This is the second in my series of short travel posts from the road as my husband and I drive from one side of the country to the other. See highlights from our trip here: Across the Great Divide.
Yesterday it hit me that the more we travel the less we eat.
A big reason for this is logistical: we don’t really have any food in the car—unless you count goldfish or apples, which we’re getting sick of and I don’t really count as food anyway. So we have to stop and buy food every time we want something real to eat.
And since we’re driving across the top of the country, it isn’t unusual to go sixty miles or more without seeing a restaurant or roadside convenience store, and even when we do find one, our options are limited. I’m almost getting tired of eating Buffalo (almost), which is the main theme in the food we find up here—Buffalo burgers, Buffalo brats, Buffalo dogs, Buffalo stew, you name it. (And, thankfully, we’ve only seen one McDonald’s since we left Iowa several days ago.) So finding food is hard enough.
And another reason we’re eating less is because we’re doing so much more. On Tuesday we visited six—yes, six!—American treasures: the Badlands, Wall Drug, Mount Rushmore, the Crazyhorse Monument, Deadwood, and Devil’s Tower. And after that, on Wednesday, there was Little Bighorn.
We basically zigzagged across South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana trying to hit every spot we could before they closed the gates on us or the sun went down. (We barely got to Devil’s Tower before the latter happened, as you can see in the picture above.)
Because of all this rushing around, we didn’t have much time to spend eating, and have instead eaten almost solely to fuel our bodies rather than to satisfy our cravings. This makes me wonder if we eat more when we don’t have enough to do—or at least enough to do that makes us happy. I do know this: what I’ve missed out on in terms of eating I’ve more than made up for in experiences. It’s a trade I’m happy to make.
Dave and I are on a road trip right now—traveling from our home in Kentucky to California by way of many great American landmarks including Mount Rushmore, Little Bighorn, Yellowstone National Park, Devil’s Tower, and many more. (If you’re interested, you can follow our progress on our Tumblr blog, Across the Great Divide.)
Since I’ll be away for a few weeks and have limited internet access, I’m going to run a series of short travel posts during this time rather than writing regular-length entries.
Here’s my first travel post, which I’m calling “Do you see yourself as an ugly duckling or a beautiful swan”. . .
I had an epiphany pretty quickly after we left home. At the end of the first day, Dave and I stopped in Kansas City, Missouri, to have dinner with my very first best friend, Ruthie. Ruthie and I were BFFs when we were very young—from around the age of three to around the age of eight, give or take a year or two. We were pretty tight, so much so that Ruthie once gave me chicken pox and when she told me she was moving to Kansas City after second grade, I cried for two whole weeks.
Since we were so close, it’s no surprise Ruthie remembered many fun stories about me. But one particular memory of hers made me question how I see myself.
Ruthie reminded me about the time I had appeared in a school play—probably in kindergarten—as the ugly duckling.
I had forgotten about this experience, but as soon as Ruthie mentioned it, the whole thing came back to me: as the ugly duckling I stood at the front of the stage with my back to the audience and wagged my fluffy duck tail at all of them. According to Ruthie, I stole the show, sending the whole audience into laughter—just as any five-year-old shaking her feathered butt at a room full of people would. But, to the audience’s surprise, when I turned around and faced them, I had been transformed into a beautiful swan.
That’s all either one of us recall about the performance, but we both also remember that I had no trouble playing the part and was an extremely confident child.
I’m still confident about almost every aspect of my identity, but on rare occasions I struggle to feel confident about my appearance, something I oddly never worried about when I was a five-year-old ugly duckling.
This makes me wonder: why have I changed so much in the past thirty-seven years and what caused that change? And, almost more importantly, what can I do to get back to that level of confidence? The kind of confidence that allowed me to shake my tail at a room full of people and let everyone call me the ugly duckling?
I wish I could go back to my adolescent self—the time when I probably became less confident—and shake my doubts out of me. But since I can’t do that, I guess I’ll just have to obliterate any remaining insecurities now and focus instead on shaking my fluffy tail.
Some good news last week I never got around to talking about: Vogue, the most influential fashion magazine in the world, has banned models who are either too thin or too young.
According to Conde Nast International Chairman Jonathan Newhouse, “Vogue believes that good health is beautiful. Vogue Editors around the world want the magazines to reflect their commitment to the health of the models who appear on the pages and the well-being of their reader.”
That’s pretty damn impressive.
And it gets better . . .
Vogue editors have agreed to “not knowingly work with models under the age of 16 or who appear to have an eating disorder.”
To accomplish the former, they’re actually going to check IDs when casting models. I have no idea how they’re going to achieve the latter, but I imagine they will adopt similar techniques to the ones used on runways overseen by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), a group that also bans too-young or too-thin models.
