bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Gluttony: Drawing the line.

    So, I said a few posts ago that I would try to write some ideas about what is, and what isn't, gluttony.  This is one of those posts where I become an armchair theologian.  I might be on to something, or I might be completely wrong.  Take it with a grain of salt!

    Aquinas's definition of gluttony seems to have one glaring problem:  it lacks a bright-line rule.  "Gluttony means inordinate appetite in eating," he tells us, and we rightly ask:  What do you mean, "inordinate?"  Out of accord with the natural order of things, one supposes.  He clarifies:  

    Now in eating there are two things to consider, the food that is eaten, and the eating thereof. And consequently there may be a twofold inordinateness of appetite: one in respect of the food itself that is taken; and thus in respect of the substance or species of the food one seeks dishes that are expensive; in respect of the quality one seeks dishes too elaborately prepared, that is, daintily; in respect of quantity one exceeds in eating too much. The other inordinateness is in the taking of the food, either by anticipating the due time of eating, which is too soon; or by not observing due mode and manner in eating, which is too eagerly.

    We've been over this before:   we can be a glutton by eating too expensively, too daintily ("pickily"), too much, too soon, or too eagerly.  This is a nice categorization because it expands the usual definition of gluttony, but it still leaves us asking:  But Thomas, what do you mean by "too" anything?  If one can eat "too" expensively, then surely one can eat "just expensively enough," and so forth.  Where is the line?  How do we know when we've crossed over from eating promptly, to eating "too soon?"  Eating with relish, and eating "too eagerly?"   Selecting good food and being a glutton of pickiness?

    I think the answer is that gluttony, like most concupiscence, abhors restraint; what makes gluttony different from other vices, such as sloth or lust is that the restraints it abhors all have to do with food.  Different people live under different sets of restraints, some more stringent than others; and different times call for different restraints; so the boundaries of gluttony cannot be defined clearly as a set of rules that are appropriate for everyone.   And so eating quite a lot of food, or eating expensive food, or eating at odd times, isn't inherently gluttonous; what makes it gluttonous is if the eater is supposed to be exercising restraint, but isn't.

    What kinds of restraints might we live under?  Well, here are some:

    The restraint of charity.  We should be gracious guests;  we shouldn't make onerous demands on the people who prepare and serve our food; we shouldn't demand the most or the best, always leaving lesser portions for others.  We shouldn't make messes that others have to clean up.  

    The restraint of obedience.  Men and women in religious life observe a rule of set mealtimes.  Children must obey their parents who tell them, "Don't spoil your dinner."  Employees might be enjoined to refrain from eating and drinking during working hours or in work areas.    A husband and wife might agree to save money by curtailing impulse food purchases or restaurant meals.

    The restraint of resources or money.  Each person has only so much money to spend on luxuries, and the luxuries we enjoy shouldn't cut into our budget for necessaries.

    The restraint of physical health.  We have a responsibility to guard the health of our bodies, and to do this we must keep our diets within a certain range, one which varies from person to person.  Certain illnesses (diabetes, food intolerances) might restrict us further.  And many of us have experienced the immediate uncomfortable effects of too much of the wrong food (or drink) in too short a time.

    The restraint of religious or ethical duties.  These are culturally specific:   Some people keep kosher.  Some people swear off factory farming.  Some people don't eat meat on Fridays during Lent.

    The restraint of manners.  Also culturally specific, but significant:  We don't start eating until the blessing is said, or we have courses in a certain order, or we eat with utensils and not our fingers, or we don't ask for refreshments until they are offered, or we graciously try some of everything served to us — whatever the standard of polite behavior regarding food may be, wherever we are.

    + + + 

    My point here is that I can't draw a bright line such as "Eating 15 minutes before a meal is to be served, is an example of Aquinas's 'eating too soon' and is therefore gluttony."  That's because some of us live under circumstances where snacking fifteen minutes before dinner is doctor's orders, some of us live under circumstances where snacking fifteen minutes before dinner causes no problem to anyone at all, and some of us live under circumstances where snacking fifteen minutes before dinner would be a serious violation of a duty to obedience.

    But  all of us live under some duties of gastronomical restraint.   Sometimes the restraint is imposed from outside, for instance by medical advice, common manners, appropriate authorities, or monetary limits.  Other times the restraint is entirely of our own making:  we may set a goal to cut out sweets, reduce our carbon footprint, lose weight, or eat more vegetables.  Or the restraint may follow naturally from trying to live out our convictions, as in being a gracious dinner guest, or making sure that others have enough before taking seconds.

