Okay, the no-carb thing has got to go. Seriously. The weight-loss culture in its toxic and dangerous entirety has got to go, actually, but I’ll get to that in a second; first, I’ve got to rant about C2, which is not a nifty way to get the great taste of Coca-Cola without loading up on carbs and cals, but rather a clever marketing ploy capitalizing on the bone-ignorance of consumers about basic nutrition, just like every other aspect of the no-carb fad. It’s just as easy to halve the carbohydrates and calories in a Coke by 1) just drinking half a freakin’ Coke in the first damn place, 2) switching to Diet already, or 3) opting for better-for-you-anyway juice or water, but no. Americans don’t want to do that, apparently; Americans don’t want to eat smaller portions, or devote any energy to planning a balanced menu. Americans want to sit down to the same gigantic servings, just not of pasta.

Enough. A life without starch is not worth living, for one thing, and for another, has it occurred to anybody that it’s the first we’ve heard in human history of the eeeeevil lurking in carbohydrates — that we puttered along for millennia eating pasta and potatoes and managed not to die off as a species? Doesn’t anybody else think you should have carbs in your diet — all kinds? That you should in fact have all kinds of things in your diet, period, including fats, and that it doesn’t matter how religiously you avoid crackers if you eat too much cheese and don’t snack on grapes now and then? That the only reliable way to lose weight and keep it off is to eat less and to exercise more? That when you finally fall off the wagon and go back to bread, which you will, because hello, French toast is one of mankind’s great victories, you’ll just put the weight back on, because your body responds to privation by slowing down your metabolism? That low-carb beer is a crock because it’s not the carbs in beer that make you fat in the first place? True, beer has a lot of calories, but enough of any booze will make you fat, because booze inhibits your body’s ability to burn fat. Now you know. Now you can drink a Brooklyn Lager now and then like a normal person. And eat a handful of bar pretzels. Life is short. Learn the food pyramid, take up badminton, and stop torturing yourself.

No, you aren’t hearing me. Stop torturing yourself. Unless your weight is jeopardizing your health, it just isn’t worth it — it isn’t worth it physically, and it isn’t worth it mentally, because you waste so much mental real estate obsessing over what you eat and beating yourself up if you think you eat the wrong things. Cake exists for a reason; don’t treat it like a vestigial tail. A moderately-sized slice now and then isn’t going to kill you. Chew it slowly. Sip coffee with it. Don’t bolt it down all greedy-crammy Meredith Baxter-Birney in Kate’s Secret like you’re doing something wrong, because you aren’t. You’re enjoying a piece of cake. Nobody’s looking at you and thinking, “No offense or anything, but the last thing that girl needs is Linzer torte.” Nobody’s doing that, and if anybody is doing that, that anybody is an ass, and stupid, because one of the first things everybody needs is Linzer torte, and you can stitch that on a pillow.

The no-carb thing is just so typical of how our society addresses individual sensuality, letting things get out of control and then spazzing off about something that’s only tangentially related — like with the whole Janet Jackson boob thing. You’ve got junior-high-age kids giving blowjobs and decades of hushed-up sexual abuse by Catholic priests overrunning the courts, not to mention a number of serious reproductive-rights issues on the table, but let’s not talk to kids about the consequences of sex, or set emotionally mature examples for them, or remind them about bad touching — let’s have a hissy because our nation’s youth was exposed to a partial breast at subliminal-advertising speed, shall we? Let’s get our panties in a knot about what is, in the end, a body part.

No carbs? Same sort of thing. Instead of acknowledging that our country has a problem with obesity that stems at least in part from inadequate understanding of nutrition and food prep, let’s just take a shortcut and tell everyone not to eat one food group! It’s easy to remember, everyone can still eat monstrously huge portions, and hey, nobody actually dies of scurvy anymore, right? Uch. People, please. It’s a fad, fad diets do not work, it may have worked for you so far but the minute you eat a Goldfish cracker, your gut is going to come busting in the front door with a suitcase tied together with twine, wearing a sombrero and yelling for dinner, period, end of story, thank you, goodbye.