The CFDA has emphasized that age and weight are a real problem in the industry, saying, “designers generally produce only one sample size for the runway, and in the last decade there has been a dramatic downward shift in the sample size of some of the top design houses. As a result, models are under increasing pressure to be thinner and thinner, and younger and younger. The industry’s hiring of prepubescent-appearing teenage girls as models of adult clothing sets an unrealistic standard; hips and breasts, the curves that define the female figure, are absent. Some models have difficulty maintaining the body ideal as they move into adulthood and run the risk of engaging in unhealthy eating behaviors that lead to eating disorders.”
Thank God they’re admitting what we all know to be true—that curves are absent are far too many models.
No matter how you slice it, this is good news—for models and for women who see the images of models in everyday life.
In other words, it’s good for all of us.
And that’s because, as we all know, until we start seeing regular-sized women in our magazines and on our screens, we’ll continue to have trouble feeling like we can measure up.
No, Vogue isn’t going to start featuring women who wear the same size—twelve—as the average American woman, but at least this is a step in the right dreiction. At least something is changing.
An interesting side note: Vogue‘s U.S. editor-in-chief Anna Wintour was instrumental in crafting similar guidelines for the CFDA in 2007 and no doubt played a role in this decision. A thinly veiled version of Wintour was played by Meryl Streep a few years ago in The Devil Wears Prada, depicting her as a heartless bitch would do anything to get ahead—even if it meant hurting those closest to her. There’s no doubt Wintour was involved in this decision by Vogue to try to improve the model problem, and it makes me wonder—did the movie just make her out to be so awful just because she’s a strong, successful woman? It’s certainly something to consider.
This weekend Dave and I went to see The Five-Year Engagement starring Emily Blunt and Jason Segel. It’s not the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it had its moments. And I was pretty entertained by the jabs the writers took at higher education. Suffice it to say the movie accurately captured what it’s like to work in academia, especially when you’re married to someone who needs a job too.
But academia is not what I want to talk about tonight. (Lord knows I’ve been thinking about it all day, which is enough.) What I want to talk about is Jason Segel, the film’s male lead.
Segel is probably best known for his role on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, but he’s also a regular fixture in Judd Apatow-produced projects such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall,Knocked Up, and Freaks and Geeks (one of the best TV shows nobody watched).
Since he’s starred in other Apatow films, I was shocked to find out that Segal was put on a strict diet by studio execs when he began making The Five-Year Engagement. According to Segal, “I was told that it had to be conceivable that Emily Blunt would ever choose me to be her husband.”
And that’s why they put him on a diet.
Segal goes on to say: “I didn’t enjoy it, but they sent a trainer to set and I had to work out twice a day, and then he would watch me all day and monitor my eating.”
It sounds just awful—can you imagine having someone watch you eat all day?
But Segel claims he still got his fill because he played a chef in the film and would eat on set: ”I paid my costars a nominal amount of money to forget their lines,” Segel explains, presumably so they would have to do multiple takes of scenes in which eating was required.
I’m not thrilled that Segel was put on a diet for the film—as so many actresses have been forced to do before—but I am happy that, for the first time I know of, studio execs are thinking about the fact that audiences might not always buy some of the movies in which they pair gorgeous actresses with schlubby actors, a problem I’ve been complaining about for years.
Could this be a sign that Hollywood is finally getting the message that we don’t believe it when people like Emma Stone end up with people like Jonah Hill (as she did in Superbad)? And that it’s unfair and unhealthy to expect women to look perfect on film while letting their co-starring men appear more like real people?
I really hope so, but I also know that change in Hollywood happens about as fast as change happens in Washington. In other words, it doesn’t happen.
Keep your fingers crossed that I’m wrong about this.
We’re having our second party this spring tomorrow night, and as we clean the house, hide the dirty laundry, and prepare the food, I’m reminded of how little people ate at our last party a month ago.
Our previous party was an ’80s dance party, so we served ’80s-themed food. I had a hell of a time coming up with ’80s food ideas, and ultimately I realized it was because—back in my teenage years—everyone ate processed foods. We’re talking Hot Pockets, Steak ‘Ums, frozen dinners, Fruit Roll Ups, Easy Cheese, Mac ‘n Cheese, Cheese Wiz, Spaghettios—all the stuff we try to stay away from now. But I figured, when in Rome . . . and served a bunch of unhealthy snack foods to my dancing friends.
Even though the food was yummy and we got plenty of compliments on it, nobody ate very much. I’m used to going to parties where friends and family step up to the table one minute and leave it pillaged the next, so I was shocked.
