Eat Cookies and Lose Weight!
Just don’t do it the way the owners of “cookie diet” companies encourage you to.
NY Times writer Abby Ellin and I must have been on the same wavelength Wednesday night. After I posted my last entry, on working ‘temptation’ foods into your diet, the Times ran an article questioning the efficacy and safety of so-called “cookie diets.” Based on my own approach to nourishment and weight maintenance, I located the following problems in the ethos of “cookie diets”:
1. Lack of balance! Cookie diets supposedly integrate a “forbidden” food into one’s everyday diet–which is what I recommended re: chocolate-chip pancakes for breakfast. Severely restricting your consumption of other foods, though? Where’s the nourishment (which I am foolish enough to think is the purpose of food)?
2. The cookies on these diets do not seem to qualify as food. Made of distinctly non-cookie-like ingredients, and engineered to absorb water in the stomach and create a sense of fullness, they are what Michael Pollan refers to as “food-like substances.” (The United States threw out a law many years ago that would have forced companies to label foods with lots of additives as “imitation”; too bad for us, since now most supermarket “bread” contains 30+ “ingredients.”)
3. Starving yourself all day and then indulging in cookies, even if they are real cookies, is not a sustainable lifestyle. Attaining and maintaining a healthy weight is very important to overall health, but adopting habits you can’t sustain yields temporary results. It may also make you miserable.
I speak from experience: not too long ago I was relying on processed ‘diet foods’ to get me through the day. I gave them up slowly and reluctantly, helped along by the observation of a caring and brave roommate that my irritability had increased proportionally with the frozen meals in my diet.
It was only after a recent trip to Bulgaria that I realized food culture in the U.S. is particularly focused on “food” that isn’t really food. The moment you get sick of the cookie-and-starve cycle (I’m guessing quickly), you’ll be back where you started: in need of a strategy that works long-term.
I am glad that the Times put a spotlight on the importance of moderation and the dangers of going to extremes where diet is concerned. The question: is America listening?
wwkrissiewear
October 27th, 2009 at 3:11 pm #
Like Montaigne said back in the day, “All things in moderation.” Still makes sense today! Oh, and I think America is deaf… or maybe just wearing headphones?
admin
October 27th, 2009 at 3:38 pm #
Yes, it’s still a very relevant quote for sure. I think the U.S. has lost its sense of what moderation is, and that’s why people can’t seem to find balance. We are surely familiar with excess, and some people are familiar with deprivation, but there aren’t too many examples of the middle ground. It’s as if both excess and deprivation are somehow “sexy” even if they are harmful, while moderation is that thing you know you *should* practice but it’s just too old-fashioned and too much of a bother. There are the headphones you mentioned!