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I had never heard of author Jen Lancaster until I saw a note in my local paper today announcing a book signing with her at a local Borders store tonight. Lancaster is in town promoting her third memoir, Such a Pretty Fat.

The title immediately bleeped on my fatdar, so I looked up the book on Amazon and watched the video clip there. Lancaster insists her book isn’t a weight-loss memoir, but the video, book description and reader comments suggest otherwise. As she writes:

“To whom the fat rolls…I’m tired of books where a self-loathing heroine is teased to the point where she starves herself skinny in hopes of a fabulous new life. And I hate the message that women can’t possibly be happy until we all fit into our skinny jeans. I don’t find these stories uplifting; they make me want to hug these women and take them out for fizzy champagne drinks and cheesecake and explain to them that until they figure out their insides, their outsides don’t matter. Unfortunately, being overweight isn’t simply a societal issue that can be fixed with a dose healthy of positive self-esteem. It’s a health matter, and here on the eve of my fortieth year, I’ve learned I have to make changes so I don’t, you know, die. Because what good if finally being able to afford a pedicure if I lose a foot to adult onset diabetes?”

In the video, the 40-year-old Lancaster says that she enjoyed healthy self-esteem and good confidence and never had a “compelling reason” to lose weight until she went to the doctor and was “essentially delivered a death sentence.” Her somehow non-weight-loss book claims it documents her attempts to lose weight in a healthy, non-dieting manner through improved diet and increased exercise with a trainer named Barbie who looks like her doll namesake, animated.

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Stand-up comedian, actor and writer Tom Naughton insists all we know about fat to be a load of bologna. In parody of and response to Morgan Spurlock’s mockumentary Supersize Me, Naughton’s Fat Head insists the so-called obesity epidemic has been wildly exaggerated by the CDC.

How does he set to disprove obesity stereotypes? He plays into them by setting out to show how one can lose weight while eating a fast food diet. You can watch the trailer below and other clips on his website.

I’m straddling the fence on this one. On one hand, it’s hilariously funny and represents a departure from the usual fat fear-mongering while also disproving tired stereotypes. But on the other, it’s still promoting weight-loss and a particular means of weight-loss, namely a low-carbohydrate/high-fat diet. In his effort to dispel stereotypes of fatty and fast foods while demonstrating how one can lose weight and improve health by cutting carbs and sugar, Naughton is still reinforcing the good/bad food ideology. Still, I don’t think we ought throw the baby out with the bathwater. Given the dominant socio-political clime of the day, is it better to work with people than against people, while still appropriating channels and spaces for our own means? What do you think?

The belief that upward social mobility in the United States can be achieved with mere hard work and determination has existed almost as long as the country itself. America’s Protestant worth ethic has been encapsulated by people like Horatio Alger, who wrote a series of stories involving poor young men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to achieve great success.

Weight-based discrimination is rampant today because of our culturally ingrained stereotypes of fatness and fat people. Fat people, it is assumed, are fat due to “lifestyle choices,” that being a willful overeating of “bad” foods and sedentary lifestyle. So-called obesity-related diseases are viewed to be a drain on our national economy, as they decrease work productivity and increase health care costs. And because of the conflation of fat with overconsumption, those rapacious fat people are also thought to represent a threat to the environment and the security of the nation state itself.

The world collectively sighs as it wonders why fat people won’t just practice dietary restraint, eat healthier foods, exercise and pay scads of money for diet programs, even if such programs have been shown to be largely ineffective. Why, oh why can’t and won’t fat people pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become thin, socially acceptable, and responsible citizens?

Maybe it’s because fatness isn’t always caused by inactivity and a scarfing down of Twinkies. As anyone who has struggled with weight will attest, weight loss and gain aren’t always simple matters of “choice.” Here are some physiological reasons why some people are fat:

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Sixty-five percent of American women between the ages of 25 and 45 report having disordered eating behaviors, according to the results of a new survey by SELF Magazine in partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An additional 10 percent of women report symptoms consistent with eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder, meaning that a total of 75 percent of all American women endorse some unhealthy thoughts, feelings or behaviors related to food or their bodies.

The online survey garnered responses from 4,023 women who answered detailed questions about their eating habits. Results and analysis appear in the magazine’s May 2008 issue on newsstands through May 19. Click here to read the article online.