    Whatever the restraint we live under may be, I think gluttony is the inability or unwillingness to bear the restraint.  To the extent that it's an inability we are talking about a weakness, a vice or a character fault; to the extent that it's an unwillingness we are talking about incidences of sin.   The weakness and the sin happen to share the same name, but I think it is not too difficult to tell the difference.

    If I can't or won't set limits for myself, or if I constantly promise myself to set a limit and then break the promise, this is a symptom of gluttony.  It's not a sin to eat a sweet.  It's not a sin to promise myself I won't eat any more sweets tonight, and then give in and have just one more before I go to bed.  But if it's a pattern that I promise myself every night I won't eat sweets, and then every night I eat sweets anyway, then there's good reason to suspect I have a problem with the sin of gluttony — because I have the habit of giving in, of detesting even this small self-imposed  restraint.    And of course, if I suffer from this weakness, it's so much more likely that I will fall into the sin.

    [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.  This is one of the posts where I did a better job trying to make the distinction.

    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.]

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  • “Make me, I pray you, sweet to my friends and sour to my foes, to these a man reverend to behold, to those a man terrible.”

    Solon, among a selection of passages from Greek authors at Laudator Temporis Acti on the subject of loving one's friends and hating one's enemies.

    The reason for the highlight is, of course, the Sermon on the Mount, which we've been getting in installments in our Sunday readings.  It's hard to keep the Sermon in context, isn't it?  After two thousand years of repeating things like "Pray for those who persecute you," such uterances start to sound like they make sense.   It's really only familiarity that makes us say "Oh, yes, that's nice."    

    But it doesn't make sense in any human, natural way, and we all know this.  Check any newspaper for examples of Christians eager for revenge of one kind or another (sure, it may go by the names of "closure" or "justice" or "teach him a lesson.")  Jesus was a man who said a lot of extremely surprising things, and this is one of them.  

    Actually, surprising perhaps puts it too mildly.  "Pray for those who persecute you" is downright offensive.   Traumatic.  Triggering, even.  

    The Greeks were wise in the ways of man, if not of God.  Here's an interesting tidbit:

    Polybius 1.14.4-5 (tr. W. R. Paton) allows an exception to the rule only in the person of the historian who is bound to be impartial:

    "…a good man should love his friends and his country, he should share the hatreds and attachments of his friends; but he who assumes the character of a historian must ignore everything of the sort, and often, if their actions demand this, speak good of his enemies and honour them with the highest praises while criticizing and even reproaching roundly his closest friends, should the errors of their conduct impose this duty on him."

    The historian's duty is to truth, and truth requires impartiality.   People naturally seek comradeship and deal out retribution, but accuracy — truth —  is something different and yet worth seeking, and it's simply common sense that, to find it, the historian must squelch his unhelpful (if natural, universal, understandable, and ordinarily even desirable) favoritism.  Everybody knows that, right?  Today we would mention other professions bound by this standard:  reporters, research scientists, judges, and teachers.  The Greeks knew, as we naturally know, that truth is a good that supersedes natural human desires to divide the world into "us" and "them."  Still, the Greeks indulged those desires in everyday life, and most of the time, so do we.  If it's not our job to be impartial, we don't expect it of ourselves.

    The really radical aspect of the Sermon on the Mount isn't so much the call for impartiality:  "love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust."  As Polybius wrote, as we know, there are purposes and duties that call for impartiality — that's obvious!  

    The radical part is the suggestion that all times and all purposes call for "serving Truth."

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  • Withholding the truth.

    Nice review of the basics on lying and telling the truth at Riparians at the Gate.  Specifically, how to graciously withhold the truth from someone who has no right to know it.

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  • Is foodie-ism a form of gluttony?

    It can be, for sure.  Check out the article by B. R. Myers in the newest issue of The Atlantic, and discuss.

    I admit that my shift away from foodie-ism has largely been out of necessity, as family pressures give me less time to indulge cooking-as-a-hobby.  Or maybe it's really a transformation:  you can be a foodie who exults variety and exotic ingredients and expensiveness, or you can be a foodie who works on the perfect homey comfort food, the best of all possible meatloaf and mashed potatoes.   I am ever in search of that elusive dish that everyone in the family raves about, after all. 

    But, on the other hand, although I can do it less and less these days, I look forward to the occasional trip to the new fancy restaurant that's getting all the rave reviews.  I have some discretionary income; why not spend some of our entertainment dollars on foodie entertainment?  If I'd rather have sushi than a movie, well, what's wrong with that?

