Chocolate Calorie Feminist Rantings

[mhuzzell]

UK packaged food labelling has recently started to have these little "traffic light" guides on it, where foods will be categorized as 'green', 'amber', or 'red' based on healthiness. Sometimes these are subdivided into different categories -- as on my box of cereal, which says it is 'green' for fat content but 'red' for sugar content (heh).

...And then it says it is 'green' for 'calories'. What?? Since when is 'energy contained in this food' something that is healthy or not? I mean, I had understood the colour-labelling of the other categories (fat, sugar, fibre, etc.) to be proportional measures -- i.e. this is a sugary food because it has a lot of sugar per serving. But calories -- I would have thought -- are the base agaisnt which some of the others might be measured. Right? Or maybe it means 'calories per volume', where cereal has very few and something like cake or meat has quite a lot.

In any case, foods with a lot of calories per volume are not (necessarily) any less healthy than foods with a low calorie::volume count. And it makes me angry. Angry and ranty.

Because, you see, I spent a long time in my overweight early-teens "counting calories" as a weight-loss strategy. It didn't work. It just made me hyper-aware of my food, and even though I lost a little weight, it didn't make any long-term difference, and my diet ended up being a lot less healthy than it might have been otherwise, because I would do things like forego the meatier parts of my meals in order to "spend" my allotted calories on ice cream later.

Worse, it set up in my mind this idea of 'calories (=food energy!) = BAD!' Or, okay, I probably got the idea to count calories in the first place because that idea had already been culturally implanted. My mom and aunt were in Weight Watcher's at the time, and the idea of calories and the counting of them seemed to be ever-present in the pages of women's magazines -- which still managed to worm their way into my head, even though I never properly read them; but they were always there in doctors' and dentists' and other waiting rooms (and indeed in the lobby of the Weight Watcher's, whenever my mom had to bring me along and leave me waiting during her dietary group-therapy).

Nowadays I have an utterly different perspective. I eat to fill my belly, and there is no chance that I would consider 'calories' (=food energy!) to be any kind of inherently bad thing. If anything, they are an inherently good thing! I still struggle to maintain a healthy diet, even though I have long since dropped out of the 'overweight' category. But now that means "a diet that will give me enough energy and vitamins to go about my life" rather than "a diet that will make me thin". There was a time this winter when I was buying these little pre-mixed chocolate milk things instead of lunch (like I said, I struggle) because they were cheaper than food and required no prep, while having just as many calories as a meal, and filling me up as much. And I would often go for the higher-calorie "chocolate brownie" flavour above the plain chocolate flavour, purely because the former had more calories for the same price. Which is, like, utterly unhealthy -- but only because I was drinking them to replace a meal, not because 'calories' are somehow 'bad for you'.

Comments

[teaberryblue.livejournal.com]

I agree with you that the mentality that you were taught was wrong and unhealthy. But the problem is that that's not a healthy way to perceive calories, not that the number of calories we're putting into our bodies shouldn't be given elevated attention. The point of being aware of how any calories are in your food is so that you don't eat the ice cream later because you realize that the ice cream has a lot of calories in a little tiny serving, and that's not enough to fill you or help power your body based on the number of nutrients in that little serving. So instead of not eating lunch because you want ice cream, you forego the ice cream in exchange for a piece of chicken and a salad and baked potato. If you were doing the opposite, it means that you were being given the wrong tools to understanding nutrition.

To me, the point of telling people that something is "bad" in terms of calories is exactly what you're saying-- it's a question of calories per volume and calories compared to the other nutrients available in the food.

To someone with a healthy relationship with food/eating mentality, this would make sense: this candy bar has 400 calories and no actual nutrition, so eating it is just excess and could be unhealthy for me if I eat lots of candy bars all the time. It's saying "If you fill your belly with this, you will not be eating empty calories" or "If you fill your belly with this, you will not be getting the nutrients you need."

The problem isn't labeling foods to say whether they have an appropriate number of calories compared to the nutrition they provide-- in fact, I would really like to see that here because it would make people more aware of what they're putting in their mouths and sometimes it is hard to tell. The problem is the psychology that an anorexic society (I mean anorexic in the sense of how we're taught to approach food, not skinny) teaches people, especially young women, which then attaches all this body ick and conflicting feelings to a label like that. The label, given someone who hasn't been socialized to believe calories are inherently bad (whether or not they still believe that), wouldn't have the kinds of connotations you're affixing to it.

The problem is that it does because we've raised people, especially girls and women, to believe something else about calories than what food scientists and nutritionists who make recommendations for labels like that believe about calories. To me, it's an issue of speaking two dialects where the word one group uses is a dirty word amongst the group they're speaking to. The trouble is that without all the food and body ick we're taught, it would be a positive and useful thing. So I feel like what this says is that we need to make sure to be more vigilant against the people who teach these ways of thinking about foods so that people don't read the label the way you're talking about reading it.

Does that make any sense?

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

My profound feeling here is that analyzing food into chemicals and calories, and then labelling these componments "bad" or "good", is the root of the American problem with food. It's the reason so many people eat artificial foods like mostly chemical "diet foods", or even foods like "Lite" yogurt that are adulterated with glycerin and gelatin that have little or no food value at all, just because they have "less fat" or some such reason.

Women in particular have become afraid of food and see it as a necessary evil. The body does not see it this way at all. Hence the war and the self-punishment that women go through, forcing themselves to eat weird stuff out of the fear of being "fat". Now, if we define "being fat" as obesity, of course that's bad. But we don't. We define "being fat" as "anything over downright gaunt and half-starved."

There is a snotty and annoying little book called "Frenchwomen don't get fat" or somesuch thing that, under the snot and annoyance, makes an excellent point or two. Namely, that eating real, well-done foods only when you are hungry, and suppressing the desire to analyze your food to death, are good ways to stay healthy. You won't be gaunt, but you won't be obese, either.

[lizardist.livejournal.com]

So you've finally figured it out. The goal of dieting isn't to feel good about your body, it's to feel absolved of sin.

[mhuzzell.livejournal.com]

Nah, dude, that part's been obvious from the beginning. If you'd been raised socially female you'd have known it since childhood, too.

"Luxuriate in this sinful chocolate cake, drizzled with white chocolate... and only 130 calories! It's so good, you don't have to feel bad!"

[ducakedhare.livejournal.com]

I have no pretense of knowing anything about diets etc - let's get that straight first.

I basically keep to my mother's belief: eat what you want in non-stupid amounts, and if your metabolism can't cope, do the appropriate amount of excercise/physical exertion every other day.

I am yet to put this to the test, but it's done my parents good so far...

If people want their statistics so be it. In the end it's not so much what's in your diet as in how you deal with it - both mentally and physically...