While I don’t doubt the high levels of unhealthy relationships with food amongst a national cross-section of women, I do have to point out that Self isn’t exactly a paragon of body size acceptance. Every edition touts some kind of diet and weight loss plan, along with some half-naked airbrushed woman on its glossy cover.

Consider a sampling of recent headlines: “New fixes for stubborn fat!,” “A Diet to Shed Pounds Fast!,” “The 10-Calorie Secret,” “Drop Weight, Look Great and Never Go to the Gym,” “Shortcut to your Best Body,” “A Super Simple Slim-Down!,” “The One-Month Total Body Makeover,” “Peel off the Pounds!,” “Lose Weight Every Day!,” “The Beauty Diet,” and so on.

The magazine even boasts an online section dedicated solely to dieting, with “healthy eating” thrown in almost as an afterthought. Members here can join the Self Diet Club complete with “powerful tools can track your progress, analyze your diet and even tell you exactly what to eat (and what to skip) to slim down.” Because eating according to software dictates is much better than intuitive eating, right? Readers can also read about how to jump start their diet to drop a size in 30 days, take the Self challenge to achieve a “dream body,” learn fitness moves designed to burn more calories, and get such helpful reminders like how calorie-laden beverages can make you fat.

In the article “Scale Stuck?” Self urges women to consider 10 reasons why they’re not losing weight and genetics isn’t one of them. Such sage recommendations include recommendations to grocery shop online, count calories and don’t celebrate workouts with M & Ms. Other stellar recommendations are to deliver messages in person instead of email so you can lose nearly a pound a month!, as well as the same kinds of advice distributed on pro-ana boards, like encouraging women to wear tight jeans on weekends so you don’t overeat and to give away clothes the moment you drop a size to “ensure you won’t drift into them again.”

While Self does include constructive articles on how to beat stress, healthy recipes and basic nutrition, health issues like breast cancer, and green fashion and living trends, its overall emphasis is that women need to change. Specifically, that women need become thinner and more beautiful and ergo better people. I have to wonder if there exists an audience of women who don’t accept themselves as they are and Self simply fills that need, or does magazines like Self help to create and perpetuate such audiences?

With its predominant emphasis on dieting, weight loss and unrealistic beauty standards, it comes as no wonder so many of Self’s readers have unhealthy relationships with food, weight and body image. Perhaps the magazine ought to see its study more as an indictment of itself and less as a reflection of a national trend.

EDIT: Claire of 5 Resolutions advised me the survey was a national survey, and not solely of Self readers. My comments about the magazine still stand.

Another diet company has joined the ranks of discredited and disreputable diet mongerers: LighterLife.

If you remember, diet book author Kevin Trudeau recently came under Federal Trade Commission crosshairs and diet-monger Heidi Diaz, founder of the much-aligned diet scam Kimkin’s, has also been in court to answer claims of false advertising. And in January, the LA Weight Loss Center closed its doors and filed for bankruptcy.

The British-based LighterLife program consists of drinking 530 liquid calories a day for 12 weeks. The company claims to have enabled 60,000 people to lose 42 pounds in three months. Mmm… drinking your nutrients from a straw for three months… Sounds safe, right? Not according to reports made by undercover reporters from the BBC’s Inside Out in the East.

The reporters selected two LighterLife counselors at random, posing as prospective clients. When asked about side effects, both counselors advised the worst that could be expected would be a headache. This is, despite numerous accounts of customers who have reported a loss of menstruation, hair loss, and one man who was admitted to the hospital with water poisoning after drinking too much to try and relieve constipation caused by the program. Other counselors with inadequate training - a breach of the company’s own protocol - were observed providing “professional” advice. Keep in mind, the British government recommends low-calorie diets be undertaken only under medical supervision.

It’s not coincidental that hair loss and amenorrhea are also symptoms experienced by people with anorexia - both are symptoms of malnutrition and starvation. In essence, the company is shilling anorexia as an expensive “diet” plan. But perhaps LighterLife’s most egregious and blatant breach of ethical and moral standards is this: Undercover reporters observed LighterLife employees offering the starvation diet to someone with an eating disorder.

The company does not deny this and in fact crows about its policy of allowing people with eating disorders onto the program. Bar Hewlett, a founder and director of LighterLife, claimed to Inside Out:

“The [British] National Eating Disorders Association actually sends people to us who are obese. They believe that the programme we have and the services we offer are absolutely suitable for people with eating disorders.”

