Ampersand linked to Carol Lay’s new graphic memoir. He’s dismayed by the story, and I think I agree. It’s a book about how, via a really severe calorie restriction regime and a regular exercise program (but mostly the former), she has managed to stay at her “goal weight” of 125 pounds for the past half-dozen years. She’s 5’9″ inches tall, and 125 pounds puts her at the low end of the BMI’s healthy weight range.
The sample chapter on the comic’s webpage details a day on her diet–a day when, admittedly, she seems to be trying to lose a little bit of weight that might have, um, climbed back on. This is what she records eating before a pre-lunch workout:
One cup of coffee with a splash of skim and a smidgen of honey at thirty calories, p. 3
One half of a banana, at fifty calories, p. 3
Open-faced egg salad sandwich, for one-hundred and eighty calories, p. 4
One cup of tea with milk and sugar, for thirty calories, p. 4
One half of an apple with a tablespoon of peanut-butter, for one-hundred sixty calories, p. 5
One cup of tea or coffee with milk and sweetener, for thirty calories, p. 5
That’s four-hundred and eighty calories altogether. That’s not very much food:
1/2 banana
1/2 apple
1 piece of bread
schmear of egg salad
1 smallish spoonful of peanut butter
3 (coffee-)cups coffee or tea w/sugar and skim milk
…followed by a strenuous workout.
Commenters over at Alas–along with lots of other commenters on related posts about similar regimes–have talked about the standards implicit in this goal-oriented healthy lifestyle. The thing that impressed me most was the undertone of hunger and the way hunger is treated in the sample chapter.
Her diet has brought her weight down to the lowest end of the healthy range on an extremely conservative scale. (And she’s tall, which means that her slot is quite possibly branded with an even more parsimonious number.)
She’s still very hungry, is the thing. She craves more food than she consumes, and seems to crave more pretty frequently. She has to carefully count calories to keep herself from eating more than she determines appropriate. She weighs herself daily to remind herself of her goal in the face of temptation. She talks about exercise as something that keeps her mind off of food, and refers to one snack as something that “gets [her] through” an hour or so of work. She apparently doesn’t keep sweets in the house because she can’t trust herself not to eat them. She keeps a careful record of the caloric value of her meals so that she can focus on that rather than what her appetite demands.
She’s hungry. She’s an active, healthy woman. She doesn’t seem to be under a lot of stress, or dealing with some terrible crisis. She’s getting adequate rest. She’s been eating an extremely healthy diet for years, so her body doesn’t crave unhealthy food per se. She has no real reason to feel something else as hunger. So if she’s hungry, she’s hungry.
Why is her body’s consistent assertion that she should eat more treated as something to fight against? She is nearly underweight; she could gain ten pounds and still be well within the healthy range for her body as determined by the BMI scale. (If we stick with calorie-counting for the sake of argument, that would work out to about an extra piece of toast and marg, or less than fifteen hundred calories total daily, for a year. She could also cram half an energy bar before heading to the gym.)
Why the hell not? Why is this not an extreme diet? And why is hunger not an indication that it’s too extreme? It’s really kind of baffling.