Pickiness.

One problem with being “on a diet” in America:  It tends to make you an aggravated, and possibly aggravating, dinner guest.

This is where the habit of gluttony* really shows its true colors, and in so many different ways.  Our cultural expectation of overeating as part of a celebration — and I don’t mean ordinary, natural festive feasting food, I mean really overstuffing — tempts those who would like to remain temperate; and it causes people to take offense when a dish is declined, however politely.  

One of the more insidious ways, though, is that the dinner guest or houseguest  “on a diet” often can see no way to limit her eating, except to fall into another kind of gluttony:  eating “too daintily.”   That is:   “being a picky eater.”  

Allergies excepted, it’s indeed gluttonous to ask that your host conform the dinner to your imagined dietary requirement.  What’s that?  Did I just say “imagined?”  Yes, indeed.  There are no dietary requirements over the time scale of a single meal that are not imagined.  There may be dietary exclusions — allergies and true food intolerances, as well as religious and philosophical taboos — but no requirements.  Many exclusions are imaginary, too.  It will not kill a low-carb eater to have a polite quantity of rice or pasta or potatoes.  White flour may not be good for you, but it is not poison in small quantities to most people.   An entire dinner of deep-fried food, with nary a fresh vegetable to be seen, will not destroy a low-fat dieter.  But it is so tempting to sit unhappily at the table and think “Don’t they know I can’t eat all this stuff?”  Or to conspicuously peel the skin and breading off your chicken and leave it in a sodden pile on your plate.  Or else to become the Guest from Hell — “Do you have any plain vegetables?  What’s in this salad dressing?”  Even following the best advice — bring a “safe” dish of your own to share — often carries a subtext of “You make the WRONG food and I am trying to show you what is the RIGHT food.” 

Look, I’ve been there.  I’ve done this. I spent several years trying to eat low-carb, which is one of the worst offenders in terms of diets for turning its proponents into picky eaters, certain that one bite of dessert will send them out of ketosis and derail them for the next 3 weeks.   I am keeping my fingers crossed that my in-laws and friends don’t invade the comboxes and say “Come on Erin, you should talk.”  I’m trying to be better!  I swear!

I’m bringing this up trying to make a plug for simple moderation of quantity as a dietary tactic.  Since I stopped following strict dietary regimens and started “not eating so damn much,” I find it’s a lot easier to be a dinner guest.  There’s nothing I can’t accept on my plate graciously:  potatoes, bread, meat, dessert.   If there are plenty of vegetables around, it’s not hard to fill my plate up with half veg as I try to do on a daily basis.  But even if there aren’t,  so that I must subsist (for just this one meal!) on high-calorie, low-nutrition stuff, no one can stop me from taking servings that are small enough to get the right amount of calories at least. 

You know the phrase “I’m saving room for dessert”?  Use it.  Really do save room for dessert, by eating a right-size portion of everything you’re served.   You do not have to clean your plate.  Use “No, thank you” as many times as necessary.  And then when dessert comes, rave over it.  And then, if you like, stop before you’re done and proclaim yourself too stuffed to eat any more. 

It’s as simple as that.  And you can do it without explaining to anyone that you’re on a diet, or have special needs, or are… “special.”  You can just concentrate on being a gracious guest and having a good time with the company.

Reality:  You may not be able to consume a perfect meal, or even a “good for you” meal, when you are a dinner guest.  But you can always reinforce anti-gluttonous habits.  That includes pickiness.  Cheerfully accepting what’s served to you and eating a moderate portion of it — meaning that the only control you choose to exercise over the menu is self-control, i.e., STOPPING when you have had enough calories — is part of being a gracious guest, and also an important skill that I think many of us have not developed and that transfers to lots of other eating situations.  And when you leave, you can reflect with pleasure on the habits you have reinforced — making good choices (not just biochemically healthy choices, but charitable ones) in a situation where choices are, as always, limited.

[Editing note.  Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.  

I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.

I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them.  Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]