    I assert:  Obsessiveness with locavore-ism or with only eating "sustainably" or with consuming only organic food or with only eating interesting food even, that sort of thing is, indeed, a form of gluttony.  Eating local, or sustainably, or organic, are preferences, just like a taste for pizza or meat or a sweet tooth, and there's nothing wrong with seeking out one's taste preferences, but it can go too far: demanding that those preferences be fulfilled at all times, or spending way too much money on them, or (here's the rub for the foodie writers) encouraging other people to be dissatisfied and unhappy with what they have — those are real faults.  Sins even.  And gluttony is what it falls under.  Remember, it's not just "eating too much."  

    Where do we draw the line?  How do we draw the line?  

    I have some thoughts about this, but I would like to get a few comments first.  So check out the article, and tell me if you agree or disagree with the author.

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  • Rice cooker jambalaya.

    The low-carb visitors will really be disappointed in me on this one.  

    Here's a new rice-cooker dinner I tried today.   In general, when I say "rice-cooker dinner," I'm not always looking for meals where you throw everything in the pot and turn it on and that's it.  I'm looking for meals that finish cooking in the rice cooker, and then stay warm in there indefinitely, so they are perfect for Monday night swimming lessons where we get home at 5:45 p.m. I don't mind doing some prep beforehand, as long as I can hit "COOK" right before I run out the door and have dinner ready when I get home.

    If you're using white rice, apparently you can toss the raw rice and liquid and other stuff right into your rice cooker and have it all turn out okay.  Brown rice, which is the only kind I buy, is a bit more finicky.  I usually cook the brown rice first and then add other stuff and hit "COOK" a second time in order to have it done enough.

    So, tonight I adapted a fakey-jambalaya recipe as follows:

    • Cooked a cup of brown rice in three cups of chicken stock with a little salt, in the rice cooker.  (If you use white rice instead of brown, two cups of stock will do, and you probably don't have to pre-cook it)
    • Chopped up two green bell peppers and a medium onion.
    • Sauteed the green pepper and onion in 4 tablespoons butter till soft and a little brown.
    • Mixed in 2 teaspoons "cajun" seasoning (not the kind with salt added; from the bulk spices section of the grocery store).
    • Added this to the rice cooker, butter and all.
    • Also added to the rice cooker one can of blackeyed peas, drained, and one can of Ro-Tel brand tomatoes with green chilies, not drained.
    • Sliced up a 14-ounce ring-shaped smoked sausage.  Browned that in another 2 tablespoons butter.  Dumped that into the rice cooker too.
    • Deglazed the pan with another cup of stock and added that to the rice cooker.  Mixed it all up.
    • Closed it and hit "COOK" for the second time.  Left for the Y.
    • Came back and made a fruit salad to go with.  Also some okra.

    Very well received by 4/6 of my family.  The rest had peanut butter sandwiches.  

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  • “Dysphoric milk ejection reflex.”

    In this blog post at Babble, Katie Allison Granju tells about a tentatively-identified disorder called "Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex:"

     One of the things I mentioned…was how bizarrely agitated and unhappy I felt every time I used a breastpump. I described the feeling as being close to a low grade panic attack.

    One of the commenters on that post left a link to a website about something called “Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex” or “D-MER.” I’d never heard of this, so I went and checked the site out, and what I found is truly fascinating, and has the potential to help a whole lot of women.

    The site was started by a mother who found herself experiencing sudden and painful  feelings of sadness and disappointment every time she started to nurse her baby. She made the connection between her milk letdown (ejection reflex) and the onset of these feelings, and started trying to track down information and resources about this condition, which obviously has the potential to make it very hard for a woman to breastfeed her baby, and could also lead to more serious problems, like depression.

    … I have personally known several mothers over the years who have described what I now believe to have been D-MER to me with regard to their personal breastfeeding experiences. These women recounted that they began to feel inexplicably empty and hopeless whenever they breastfed their babies; one friend told me that she had a sudden and powerful pang of what felt like homesickness when the baby would begin to nurse. Another explained that nursing her baby made her feel very anxious and agitated, like she was going to jump out of her own skin.

    Check it out, and especially read some of the comments.   I didn't think I've ever experienced it, but some of the comments remind me eerily of the horrible feelings I got every time I tried to nurse the baby and the toddler at the same time (like, literally simultaneously, one on each breast).  I think I only ever attempted that about three times before I swore I would never, ever, ever do that again.

    There's some more detail in Katie's post about the specific hormonal mechanisms that are implicated, and of course you can follow the link in the quote to the DMER website.

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  • Taking a step back.

    I can't for the life of me remember what temporary insanity induced me to get on a pair of downhill skis for the first time.  It was sixteen years ago.  I must have been bored.   I was in college, working an internship in Kentucky of all places, and some of the other interns and I went to General Butler State Park, which at the time had a ski hill with a whole 600-foot vertical drop and three or four lifts.  (It closed permanently a couple of years later.)  

