Fasting or Feasting - a rant

Before we start this, I want to be absolutely clear on two points. Firstly, if you are the kind of person who likes and follows celebrity or fashionable diets/body sculpting tips and believe that they work for you, then great but this will not be the kind of article that will provide you with the reassurance that you are doing the right thing. Secondly, neither is it an unrepentant attack on the healthy food movement as a whole, most of whose members are undeniably well meaning but attempt to provide the kind of ultimately doomed principles that are usually presented in 'three easy steps'. 

If you are still here then I hope we are all on the same page about what's coming so let's get cracking; I was in Tesco a few days ago and wandered down the book aisle as I am prone to do in certain moments of calm. I browsed across a few mediocre Dan Brown copycats and glossed over the paperback 'Easter Holiday easy readers' until my eye was caught by this book sitting at the number one best sellers position:

At this point let me please say that I have nothing whatsoever against Elly Pear. I've never met her but I'm sure she is a lovely woman, indeed I know several people who follow her dietary advice and swear that it does them the world of good. However, the reason behind my sudden, uncontrollable and irrepressible anger towards this book is that it represents the ultimate failure of our modern, cultured and some may say even civilised society to understand how we continue to use and mis-use food in sustaining our bodies on a daily basis. Instead, it excuses and even encourages our current unwillingness to develop long term relationships with the food we eat. You don't need willpower if you only have to not eat for a day, right?

Ms Pear is, of course not the only culprit in this issue and on the same shelf I immediately saw other such gems. Believe me when I say that I have just as much ire for Davina McCall, Amelia Freer, Dallas Hartwig and James Duigan.

 

 

All of these books promise that by buying their book and following their edicts to give you either karmic absolution, body image revolution within an absurd time frame or in the deplorable case of James Duigan, both of these at the same time.

I know that by now, some of you will be apocalyptically enraged by my mis-representation of these diets and how they actually advocate 'whole food' views with enough caveats about personal responsibility and clear accepted opinions of what is healthy and what is not to satisfy your justification bias. However, keep with me here and let me demonstrate why I got so angry with publishers making money out of your and my insecurities while pretending that they are doing us a favour.

Let's start with Elly Pear, it's not what she says that I have a problem with, rather it's the attitude that her book represents. Let's not mess about here, there are three major attractions to the very basic representation of 'Fast Days and Feast Days'. Firstly, that you can eat anything you want.  Feasting is a good thing and is all about pleasure, gluttony and generally feeling good about eating as much as possible. Secondly, a 'fast day' can be one of two things, firstly it's a day of not eating but secondly it describes a period of time that passes more quickly before you get to another 'feast day'. Finally, the cover shows Elly herself, looking attractive and representing the kind of person that you can be if you follow the guidance in her book.

Am I the only one who see's this as odd? Is an accelerated process of starving and bingeing really going to make you more attractive? I think a huge number of recovering anorexics and binge eaters would beg to differ. Again, please don't think for a second that I believe that Elly Pear is offering readers a weight loss solution based on the principles of eating disorders, rather what I object to is that this is the representation that book gives me, the reader as its proposition. If you read the book, you'll see that the promise of a 'feast day' is actually laced with very carefully constructed guidance on what you should and shouldn't eat. I applaud the intention to change what the reader believes to constitute a feast into something more appropriate to healthy living but you are set up to fail if you go into the plan on the promise of its title alone, which unfortunately, is the inevitable intention of the publisher. An attractive cover sells books.

Now, look back at the other book covers that I chose here. All of them give you the same message; it's easy to eat whatever you want and still change yourself into a better person.  'A totally toned tummy in 14 days', James Duigan you should be ashamed of yourself; 'the 30 day guide to TOTAL HEALTH and FOOD FREEDOM' nice use of capitals there to highlight the ridiculous promises; '10 easy steps to losing weight' it's easy to look as good as this airbrushed photo; 'Eat carbs and still lose weight with my amazing 5 week smart carb plan' come on Davina shouldn't it be under promise and over deliver, not the other way around?

The truth is, that it's really, really, really hard to stay healthy in today's society and any suggestion that it's otherwise is wrong. There are simply too many competing interests all trying to get hold of your cash. From junk food to healthy snacks, from processed fats, processed sugars to organic pesticides and fairtrade bananas, sooner or later you'll fall off the wagon and hate yourself for doing it. So, after noticing that you've just finished the whole tub of ice-cream without realising it, you'll buy another book which promises to fix you up and make you feel better about yourself just in time for the summer holidays. I don't know to what extent these messages are written by the authors themselves or created by publishers to sell books but their effect is to create an overwhelming baseline of an accepted view that allows you and me to expect to treat food in a particular way; it's OK to only eat sausages today because a) I really like them and b) besides, I'm drinking kale smoothies for the rest of the week. 

So what do you do? Aha, my friends, you won't catch me out that easily! Will I just be another hypocritical voice in my condemnation of something that I haven't been able to achieve myself? We live in a completely different world to the one that we evolved from, with so many more choices and experiences open to us. I live my life by eating my way from experience to experience and so I can't afford to be weighed down by such emotional baggage as worrying about how I look in my speedos. I see diversification of diet as a good thing and people today are able to explore new tastes more than ever before but as there are so many things to treat and indulge on, that diversification must be enjoyed in both the good and the bad.

Too much of anything is bad, just as a little bit of anything probably isn't going to kill you*. Surely a healthy understanding of the essence of life must be based on the appreciation that life is full of nice things to eat and we can have some of this, a bit more of that but only a little bit of this. Before you could order food from any cuisine under the sun delivered hot to your door, people didn't need to worry about polyfats or carb bloating. We live in a new world and we should respond by recognising it. I am not the posterchild for clean living, I don't have a body mass index of anything approaching svelte and I don't cut out sugar, carbs, wheat, soya, fat, nuts or gluten. But I do know that eating too much of any of those things is bad for me and I adjust my habits accordingly. 

I see the commercial need to push on the human condition but morally, can it be justified when it just pushes us towards a point of culinary armageddon where we end up with one of only two extremes:

1) total sanitisation of food that's been screened, processed and approved before it can be eaten without guilt 

versus;

2) the counter culture of hemp oil biscuits and soya pasta, where nothing can enter the body unless it's been grown on the untouched slopes of the Andes and cultivated with the tears of passing yak.

Now I don't know about you, but I'm hoping that we find a happy medium.




* Apart from heroin, or crack. Seriously kids, don't do drugs. At all.