The Eating Disorders Association (now called B-eat), told the BBC: “We don’t make referrals to LighterLife or any other diet.”

While looking for an old paper yesterday, I stumbled across some notes I made while researching women’s magazines in the 1950s for articles and advertisements related to women, food and body image. I thought I’d share a few snippets here from the notes I made. Many of these would be hilariously funny if they weren’t the same kinds of things we still see in magazines and the media today.

Ladies Home Journal Jan. 1957
“The Diet That Turned Me into a Model”
As told to Dawn Crowell Norman

“Every time I see a young girl who is overweight, I want to tap her on the shoulder and say, ‘Let me tell you about my own life as a fatty – let me help! …Roy, my husband, would never have looked twice at the old 175-pound Linda… When I am occasionally tempted to eat more than I should, it’s Roy who puts his foot down! ‘Don’t forget,’ he teases, ‘you were once a fatty!’”

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Ladies Home Journal May, 1957
“Is College Education Wasted on Women?”
Dr.Nevitt Sanford

“Psychology and psychiatry have contributed their share to the notion that the best way for a girl to show that she is healthy, wholesome, mature, well-adjusted and the like is to get married and have children.”

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Good Housekeeping Aug., 1958
“How to Bring Up Perfect Little Ladies with the help of Wash and Wear”
Janet Livingstone

“Being a lady is a life’s work, and the sooner your daughter begins mastering the tricks of the trade, the better. Once she has discovered the sorcery of a smile and the magic of ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ she’s ready to go on to the next lesson: the gentle art of looking like a million bucks.

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Good Housekeeping Aug, 1958
“The Date Line: Facts and Fancies for the Girl in School”
Jan Landon

“’Calorie wisors’ are new defense weapons developed by some N. Carolina boys to protect their wallets at drive-in restaurants… the boys attach a mirror to the back of the car’s right-hand sun visor; put next to it a list of calorie values of typical items on the menu - hamburger with ten french fries, 450; banana split, 530; Coke, 75; etc. - and slyly suggest girls check their makeup before ordering!”

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In his Husband and Wife Diet Cookbook (1955), Dr. P.W. Punnett suggests one way for women to shed pounds is to simply stop “constantly nibbling candy and nuts and cake and cookies between meals and in addition to their regular meals.” Whereas, he continued, a woman most often gains weight simply because she eats “twice as much as she really needs” – primarily, “foods like pie, cake, ice cream, candy, nuts, mayonnaise, and sweet desserts” – overweight husbands ought not to “be ashamed if the pounds have sneaked up on you.” He attributed men’s weight gain to extra-fatty meats, gravies, alcohol and inactivity due to work-related advancements.

CNN Headline news tonight ranted about a site that encourages adolescent girls as young as seven to give virtual dolls breast implants, dress them in lingerie and put them on crash diets. The UK-based ‘Miss Bimbo’ web site describes itself as a “virtual fashion game for girls” and encourages them to compete against each other to become the “hottest, coolest, most famous bimbo in the whole world.”

[Girls] are told “stop at nothing,” even “meds or plastic surgery,” to ensure their dolls win.

Users are given missions, including securing plastic surgery at the game’s clinic to give their dolls bigger breasts, and they have to keep her at her target weight with diet pills, which cost 100 bimbo dollars.

Breast implants sell at 11,500 bimbo dollars and net the buyer 2,000 bimbo attitudes, making her more popular on the site. And bagging a billionaire boyfriend is the most desirable way to earn the all important “mula” or bimbo dollars.

The advice on feeding the dolls is even more spurious, encouraging them to feed the dolls “every now and then” even though they want to keep their Bimbos “waif thin.”

My husband registered for an account - with no urging from me, let me add. The user console says the target weight for his “bimbo” is 127 pounds with an ideal height of a “slinky 5′6″.” This combination would result in a BMI of 20.5, the very low end of what the U.S. government considers to be average. His “bimbo’s” IQ is listed at 70, which signifies her to be mentally retarded.

Edit: With his initial $1,000 Bimbo dollars, Brandon purchased and fed his “bimbo” vegetables and had her go dancing. She gained more than 2 pounds in two hours. What kind of message does this send to young, impressionable girls if vegetables make their dolls gain weight?