    I don't remember learning to ski there.  I don't remember learning how to get on and off the lifts.  I certainly didn't have a lesson.  Maybe one of the other interns gave me a few pointers.  At any rate, by the end of that first trip, I was managing to make it down the hill on the rental skis.  That's all I remember.

    Mark skied for the first time sometime after I did — he went with his brother somewhere.  Later the two of us went to an eastern resort and took a couple of lessons.  Over the next few years both of us improved, him much faster than me due to a general willingness to hurl himself over precipices, one that I have never shared.  But I did get to the point where I could make it down most any intermediate run without panicking.  He goes skiing about six times as often as I do, but we still take family trips every once in a while, and occasionally trot out to the local hill (yes, we do have them in Minnesota) so the kids and I can practice a bit.

    We just got back from a trip to Colorado, the first trip since I started exercising and lost all that weight.  I think I learned something.

     Even though I've been skiing for sixteen years, and even though I have been able to ski intermediate runs for a long time, and even though I'm fitter and stronger than any other time I've ever been skiing, I spent all my snow time this trip on easy "green" runs.  It is about time I took a step back.  For a long time I have been trying to ski stuff that is really too hard for me.  Sure, I can "make it down," the intermediate runs don't frighten me, but my form is terrible and always has been.  Maybe I was trying too hard to keep up with my daredevil husband so that we could sort of ski together once in a while.  

    At any rate, maybe because of what I've learned from swimming and running over the past two years, I realized that what I really need to do is stop trying to pretend that I'm a good enough skier to ski intermediate runs.  Merely being unafraid of them is not enough for me.  So, I took a refresher lesson on my first day, and then I spent the rest of my snow time working doggedly on the fundamentals of carving turns, on easy terrain:  back and forth across the cruiser hill, not even attempting pole plants, doing nothing but concentrating on the pressure of the edges in the snow.

    It sounds maybe kind of boring?  Actually, the time went by very fast.  The truth is I like the challenge now, of trying to learn how to do something physical, how to improve.  Maybe if I was already a good skier, I would be having fun just, er, having fun, going fast and feeling the wind and challenging myself on tricky terrain.  But as I am — reasonably confident but aware of how much work I have to do — going back to the easy terrain and struggling to carve turns gracefully and efficiently, turn after turn, occupied all my attention and challenged me from head to toe.   By the end of my few hours on the slope each day, when I went back to fetch the baby, I was sure I was just on the cusp of "getting it."  And of course on the last day when I popped off the rental skis for the last time, I thought:  Darn it, I almost had it. 

    Given how rarely I get to get on skis, I honestly don't know when I will ever make it back off the easy green cruisers.  Maybe after a while, I'll be longing for the days when I thought I was improving just because I was tackling harder terrain.  But I'm determined to fix my bad form, and if that means sticking to the easy stuff for a while, so be it.  Baby steps!

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  • Erin Manning on headcoverings for Mass.

    I pretty much agree with Erin Manning's take on chapel veils/mantillas/headscarves and the like at Mass.

    To begin with, though, let's look at this recent comment from Father Z.'s poll/post:

    "Why does the head covering always have to be a 19th-century mediterranean mantilla – or whatever it is? You might as well wear an ancient Athenian helmet. What’s the idea here? Cover the hair? Cover the top of the head? Look almost like a (habited) nun while retaining enough distinction to show you’re not? Would a zaccheto do? Would a chador be too much?

    "Which of the Easter bonnets in the movie Easter Parade would suffice?" 

    I have often wondered about that, too…

    A traditionalist website to which I will not link (a policy of mine) asserts that Christian women have practiced "veiling" for two thousand years; this "veiling" took place when women entered a church or were in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. I tend to smile, a little, at such statements–because there is such a false impression given by them. We see, in our mind's eye, a simple European peasant girl, passing by a church on a weekday; she pauses, makes the sign of the cross, carefully drapes a large and elegant lace veil over her head, and enters to make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament…

    But a quick visit to the paintings of someone like Jean Francois Millet shows us what that peasant girl would more likely be wearing–a simple twist of some rough fabric, which she wore all the time to cover her head, not just when she happened to pass a church. Some nicer fabric, or an actual hat, might repose in her closet for Sunday; but lace, in the days before machine-made lace, was impossibly expensive and not likely to belong to most Catholic women.

    In fact, a single lace mantilla in Madrid in the year 1830 could cost today's American equivalent of six hundred to two thousand dollars. Middle-class women scrimped and saved to afford mantillas with lace borders, while poorer women made do with fabric mantillas in the best fabric they could afford.

