Dieting Dilemmas--Just a Waste of Time

This summer, my friend James asked me a most astounding question. We were eating frozen yogurt outside Temptations when he said: "Is frozen yogurt better for you than ice cream?"

It was a revelation. James has never considered food in any terms more complicated than hungry, full, yum, yuck. I--and, I would venture to say, most of my female friends--have had as confused and complex a relationship with food as with many a human being.

When I was six years old I knew that ice cream was somehow connected to the undesirable roundness of my post-toddler tummy. And since the fifth grade, when my family switched to frozen yogurt on the occasion of my parents' first cholesterol tests, I've been aware of the less "fattening" alternatives. I don't mean that I was obsessing about these things as early as that. That was a later phase, starting around the seventh grade. Only that I've been semi-consciously stockpiling health information for most of my life. It's gotten to the point that it's as natural and ostensibly integral to my conception of the way the world works as, say, the speed limits on the major roads around my house.

And here's James, 19 years old, very knowledgeable and intelligent and who's been able to live his whole life without ever encountering this information. He eats when he's hungry, and if he feels like a roast beef sandwich at midnight, he hesitates not to consume the 350 calories, but only to spend the $3.50. He has never distracted himself in class by adding up the day's calories, and he's never spent two or 15 or 100 minutes regretting his dessert--feeling with a visceral certainty that belies all nutritional science that the second peanut butter cookie has gone directly and instantaneously to his thighs.

So I'm jealous. I'm really, really, almost angrily jealous. Because it's not like I have particularly tortured eating habits, compared to most girls I know. I've gone through that a bit, in and around high school, and I'm endlessly happy and grateful to have left it behind. But looking back, I resent the amount of mental and emotional energy I lost to those thoughts--to planning what I was going to eat for dinner, and berating myself for what I'd eaten at the party last night, and forcing myself through ridiculous exercise routines and talking about dieting with my friends--when I could have been thinking and talking and worrying about so many other things that actually matter.

We should all resent that loss, and recognize it, even in its mildest form, as something we consider briefly and in the back of our minds. Even every time we enter the dining hall and fill up our trays with salad or soup or pasta or french fries.

Who would we be if we could have that time and energy back? My friends and I and, according to a statistic I've heard, the 90 percent of fifth grade girls who diet? I'm not saying we would've written the great American novel--although it's rather nice to think so. It's just that it's such a waste, such a terrible waste. We are, for the most part, no fatter or thinner than we were when we started out, despite our neurotic attention to the matter. We may gain and lose a little weight here and there, but more often than not, it all comes back to the same, basic body.

More often than not, it all comes back to just exactly where our metabolisms want us to be, whether we feed them until they race like trackstars or starve them until they slink along like Calvin Klein models, dutifully hoarding calories in response to the apparent famine.

But we've heard this all before. People spend plenty of time talking about eating disorders and the media's impact on body image and whatnot, and I don't mean to harp on that. I only want to share my amazement at the diet-free world of a guy I know, and my ensuing amazement at my own amazement, if you see what I mean.

James's question should not have surprised me so much. But I have a feeling that it would surprise most women he might've asked, and that's a pretty miserable fact if you think about it. We go to the dining hall and watch girl after girl load up her tray with salad, while boys fill one plate with pasta and one with chicken fingers and save room for dessert. We consider both trays appropriate and normal.

Sometimes we satisfy ourselves with the half-truth that boys just need to eat more; sometimes we make the absurd assumption that girls just like salad more; mostly we just don't think about it, because we've been watching it happen like this for years. And I could add disclaimers about how boys have eating concerns too, which is certainly and sadly true, or about how I don't speak for all girls or about how chicken fingers every night is not the healthiest of diets either. But with all that said, the situation still stands, and I almost wish I hadn't answered James's question. Why not let him go on not knowing?

It must be awfully nice.

Jody H. Peltason '01 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.