The British site claims to have nearly 200,000 players, most of whom are girls aged between 7 and 17. The game is free to play, but if contestants “fail to find a boyfriend to be [their] sugar daddy and hook [them] up with a phat expense account!” they have to send phone text messages at $3 a pop or use PayPal to top up their accounts.

Apparently the site isn’t a new and disgusting phenomenon; it’s sister web site “Ma Bimbo” launched last year has been roundly criticized by dieticians and parents. One parent threatened the creators with legal action after his daughter ran up a $200 cell phone bill without his knowledge.

Meanwhile the site owners, two college-age men who also appeared on CNN news claiming the site to be “harmless fun,” insist the site does not promote boob jobs and crash dieting, but rather “reflects real life.” Hmm… waif-thin, big-breasted, mentally retarded women bagging billionaire boyfriends and dressing in sexy lingerie. Is this real life or some college boy’s fantasy?

Sanjay Gupta is presented by media outlets as the wonder doctor of all fields, the Doogie Howser neurosurgeon extraordinaire who can just as effortlessly deliver a baby as he can diagnose rare genetic diseases. Gupta is quite accomplished and boasts an impressive array of credentials and qualifications, but considering his career as the medical talking head of CNN, he probably doesn’t spend much time with patients or in practicing medicine.

So, it doesn’t strike me as odd that he’s at a loss as to why people don’t exercise. He addressed the issue recently in a column for Time magazine. It’s a good thing A. Chris Gagilan helped the good doctor out with some basic reporting, because I think the answer to Gupta’s question is right here:

Research by psychologist Roy Baumeister at Florida State University, for example, suggests that self-control is like a psychological muscle — one that can simply become exhausted.. If that routine involves a diet, things can get even more complicated, as the effort you make to resist having a Snickers in the afternoon depletes your resolve to work out in the evening. “The more you use the self-control muscle,” Herbert says, “the more tired it gets.”

In short: Physical activity should be something you want to do, not something you have to do.

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I don’t react well to stress, which is to say, I often freak out about and over-dramaticize those situations in which even the minute of forces are beyond my control. It’s the same kind of classic black and white thinking that helped structure and bolster my eating disorder.

Like every quarter of my undergraduate and graduate school years, I procrastinate in writing the final paper until the deadline looms ominously at which point I usually churn out fabulous stuff. It takes the threat of a deadline to spur me to action, but my work is usually much better for it. Last Monday saw me starting the final paper of my graduate seminar on nineteenth century America. The paper was to be a broad overview, based on the books and article we read throughout the quarter - no primary research - on the nineteenth century. I don’t do well with broad; I like structure, detail, focus, all of which is part of why I didn’t start on the 15-page paper until two nights before it was due.

I was making pretty good headway when my husband, who was sitting at the desk next to me playing a video game, reached for a can of soda and spilled it on the desk, splashing on my laptop keyboard. I immediately sopped up the spill, while he ran to get towels, but a few seconds later, my laptop screen went completely dead. I immediately freaked out - my paper! all my work! my research! my designs and photography! Gone, gone, gone! It also didn’t help that I haven’t backed up my work on my external hard drive in, well, ever.

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My sister-in-law, the Weight Watcherer, is probably the pickiest eater I know. She doesn’t like vegetables, she doesn’t eat much fruit. What she seems to live on are those ridiculously expensive 100-calorie preportioned diet junk-food snacks. But yet because she’s managed to lose her baby weight and is now back to what is probably her body’s natural set point range, I’m sure she thinks she’s eating healthy.

At the grocery store last week, the woman in front of me piled the belt high with Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, Weight Watchers muffins, 100-calorie bags of chips, a case of Slim-Fast and those new “diet” vitamin-infused flavored waters. Her loot stood in stark contrast to my fresh fruits and vegetables, brown rice, cans of organic beans and vegetables, Quorn faux chicken breasts, orange juice and bottles of plain ole’ zero-calorie water. Yet in a comparison between the two of us, with no other factors considered, most people would probably judge her to be healthier simply because she is thinner.

As the growing numbers of preportioned snacks reflect, they’re not the only dieters infatuated with what one nutritionist calls “trailer food.” Every snack variety known to modern Western society now comes conveniently packed in “guilt-free” servings. Even Hershey’s makes 100-calorie packs of M&Ms. MSNBC republished an Allure story today on such junk-food dieters:

According to their credo, low-calorie is good; no-calorie is better — even if the food contains more chemicals than a can of hair spray… Many believe ingesting a few artificial ingredients is a small price to pay for being able to eat the things they love while staying as thin as a Pringle… Women who would never carry a fake Birkin seem to not think twice about toting around fake butter.