    Did they do this to honor the Lord? Well, according to a book written in that time, in Madrid in 1830 women in the middle and lower classes still wore their mantillas as their "everyday" head coverings. Only the wealthiest women–the ones with the fanciest veils–started saving their mantillas for church and wearing the newer (and even more costly!) European hats to the theater and other social venues.

    How it is that the mantilla, a particularly Spanish form of head covering, became the preferred head covering of traditional women in America in the twenty-first century is truly puzzling. 

    By all means, cover your hair if you want to, or don't if you don't want to.  There are good arguments both for and against.  But I'm with the other Erin in wondering — why mantillas?  I mean, they are beautiful, but really, a bandanna would also do the trick, and if I decided to cover my hair for Mass, that's probably the route I'd take.   Or some kind of wicking performance fabric, more likely.

    And then, the judgment I'd probably receive would be "Huh, guess she didn't have time to wash her hair this morning." 

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  • Home!

    Back from vacation!  I'll post about something or other later on, between Mass and laundry.

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  • Why We Get Fat, part 3: Why gluttony isn’t off the hook.

    Continuing my review of Gary Taubes' book, Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It….

    The word "gluttony" implies a reference to the moral aspect of eating behavior.  Be aware that Taubes doesn't use the word the way a moral theologian would, and indeed he never carefully defines it.  In general, he is using it to mean "eating too much," at the same time that he argues that "eating too much" is a meaningless term.  He writes "gluttony" ironically, because in his view it implies exactly what he argues against:  that a moral defect causes caloric excess, and that caloric excess causes fattening weight gain.  Instead, he shows convincingly that growing fatter and heavier causes the caloric excess, and the "moral defect" is something we read into this afterward by naming the caloric excess "gluttony."

    Common usage might name "fattening caloric excess" as gluttony, but moral theologians don't, and it's the theological definition of gluttony that we are concerned with here at bearing blog. 

      So, for instance, Aquinas says that gluttony is immoderation in eating and drinking.  To paraphrase him, a glutton eats too much, too soon, too eagerly, or too expensively; or else, he's too picky.  (Because of this, we might usefully subdivide the sin into categories, like "gluttony of pickiness" or "gluttony of expense.")  On the one hand, a "picky glutton" or an "expensive glutton" might not eat caloric excess by any measure at all.  On the other hand, someone eating caloric excess might not be committing gluttony.  Eating large amounts of food because you incorrectly believe you need it, points out Aquinas, can't be gluttony because you don't know better.  Eating large amounts of food on medical advice isn't gluttonous either. 

    Knowing what Taubes has to say about hunger signals, I would synthesize this to assert that, however obese you may be, eating in response to the sensation of hunger is never gluttony (provided charity or some other reason doesn't recommend that you wait); the body sends the hunger signal when the cells need food, and the point of eating is to give your cells food.  Taubes tells us that we cannot just tell our cells, "If you need food, use my stored fat," and expect them to comply; in the obese individual, hunger persists because the cells cannot use that energy, and they need to be fed somehow.   Let's posit that when your body sends you a real hunger signal, that means your body is ready to use some new food.     It might not be an emergency — healthy people can stay hungry for a few hours without disaster — but it's a real signal for food and it should generally be morally okay to heed it.

    So why does gluttony matter at all?

    Let's take the first kind:  gluttony of eating too much, past fullness. Not all fat people are gluttons of eating past fullness; many obese people feel hungry despite depriving themselves of food.  Some, however, are:  I know, I was one of them.  I ate past fullness all the time — and whenever I had to restrain myself, I was constantly assailed by temptations, desires, even dreams of food, and had difficulty concentrating on other things.  I sneaked food, I hoarded food, I spent too much money on food, I inconvenienced other people to get the food I wanted.  I hardly ever let a craving pass un-fed. 

    Yes, I almost certainly had a physical defect, skewed insulin reactions or something like it, that aggravated cravings.  But habit was part of it, short-term gratification-seeking was part of it, fear of even mild suffering, refusal to control myself was part of it.  In short, the same things that are part of concupiscence of all kinds. 

    Some people, maybe, have just a physical defect that makes their bodies hang on to their fat and sends them hunger signals all the time.  Maybe those people cut the carbs, their bodies begins to burn their fat for fuel, their hunger signals fade and (not being gluttons) they don't eat as much because they are less hungry.

    Other people, however, may suffer from a physical defect and a moral defect as well — a habit of giving in, not just to real hunger signals, but to any and every impulse to eat (or to eat rapidly, or to eat pickily), even in the face of concerns for health, frugality, charity, or duty. 

