkable and frightening sight. It was the stark contrast of those missile-like breasts, the appendages of a nineteen-year-old, with the woman’s nicotine-coated, wrinkled, leathery body, her skin’s creases and grooves reminiscent of an aged elephant’s sun-cracked hide. Laura said there was this moment of collective terror, evinced by the shared glances of the young women, because they knew in that instant that they were, thanks to their chain smoking, their breast-enlargements, and their frequent trips to the tanning booths, on the same path as the old woman. They had in that instant, I inferred from Laura’s story, access to a sort of nicotine-stained crystal ball that afforded them a snapshot of themselves a half century later, and what they saw inside that crystal ball made them gasp and shudder with horror. 

I suspect most of us for whom moderation is not part of our vocabulary have some variation of a nicotine-stained, silicone-breasted figure, some lugubrious, repellant doppelganger that we are molding ourselves into. Perhaps that is the ultimate quest of fitness fanatics. To become their very own worst nightmare.