Why hadn’t people eaten more? Why hadn’t I eaten more?
But pretty quickly after it was over, I figured out the answer to that question—people didn’t eat very much because they were WAY TOO BUSY dancing. How cool is that??? My friends and I danced for about three hours that night! We took a break about ninety minutes in to sit and catch our breath, maybe grab another beer, but nobody really ate. Maybe we were too tired or sweaty or somehting. . . whatever the cause, we just did not eat much at all.
And this made me think about how rare it is to go to a party that isn’t about food. Most of the time Americans get together to eat—whether it’s party food or a full meal—and we almost never exercise in a social setting.
And maybe that’s our problem—all of our fun is about eating rather than moving, which is what’s really need to do more of.
We read stories in women’s magazines all the time about how people workout more if they have a workout partner or how it’s better to join a gym or take an exercise class when starting a new fitness program than trying to do it alone.
But maybe it makes even more sense to spend the time we set aside for having fun doing something active. After all, that’s what we did when we were kids (and I’ve talked before about how much more exercise we got then in my “Returning to Childhood” post)—we roller skated, we bowled, we danced, we skateboarded, we swam, we rode bikes, we DANCED!
In fact, almost EVERYthing we did socially revolved around exercise.
I wonder what would happen if we did that now? Would we all go back to our adolescent weight? Would we be able to start eating Hot Pockets and Easy Cheese whenever we wanted?
A fourteen-year-old girl is doing her part to change the world.
Julia Bluhm is sick of seeing women in magazines who promote unrealistic standards of beauty because they’ve been Photoshopped and airbrushed to the point that they don’t even resemble themselves anymore.
As a result, Bluhm is asking Seventeen magazine to feature one photoshop-free spread in their pages ever month.
Bluhm—and the Spark a Movement website—have launched a petition to support their cause, which has already garnered over 20,000 signatures. They also plan to visit Seventeen headquarters tomorrow (Wednesday, May 2nd) to express their views and fight for their cause.
So please sign their petition tonight and support young women who reject impossible standards of beauty.
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PETITION: Give Girls Images of Real Girls!
Girls want to be accepted, appreciated, and liked. And when they don’t fit the criteria, some girls try to “fix” themselves. This can lead to eating disorders, dieting, depression, and low self esteem.
I’m in a ballet class with a bunch of high-school girls. On a daily basis I hear comments like: “It’s a fat day,” and “I ate well today, but I still feel fat.” Ballet dancers do get a lot of flack about their bodies, but it’s not just ballet dancers who feel the pressure to be “pretty”. It’s everyone. To girls today, the word “pretty” means skinny and blemish-free. Why is that, when so few girls actually fit into such a narrow category? It’s because the media tells us that “pretty” girls are impossibly thin with perfect skin.
Here’s what lots of girls don’t know. Those “pretty women” that we see in magazines are fake. They’re often photoshopped, air-brushed, edited to look thinner, and to appear like they have perfect skin. A girl you see in a magazine probably looks a lot different in real life. As part of SPARK Movement, a girl-fueled, national activist movement, I’ve been fighting to stop magazines, toy companies, and other big businesses from creating products, photo spreads and ads that hurt girls’ and break our self-esteem. With SPARK, I’ve learned that we have the power to fight back.
That’s why I’m asking Seventeen Magazine to commit to printing one unaltered — real — photo spread per month. I want to see regular girls that look like me in a magazine that’s supposed to be for me.
For the sake of all the struggling girls all over America, who read Seventeen and think these fake images are what they should be, I’m stepping up. I know how hurtful these photoshopped images can be. I’m a teenage girl, and I don’t like what I see. None of us do. Will you join us by signing this petition and asking Seventeen to take a stand as well and commit to one unaltered photo spread a month?
Julia Bluhm, 14, is an 8th grader and has been involved in the Civil Rights Team for many years. She spends many hours a week dancing ballet. As a feminist, she not only wants to put a stop to sexualization and stereotypes of girls in the media, but also to negative stereotypes of ballet dancers. She is a blogger for the girl-fueled SPARK Movement, which fights against sexualized images of women and girls in the media. See her blogs at www.sparksummit.com.
My boot camp class is running a “summer shape-up” program that asks participants—among other things—to track their daily calorie intake. I don’t think I’m willing to track my calories—I wouldn’t call that “dieting” per se, but I think it might cause some of the same negative effects as dieting: obsession, denial, etc.
But when my boot camp instructor sent all of us a calorie calculator that determines how many calories we should eat a day, I couldn’t resist taking a look at the thing.