    So: Let's say that you're a glutton, and you're fat.  Cutting carbs as Taubes suggests, replacing them with moderate amounts of protein, plenty of fat, and as many nutrient-dense green vegetables as your body can handle, might fix the hunger problem and reduce cravings.  And it even might make you thin — and yet, you could still be a glutton. 

    But you'd be a smarter glutton, because with hunger pangs arriving more regularly and with uncontrollable cravings diminished, the remaining impulses ought to be a little more obvious, a little easier to root out.  You might have an easier time differentiating between "need to eat" and "want to eat" — or it might be harder for you to rationalize.  You'd still have a lot of spiritual work to do, if you wanted to rid yourself of the sin of gluttony.  Physically healthy satiety might, now, tell you when you no longer need to eat — but it would still be up to your will to decide to stop eating while some pleasure still remains on your plate.

    On the other hand, if you struggle with real, spiritual gluttony, you might need to work on that from the beginning, at the same time as you try to implement the restrictions that are supposed to cure you of your physical cravings and hunger.  That's because the very essence of what gluttony rebels against is restrictions on food:  not just how much, but also what, when, and how.  Physical hunger may fade, uncontrollable cravings may subside, but you will likely still be left with a whining, childish voice that says, "But I want."  And if you can't learn to say, "But I choose" back, resist the voice of gluttony, then you may never get as far as healing the physical hunger and cravings.

    Taubes is probably right that gluttony isn't necessarily causing fat people to stay fat, and that in many fat people it might not be present at all.  But what he's left out (again, because it's not his area of expertise) that anybody, thin or fat, healthy or unhealthy, might be a glutton.  And gluttons are going to have a tougher time with the food restrictions, because gluttony abhors food restrictions.  That's its nature.  Aquinas named this the sin of eating "too much, too soon, too eagerly, too expensively, too daintily"; we could easily rename it the gluttony which hates the restrictions of capacity, duty, manners, resources, and charity.

     So to sum up:  If you are fat, you might suffer from hunger and cravings, and still not be a glutton.  But if you are a glutton, Taubes' book does not contain all the answers.  Gluttony might stand in the way of implementing the food restrictions that will heal your hunger and cravings; and if you do implement the restrictions, if you do become physically healthy, gluttony might remain long after the hunger and cravings have disappeared.

    [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.  

    This particular post is one in which I was trying to make some of those distinctions more carefully.

    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.]

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    4 comments on Why We Get Fat, part 3: Why gluttony isn’t off the hook.

  • Why Why We Get Fat isn’t really a comprehensive diet book: a review, part two.

    (Part one of my review of Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It by Gary Taubes is here)

    This is what I want out of my culinary lifestyle: 

    Above all other concerns, it has to keep me physically healthy, so I can feel good, stay active, get my stuff done, and maintain my weight.  This is the natural purpose of food, so I have no problem putting it above every other desire in importance.   But as long as I can get this, I have other desires:

    • I want to enjoy a variety of tasty, real, unprocessed food.
    • I don't want to feel dependent on eating large quantities of food; I want to eat lightly.
    • I would like to have at least a little bit of foods that make me happy even if they are biochemically not so good for me.
    • I don't want my family to consume a whole lot of meat.
    • I want to be a gracious dinner guest, accepting some (if not all) of what's offered me.  I don't want to require special treatment.
    • I'd like to save money and preparation time.
    • I want to be able to eat a meal in any restaurant whatsoever without resenting the choices.
    • I want to obsess less about my diet.

    These are not universal values.  Some of you might pipe up:  "Well, I'd like to grow as much of my own food as I can."  Or:  "I don't want to eat any meat at all."  Or:   "You'd like to save money in an abstract sense, but me, I have a food ceiling of $80/week."  Or:  "I love to try new restaurants and want to do it as often as possible."  Or:  "I have to have chocolate every day." 

    If you peruse the list of culinary desires, including the first one, you should notice one thing:  I cannot satisfy all of them.   The more I emphasize one desire, the more I must compromise with another.  For example, the more I diversify the foods I eat, the more money I probably spend.  The less processed food I buy, the more time I spend preparing food.  The more-freely I eat in restaurants and the more I accept what the hostess offers me, the less control I have over things like sustainability and healthfulness.

     Another thing you should notice is that some of these desires require effort.  It feels good to eat food, and eating lightly requires that I stop before I might like to.  It's easy to plan dinner around plenty of meat, and so using less requires me to work harder.   It feels good to eat a large piece of cake; it's harder to stop after just a small one. 

