Food. Love it or hate it, you need it. Unfortunately, too many people have an unhealthy relationship with food, which should be a pleasure from beginning to... Well, to end.
If you don’t mind, I won’t speak too much about the end part, OK?
Unfortunately, the relationship with food has become yet another victim of invidualism and consumerism; the former because rather than eat what’s best for our health, we eat what’s best for our taste buds, and the latter because we are encouraged to eat more, more and then some more.
Supersize, anyone?
There are so many dieting programs out there that I am not even going to attempt listing them here. But many of them have one thing in common: they are serious business, often worth of a Master’s Degree (or even a PhD), time consuming and boring. And don’t get me started on how patronizing, paternalistic and guilt provoking these diets are. Just reading about them makes me want to eat the anguish away.
(Where is my chocolate bar? I know I stashed one around here not too long ago…)
Leslie Landis certainly knows a lot about the often dreary, tedious task of going on a diet. She has been practicing clinical psychology for a little over ten years now, amongst others helping people who have eating disorders. And I have the impression that many of the excuses her patients make are included in this book. My personal favourite is when she encourages us to overeat in the name of the environment.
“Don’t let anyone tell you that overeating is selfish. It actually is just the opposite. Consider that it is estimated that Americans dispose of thirty million tons of food waste every year. That amounts to over one pound of discarded food per day per person. How selfish is that? So save the environment. Eat everything you order. Eat other people’s leftovers. Let no doggie bag go wasted. Eat everything in your refrigerator. EAT, EAT, EAT. Remember, it’s a cause bigger than you, so be as big as you can be about it”.
By the way, I tried reading this paragraph over the phone to my Mom and I was giggling so hard I couldn’t manage to get through the entire thing once.
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