The story gives short shrift to the actual unhealthiness of such foods, and instead focuses almost exclusively on the inevitable and banal “junk in your trunk” factor. One dieter now drinks an iced nonfat latte in lieu of a healthy breakfast to curb cravings, and is supported by the director of nutrition at Columbia University Medical Center, who additionally cautions readers that if you have one such drink with a healthy breakfast, you can gain up to 10 whole pounds in a year. Oh, the absolute horrors. The director does note that typically, those who eat breakfast are often the most “successful” losers, but for the diet-minded reader, which option sounds more tempting? A healthy breakfast with maximum nutritional benefits that contains real calories, or a diet iced nonfat latte with minimal nutritional benefits, that may or may not encourage weight loss?

I like to say I am about 90 percent vegan, because while I have eliminated most dairy products from my diet, those no-calorie spray butters remain a holdover from my eating disorder days. And since I eat lots of veggies, I tend to use spray butter nearly every day and liberally at that. But according to Laura Slayton, director of a New York nutrition counseling center, this is why I’m fat:

Also easily abusable: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! Spray. Most nutritionists aren’t opposed to misting vegetables with it, especially if it gets people to eat greens they’d otherwise avoid. But don’t be fooled by the zero-calorie label. “There are no calories if you spray five times. If you spray 20, it has cumulative calories. Don’t spray and spray and step on the scale and expect miracles,” says Slayton, who knows of one celebrity who gained weight after going through a bottle every three days.

The Food and Drug Administration says any food serving that contains less than half a gram of fat, protein or carbohydrate can claim 0 grams - and thus, 0 calories - for those nutrients. Plus, any nutrient with less than 5 calories can be listed as having no calories on the nutrition label. According to one commenter at 3 Fat Chicks (caution: it’s a diet site), 25 mists of spray butter adds up to just 20 calories; one tablespoon, or 72 sprays, contains just 52 calories. I can burn off the calories of 25 sprays with one good stretch, but still, it’s probably a good thing I don’t step on the scale expecting “miracles.”

The article goes on to address artificial sweeteners, regularly consumed by as many as 180 million Americans, according to WebMD, who offers a detailed article on them. A recent study done by Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson at Purdue University found that rats given yogurt sweetened with saccharin ate more, gained more weight, and developed more body fat than rats who ate yogurt with sugar. In explaining why, researchers suggest that artificial sweeteners may interfere with the body’s natural ability to count calories based on a food’s sweetness which may make people prone to overindulging in other sweet foods and beverages.

I hypothesize that the reason people may overindulge in other sweets and beverages is not physiological, but psychological: If your body wants chocolate and you try to pacify it with rice cakes, even those 90-calorie preportioned bags of chocolate rice cakes, chances are, your body will still want the real deal. Most people who diet, and nearly everyone with some form of binging-related disorder will tell you that the food they deny themselves usually becomes the one item they most obsess about and even binge on. When is the last time you heard of anyone binging on broccoli? It’s called intuitive eating - listening to your body’s cues signaling satiety and hunger, feeding it what it really wants and being good to it.

With its negligible attention to the actual nutritional shortcomings of much of these diet junk-food products, many diet-minded readers will most likely walk away from this story with a favorable opinion of these often highly-processed, high-sodium, low-anything-else foods. And like all food, diet junk-food is neither “good” nor “bad.” I’ve personally bought the 100-calorie packs of Blue Diamond almonds and also the 100-calorie packs of EatSmart Veggie Crisps.

But while diet junk-food may have its place in a healthy diet, I’m concerned about the growing numbers of people who have come to conflate “diet” food with “healthy” food, and by proxy, thinness with good health and fat with bad health. In our overzealousness to reduce calories and lose weight, there are people who actually believe a 100-calorie pack of Hostess cupcakes is healthier than a 150-calorie potato. Diet junk-food may be low in calories, but shouldn’t the nutritional quality of our diet supercede caloric quantity when it comes to good health? A diet consisting primarily of diet junk-food may make you thinner, but it probably won’t make you healthier.