    So my desire of staying physically healthy, even though it has primacy, has to be satisfied in context.   I must also strike a balance among a number of other values in tension with each other and sometimes even in tension with the primary goal.   And I must do it in an environment where there are many temptations to act contrary to my desires.

    A really comprehensive diet book can't tell you what your own values are, of course, but it will promote some of the author's values and show you the tensions that exist between those and other values you might have.  A really comprehensive diet book will devote some attention to strategies for balancing contrary desires, i.e., for living your life within the constraints of the eating plan:  a chapter of suggested restaurant orders,  advice on living with diet-sabotaging relatives, a section of recipes.   A really comprehensive diet book will also suggest strategies that keep the dieter motivated in the face of temptation, or ways to remove temptations from the environment. 

    Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It devotes little, if any, attention to context.  This means it is not a comprehensive diet book.    But what it does provide is a crucial piece of information:  a detailed description of an evidence-based weight-loss menu, one that has the best-demonstrated track record of really helping people lose body fat in controlled clinical settings.

    This information is undeniably useful.   It is also real-life-context-free.  Except for a couple of implications and hints strewn throughout the book, Taubes declines to provide any suggestions about how to integrate this information into your life.  Clearly, he does not think it is his job. 

     And I agree; it is not.  Taubes is a science journalist.  He is not a diet guru.  He is not a cognitive-behavioral therapist.  He is not a chef.  And more importantly, he is not you.   His job, it seems, is to tell you what the evidence demonstrates.  Your job is to figure out how you can incorporate it into your life and your own set of values.

    + + +

    So what does the evidence demonstrate?  Remember the quote from the last post:

    The one thing we absolutely have to do if we want to get leaner–if we want to get fat out of our fat tissue and burn it–is to lower our insulin levels and to secrete less insulin to begin with.

    According to Taubes, evidence suggests that the only way to do this is to reduce the consumption of — you've heard this before — breads, cereal grains, white root vegetables, "foods containing much sugar" including a few fruits, and sweets.   This leaves quite a bit left that can be eaten freely and still promote weight loss in most people:  animal flesh, green vegetables, eggs, cheese, and many other fruits.   (A rephrasing of a set of successful clinical recommendations quoted on pages 155-156).

    A key, oft-repeated point is that among obese individuals, sensitivity to the restricted foods varies a great deal. 

    The fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be… [T]here's no one-size-fits-all prescription for the quantity of carbohydrates we can eat and still lose fat or remain lean.  For some, staying lean or getting back to being lean might be a matter of merely avoiding sugars and eating the other carbohydrates in the diet, even the fattening ones, in moderation:  pasta dinners once a week, say, instead of every other day.  For others, moderation in carbohydrate consumption might not be sufficient, and far stricter adherence is necessary.  And for some, weight will be lost only on a diet of virtually zero carbohydrates, and even this may not be sufficient to eliminate all our accumulated fat, or even most of it.

    Whichever group you fall into, though, if you're not actively losing fat and want to be leaner still, the only viable option… is to eat still fewer carbohydrates, identify and avoid other foods that might stimulate significant insulin secretion…, and have more patience….The more obese the patients, and the longer they had been obese, the more likely they were to remain obese [over the duration of the studies]….

    What we don't know is whether these individuals could have succeeded had they further restricted carbohydratees, or had they simply had more patience, and maybe both.

    So some people take a long time to begin losing weight even on a drastically low-carb diet, but others succeed immediately with even a little bit of carb restriction. 

    This explains why some dieters, including me, lose weight on diets that aren't intentionally "low-carb."  Taubes insists that whatever they set out to change, be it reduced fat or reduced calories  or more exercise, their success is caused by an incidental reduction of carbs or of refined carbs.  If you eat less butter, maybe you don't want quite as much bread.  If you cut calories across the  board, well, some of that was by cutting carbohydrates.  If you took up exercising and lost weight that way, Taubes is betting you also aren't drinking as much beer and soda as you used to.    

    Successful diets aren't low-carb, but they are all (Taubes says) fewer-carb-grams-than-before, or at least better-quality-carb-than-before.

    That's the information in the book.  The evidence marshalled in the book is compelling.  Now you have to ask yourself:  How can I fit these recommendations into my life? 

    Undoubtedly you'll want to know:  What kind of success can I expect if I only "sort-of" follow the recommendations, because of balancing them with other things I wish to get out of my way of eating?  And Taubes doesn't tell you the answer to that either.  You will just have to try it and see.