Recently I had a “discussion” with a friend named Miley about how many calories we should all get a day. Miley told me she was trying to stick to 1500 calories a day to lose weight, and she happily admitted that she considered that dieting—because it would be difficult to stick with those kind of numbers over the long haul.
Miley was unhappy because she wasn’t losing weight, and I told her I thought she was getting TOO FEW calories because, when we reduce calories that much, our bodies freak out and start storing calories rather than burning them. This is what started our debate—and my research—about how many calories are appropriate for a healthy and active adult woman.
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***CALORIE COUNT.COM***
When I looked at the calorie calculator shared by my boot camp instructor told me that I needed 2500 calories a day to maintain my present weight. That seemed about right to me, but I was also frustrated because the options for my activity level didn’t really fit my life. The choices were as follows:
Sedentary: At work—you work in an office. At home—you’re usually sitting, reading, typing or working at a computer. Exercise—you don’t exercise regularly.
Light Activity: At work—you walk a lot. At home—you keep yourself busy and move a lot. Exercise—you participate in light exercise or take long walks.
Moderate Activity: At work—you are very active much of the day. At home—you rarely sit and do heavy housework or gardening. Exercise—you exercise several times a week and push yourself pretty hard.
Very Active: At work—you hold a labor-intensive job such as construction worker or bicycle messenger. At home—you are very active with heavy lifting and other rigorous activities. Exercise—you participate in physical sports such as jogging or mountain-biking each day.
But I don’t really fit into any of these categories.
I exercise every day for at least forty-five minutes, which puts me in the “very active” category, but I don’t “hold a labor-intensive job such as construction worker or bicycle messenger” or do “heavy lifting and other rigorous activities” at home. So I can’t really be considered “very active” according to the definition above.
But the “moderate activity” category is for people who only “exercise several times a week” and “do heavy housework or gardening” at home. I exercise more than several times a week, but thankfully I also almost never do heavy housework at home.
This left me feeling unsure about this calculator, so I decided to try a different one.
Sedentary: Activities of daily living only (dressing, cooking, walking to and from the car, etc.). No purposeful exercise.
Light Activity: Activities of daily living, plus the equivalent of walking 2 miles (or about 4,000 steps) per day.
Moderate Activity: Activities of daily living, plus activities like brisk walking (15-20 minutes per mile), dancing, skating, leisurely bicycling, golfing, doubles tennis, mowing the lawn, or yoga 3-5 days per week.
Heavy Activity: Activities of daily living, plus moderate exercise or vigorous exercise (jogging, running, swimming, singles tennis, soccer, basketball, digging, carpentry) most days of the week.
Exceptional Activity: Activities of daily living, plus intensive training for an exercise event like a marathon, triathlon, century bike ride, etc.
I chose “Heavy Activity,” and this calculator told me me I need 4100 calories a day to maintain my current weight.
Call me crazy, but that doesn’t seem right.
Even if I change my activity level to “moderate activity,” the American Cancer Society says I need almost 3500 calories a day.
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***FITNESS MAGAZINE***
Confused, I went to a third calorie counter—this one at Fitness Magazine—that had bascially the same categories as the American Cancer Society:
I chose “heavy” activity here, and this calculator told me I needed almost 2900 calories a day.
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To recap, the CalorieCount.com calculator told me I needed 2500 calories per day, the American Cancer Society calculator told me I needed 4100 calories per day, and the Fitness Magazine calculator told me I needed 2900 calories per day.
Which brings me to my point—how can we possibly consider these calculators reliable if they all give us such vastly different information?
And if we know that these calculators are just making educated guesses—and wildly different ones at that—then shouldn’t we also know that caloric intake is much less important than good old fashioned healthy living? And by healthy living I mean eating until you feel satisfied, sticking to mostly whole foods and plenty of fruits and vegetables, getting enough sleep and water, and exercising every day.
I’ve long believed—in fact, this blog was created because of this belief—that our American obsession with dieting is one of the leading causes of the obesity epidemic. For it’s only when we obsess about our diet and deny ourselves regular cravings that we eat too much. If we listen to our bodies and eat when we are truly hungry—rather than just when we want to feed our emotions—and stop when we start to feel full, it’s pretty unusual to take in too many calories. And the variations in these so-called calorie counters prove just that to me: the more we try to turn eating into a controlled science, the more unhealthy—mentally and physically—we will be.
Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano performed a sort of visual liposuction on famous nudes found in the work of folks like Sandro Botticelli and Diego Velazques, turning voluptuous Venuses into much thinner versions of themselves that fit today’s standards of female beauty (see some of them in this post and all of them here).
The shocking revelation? Something we technically already know: thin hasn’t always been in. But seeing these images side-by-side is a truly telling (not to mention fascinating) visual representation of how ideas about female beauty have evolved over time.
