As an undergrad, I used to live in a student co-op. Amongst the freaks and geeks I lived with was this couple, whose names escape me at the moment. They were both skinny and pimply and extremely malnourished.
The house featured a large kitchen, stocked to the gills with all sorts of tasty food, and there were daily dinners cooked by residents which were surprisingly good, stupid hippy girls’ flavor- and spice-free meals nonwithstanding (It took me years after that to learn that
“vegetarian” doesn’t mean “tastes like nothing”).
Skinny Pimply Girl was kind of a bitch. She didn’t really have many friends, other than Skinny Pimply Guy, and neither of them interacted much with anyone else in the house. The one thing I remember about them is that for dinner, they’d cook themselves this enormous plate of
steamed (frozen) corn and peas, and sit at the far end of the dining room eating their plain veggies and whispering to each other.It was fucking weird. That was all they ate…ever.
I was reminded of Skinny Pimply Couple recently when I stumbled upon an article about calorie restriction in New York Magazine. Julian Dibbell spent two months following a strict CR diet, and writes about his experience and hosting a dinner party for the CR elite.
The basic premise of calorie restriction is that by severely limiting your food intake, you get better nutrition, and live significantly longer. On the front page of Calorie Restriction Society
website, there’s even a helpful graph that shows that lab rats given severely limited diets live significantly longer than rats fed normal rat diets. Which so obviously makes calorie restriction a great idea.
Everyone knows that humans are practically identical to lab rats, plus,
it totally doesn’t matter that we can’t actually talk to the rats to
hear about how fucking starving they are and how much they hate their
calorie-restricted lives.
At first, Dibbell seems to be getting into the whole calorie restriction thing. He’s losing weight, feeling better, but getting together with big-time CR folks, he starts noticing things. Like how CR
blogger April Smith loves the “pretty” way her boyfriend’s hands are turning orange because of all the carrots and such that he’s consuming. Or how the CR gold-standard protein is Quorn, some fungus-based, highly processed pseudo-meat product that actual food-eating people seem to hate. Or the obsessive-compulsive measuring and calculating that a CR diet
requires. Or how CR folk manage to spin the loss of muscle and bone (in
addition to fat) positively.
It’s all very interesting, and by interesting I mean “fucking weird.” Admittedly, I’m not the healthiest guy on the planet, but it seems to me that a food philosophy that requires a thorough explication of how it’s not anorexia is suspect from the get-go. I fear the lady doth protest too much.
Despite all the CR folks’ claims that the diet is about health, not about appearance, April Smith seems a bit bummed that she looks “bizarrely chunky” in the magazine.
[Note: Sometime after I read her blog, Smith edited the entry to remove her complaints about looking fat, although comments remained that alluded to the text that she deleted.]
Me, I’d rather eat bacon and drink beer every now and then. What good is living to be 120 when you’re orange, without strong bones or muscles, and tricking yourself into believing that fake meat products are actually enjoyable to eat?
