![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Chocolate Calorie Feminist Rantings
Apr. 9th, 2010 12:21 pmUK 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'.
...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'.