This reminds me of other beauty trends that have changed throughout the years for whatever reason, often socioeconomic ones. In the Edwardian era of “Downton Abbey,” brunettes, not blondes, were en vogue (poor Edith), but I know plenty of ladies (and gentlemen) nowadays who reach for the bleach. Fair skin was once considered desirable, but fast forward to the 21st century when my junior high self felt pressure to fake bake my freckle-filled skin.
So this is what I take from Giordano’s reimagination of classical beauties: We really should start loving the skin we’re in, because whatever hair color, skin color, height, weight or body type society is currently obsessing over today, the “ideal” beauty might have green skin and tentacles tomorrow. OK. Maybe not green skin, but you get the idea.
Marianne and her boyfriend, Cody, at the Space Needle.
MARIANNE HALE is a Seattle-based writer and current editorial assistant at Seattle magazine. Originally from Kentucky, she enjoys exploring her new Pacific Northwest home by visiting as many art exhibits, indie concerts and restaurants as possible. Still, she refuses to be turned into a coffee drinker.
A friend of a friend—Let’s call him Jerry—used to say that all women gain weight after they’re married. Jerry would laugh when he said this—like it was funny—and then shake his head—as if disappointed.
Around the time I started I Will Not Diet, I read about why some people gain weight after they’re married. The theory goes that new spouses sometimes gain weight as an unconscious way to test their partner—and their relationship—in order to make sure that the person they married really does love them and really will stand by them through better or worse.
The idea of gaining weight as a form of resistance is certainly an interesting one. We could gain weight to test how much our spouses love us or we could gain weight to show that we reject the idea that one must be thin to be beautiful. Still, no matter the reason, gaining weight—on purpose, no less—is no healthier than losing weight to be someone we’re not.
Nevertheless, there’s something to be said for questioning why we all seem to buy into the notion that dieting—and the unyielding need to aspire to thinness–is good for us.
As you know, I don’t buy into the notion that dieting is good for us, but let’s be honest—most people do. And most people think I’m nuts when they hear I have a website devoted to rejecting dieting. Sure, they laugh at first, but then they look at me with critical eyes, wondering, “What is wrong with her?”
So why do Americans hold fast to the notion that dieting is good for them when statistics show that those who diet weigh more than those who don’t and when organizations as reputable as NPR and The New York Times have featured experts arguing that dieting is bad for us?
I think it’s because, like any other tool of oppression, dieting is something we can’t see for what it is. We can’t see that it is actually bad for us, that it is actually making our society collectively more obese. We exist so far inside the dieting mythos that we can’t possibly see what’s on the outside of it.
You are now entering another dimension . . . a land of both shadow and substance . . . you’ve just crossed over into The Twilight Zone.
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Sometimes there are days when I feel like throwing in the towel—when I feel like shutting down this blog and screaming from the rooftops, “That’s it! I give up!”
Those are usually days when I meet people who are in the throes of a major diet (and just for the record, by “diet,” I mean a temporary reduction in calories).
Maybe they’re starting to lose weight and feeling really good about their decision, not knowing it’s all going to come back and haunt them later since 90% of the people who go on diets gain back more weight than they originally lost.
But this week I saw something much worse than a person on a diet. I saw what might possibly be the most disheartening thing I’ve ever seen.
They give up eating by having a feeding tube put in their nose.
Yes, these women have given up eating and are getting their nutrition from a feeding tube for the sole purpose of losing weight for their upcoming wedding day.
I’m sorry but there is no other way to say this—that is simply fucked up.
Not only will these women start gaining back the weight as soon as they take out the feeding tube, but they will also be starting the most important relationship of their lives based on an ideal they will likely never again be able to achieve. They will forever feel that they will never again be as thin (read: beautiful) as they were on their wedding day. In other words, they will never be able to measure up—to themselves.
And it’s not just the health and psychological implications of this new trend that are so disturbing. It’s also the sacrifices these women are willing to make to do it. Because in order to partake in this ridiculous charade, they must have a feeding tube put in their nose and walk around that way for ten days! The whole time looking like they are sick—which they obviously are—or dying just to drop a few pounds. As one participant admits, “sometimes I had to give excuses to people who were asking are you sick? And I was like, ‘No, I’m not sick, I’m not dying, I’m fine.’”
And, of course, there’s the not eating. These women are not eating an ounce of food for ten days. That’s not only unhealthy—proven by the fact that they have weird side effects like constipation and bad breath—it’s sadistic.
Let me just be as clear about this as I can—nothing is worth not eating. No man. No fairytale wedding. No perfect body. Nothing.
