Heavy

So, I have recently been obsessed with the A&E show Heavy. Check it out here:
http://www.aetv.com/heavy/

Like many women, I have struggled with weight. Not to the point of the people on the show, but in the last 3 years, I've lost the same 20 pounds twice. I'm also facing the challenge of losing 20 more pounds in preparation for the wedding. So weight, healthy diet, and fitness are definitely on my mind. Heavy is seriously compelling, and I've watched enough of it to notice some trends about weight that seem to be true for everyone. I'm trying to learn from these trends in order to manage my weight in an easier way.

Here is what I've learned and how I think I can apply it to my life:

1. If you're from the American South, you are more likely to have unhealthy habits and more likely to be fat.

Unfortunately for me, I am from the American South. I have spent nearly my whole life eating fried chicken, biscuits, apple dumplings, chocolate delight, butter, and gravy. Not to mention drinking loads of sweet tea. At 28, I met my healthy Yankee boyfriend and over time some of his good habits have worn off on me. For instance. I no longer drink tea or soda. At home, my fiance and I eat much healthier than I ate at my parents house growing up. That is the lesson for me.

If I am eating too similarly to the way I grew up, I can expect to gain weight. If I am making too many of my grandmother's or mother's recipes, I need to scale back. More importantly, I've learned that a meal can be a meat and one vegetable.

In my family of origin, a meal would be one or two meats, two or three vegetables, one or two fruits or fruity salad sides (which often include marshmallows or whipped cream), one or two breads, and one or two different desserts. Supper was an event. To be healthy, supper has to be just supper. It doesn't have to be extravagant and delicious every night. In fact, most nights it should be a simple combination of chicken and broccoli. Healthiness is a culture shift for me (and all Southerners).

2. Men lose weight at a much faster rate than women.

I also have the unfortunate luck of being a woman. Nothing I can do about that except remember that every bite I put in my mouth is going to be harder to get off my thighs. I'm going to have to live with the annoying truth that (at restaurants) my fiance can eat his whole meal and have a few beers, while I can only eat half a meal. (Half a restaurant meal is one regular-sized meal for what we'd eat at home; I'm not advocating not eating). I guess there will always be a place in our fridge for my leftovers.

3. If you are as "heavy" as the people on this show, you have people around you who are enabling you to be unhealthy and encouraging you to eat.

This one goes back to the Southern culture thing. When I'm around my family of origin, I tend to eat more - because eating is such a big part of Southern culture, and the food we eat is more flavorful and unhealthy. As irritating as it can be sometimes to live with someone who is health conscious when I just want another brownie, I am thankful Michael doesn't enable me to overeat or go overboard with cooking feasts every night.

4. Unprocessed and ignored emotions lead to weight gain. Pent up anger is the emotion that is most identified on the show as a source of weight gain. Many participants on the show also have unprocessed grief.

I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, I know that I am an extremely emotional person and am fairly expressive too. I talk about my feelings, have no reservations about crying, singly loudly in my car, and write in order to process things. On the other hand, I know that I do eat a lot out of anger and stress. So, obviously I still use food as a coping mechanism for certain emotions. I guess, for me, for those emotions, talking/crying/writing isn't enough. I can't think of what else to do, except maybe work out more. Any suggestions on expressing anger or de-stressing in a healthy way?

5. Though exercise has many obvious health benefits, weight loss is more the result of a controlled diet. It's easier to cut 500 calories from your diet than to burn 500 calories in the gym.

This is pretty self-explanatory. Eat less. Make better choices. Have dessert once a week, or once a month, instead of every night. Etc. I've heard multiple times on the show that "food is fuel for the body," and that's it. It's not a hobby, a treat, a comforter, or a friend. I guess when you change the way you look at food, your choices change and your weight falls in line. I'm not quite there yet. Another person on the show said, "Food is life or death" - also a pretty serious statement. It's difficult to keep the proper perspective on food in a food-obsessed culture (and I mean America, not just the South).

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For instance, examine this CS Lewis quote from the 1940's where he compares the sexual desire to the desire for food:

"The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite true most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.

Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act - that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?

One critic said that if he found a country in which such striptease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as the strip-tease act resulted not from sexual corruption but from sexual starvation. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed that a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one.

In the same way, before accepting sexual starvation as the cause of the strip-tease, we should have to look for evidence that there is in fact more sexual abstinence in our age than in those ages when things like the strip-tease were unknown. But surely there is no such evidence. Contraceptives have made sexual indulgence far less costly within marriage and far safer outside it than ever before, and public opinion is less hostile to illicit unions and even to perversion than it has been since Pagan times. Nor is the hypothesis of 'starvation' the only one we can imagine. Everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations."

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I know that was a long quote, but I feel it was necessary to make a point. Obviously, our food desires have changed in the 70 years since CS Lewis wrote that.

Obesity is an epidemic and many people are eating enough food for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 people.

We now have VERY successful food "strip-teases." They're called the Food Network and the Cooking Channel. Even the Travel Channel has popular food shows like Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations and Man Vs. Food. I enjoy those shows (and the Food Network) but you do have to wonder if they "feed" our obsession with food and therefore contribute to weight gain. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has watched one of those shows and drooled over the food....Maybe TV shows like that keep food too much on our minds. The shows definitely elevate food to the status of art, culture, and love rather than merely "fuel."

So those are my thoughts for now on food and weight. I'm still learning and trying. Hopefully you are too!