You need a balanced diet — balanced. Harmonious! Like a song, but in your mouth! And you know what puts a song in my mouth? …Okay, ha ha. Seriously, now? Ravioli. Cheese ravioli with a sauté of tomatoes and red onions and mushrooms and fresh basil and a whole bunch of black pepper, and a little salad and a niiiiiiice hot crusty bread. And a gelato and an espresso and a cigaretto, you betcha. The only thing missing there is meat, which I can’t eat, but if you want to go with meat ravioli, do it. I salute you. The point is to get a balance of things, including carbs. God invented carbs. You think you know better than God, suit yourself. I’ll be over here at the donut table.

It’s about quality of life. “But getting thin is quality of life!” Well, yes and no. If you have a weight problem and it affects your health, hell yes take some pounds off — but do it because you value your life, the life that is yours, lived by you, the person, and because you want that life to go on a long time. Do not do it because you think you can’t get — or don’t deserve — love because of the size of your ass, or because you think finally squeezing into a size 6 is going to solve all your problems, because it ain’t, and the price of no cookies is just too high. Find another way. Seriously.

I’ve got no problem with people trying to lose weight, clearly. I know a few very fine people who have had great success with Weight Watchers, primarily because it made them watch what they ate and how much, and encouraged them to get more into fruit and drinking water and all those good things. I do have a problem with the whole “weight is character/destiny” construct that gets us all pathologically fixated on physical size as a function of relative worth as a human being, because — no. Wrong. Gross. Physical size as a function of fitness and nutrition? Fine. But in American culture, it’s never about fitness and nutrition. It’s about how everyone has to look the same and “sexy” can only mean one thing and that one thing has no basis in individuality or the self. Nor can that one thing finish a set of tennis, because it’s too thin, and also it’s depressed because it hasn’t eaten a blintz in ages, but never mind that — if you aren’t that one thing, you don’t fit. You’re no good.

And on the other side, we have the ick-o-rama prizing of thinness taken to retarded extremes. Exhibit A: I go to the doctor several months ago. I’ve got mad stress going on in my life — a break-up, a business trip, trying to move, not sleeping right, blah bling bad, I don’t eat half the time and I look and feel like crap. I get on the scale, and it says 133, and the nurse says, “Good for you!” Dude. At five foot ten? Hell. No. Ma’am. You could have used my wrist as a piercing awl at that point. The asses of all my pairs of pants looked all saggy and empty, because I had maybe half a buttock total, because I didn’t eat and burned any extra calories crying myself to sleep at night and running around my apartment with packing tape the rest of the time. My face got all pointy and my sternum got all ridgy and I just looked grey and rough and beaten down — and the nurse congratulates me. For looking like a box kite with shoes. That is fucked up.

Also fucked up is the fact that even telling that story makes me kind of uncomfortable, because it’s like an unwritten rule that thin = fortunate and blessed, and if by some chance in your case “thin = vegetarian and stressed,” just shut up about it, because who cares how you got thin, right? It’s considered bragging or something. So, so messed up.

Of course, this is nothing compared to the utter, constant bullshit the non-thin have to put up with, the assumptions made about their characters and morals, the condescension, the just plain not seeing them — but my point is that it’s poisonous on both sides. The entire country has a bizarre, conflicted relationship with food and weight that whips around the punish-lavish axis, aggravated by bad nutritional information, predatory marketing, McDonald’s sponsorship of school lunch programs, the cult of celebrity, and the default collective belief that beauty is exactly skin-deep, but instead of dealing somehow with the societal issues that got us here, let’s just cut out bread, because it’s easier than thinking.

Regulating what you eat is fine, but to the point of misery, if it’s not in the service of your health? No. Don’t live your life from the outside in. Don’t punish yourself for things you didn’t even do. Now and then, let pie love you back.

July 12, 2004

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