    + + +

    All this being said, Taubes does point out that there is some variety in the application of the diets.  Taubes organizes the successful clinical diets into three different approaches:

    (1)   "To establish an ideal amount of carbohydrates that you can and perhaps should eat — say, … three hundred calories' worth…  This is intended to minimize any potential side effects…. also assumes that it's easier to eat some fattening carbohydrates than to eliminate them entirely."  The example diet is one that allows "small amounts of sugar and an occasional dessert, some crumbs for breaded food, a little lactose (in milk), and small quantities of carbohydrate in vegetables and fruit." 

     (Note that you can still eat quite a lot of vegetables while receiving from them only "small quantities" of carbohydrate.  Many of the diets do not restrict green vegetables much except as a last resort for extremely sensitive individuals.) 

    (2) "[A]im for minimal carbohydrates from the outset" and get used to the side effects. 

    Here Taubes is talking about the physiological side effects of carbohydrate withdrawal — but I would add that such an approach also has whole-life side effects as you transition to a meat-based lifeform.  Your experience as a restaurantgoer, dinner guest, and cook will be irrevocably changed, and you're going to have to deal with this.

    (3) The Atkins compromise:  begin by drastically reducing carbohydrate to near-nothing (including limiting green vegetables), and then when weight loss is established, gradually add carbohydrates back in until the individual daily limit is discovered.

    There are advantages and disadvantages to all these approaches.

    A couple of other possible approaches are implied by Taubes' evidence, but he does not include them in this list because they are not represented among the clinical diets he has surveyed. 

    (4) The low- or no-meat approach.  I was really hoping that Taubes would address the sustainability issue, but (other than a brief comment that it is more sustainable to eat fat with your protein)  it seems he has no evidence for a low- or no-meat diet that will reliably cure obesity.  Still, he has something to say about what a vegan or vegetarian (and by extension, a flexitarian like myself) can do:

    [I]f you eat mostly plants… you're getting the bulk of your calories from carbohydrates, by definition.  This doesn't mean that you can't become lean or remain lean by giving up sugars, flour, and starchy vegetables, and living exclusively on leafy green vegetables, whole grains, and pulses (beans).  But it is unlikely to work for many of us… If you try to eat fewer carbohydrates by eating smaller portions, you'll be hungry, with all the problems that entails.

    So if you're a vegan or a vegetarian you can still benefit from an understanding… You can always improve the quality of the carbohydrates you eat, even if you don't reduce the total quantity.  This change alone will assuredly improve your health, even if it's not sufficient to make you lean.

    So you could classify the low- or no-meat approach as "worth trying, probably won't hurt, and might even help."

    (5) The cut-the-worst-offenders-first approach.  This is not, I repeat, represented among the clinical studies that Taubes references.  However, what he writes implies that it might be a viable option.  "Clearly, as [Michael] Pollan points out, humans can adapt to a wide range of non-Western diets, from those exclusively animal-based to those mostly, if not exclusively, vegetarian…. [W]hat is it that distinguishes Western diets…?"  Japanese and sub-continent Indian populations remained healthy on diets that were rich in legumes and rice before they started adopting the Western diet, after all. 

     This, plus Taubes' evidence that some people lose weight with only moderate carbohydrate restriction, suggests to me that one way to cut carbs is to begin by eliminating the worst offenders, and if that isn't sufficient to induce weight loss after a while, or if a plateau is reached, to cut back some more.    First to go might be soda and sweets, then processed food with sugar, then white flour or polished grains.  Later the portions of even the whole grains might shrink, and those be served less often.  Eventually the obese person might find it necessary to cut categories of food entirely out of his diet; but by systematic and slow improvement and experimentation, perhaps the dieter can acquire good habits along the way to a sustainable lifestyle that also promotes better blood chemistry and eventually fat loss.

    + + +

    I will continue this book review in a third part, where I want to address why, unlike Taubes, I conclude that–even if fatness isn't caused by gluttony–gluttony still isn't off the hook.

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    5 comments on Why Why We Get Fat isn’t really a comprehensive diet book: a review, part two.

  • Why we get fat: a review. (part 1)

    Two years ago I wrote a longish review of Gary Taubes' tome, Good Calories, Bad Calories.  Today I'm going to attack his new book, a sleeker, more-accessible version of the same information, containing dietary recommendations as well.   The new book:  Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It. 

    (You might go back and read my review of the first book, because I'm going to try not to repeat myself.)

    I picked up a copy of Why We Get Fat two days ago in the mall, while I was shopping for pants.  I always try to do my pants-shopping while I am visiting my in-laws, because my mother-in-law is a lightning-fast seamstress and if I say "pretty please" she will hem them for me, and I always need them hemmed.  I bought the pants in a petites store and I still had to have two inches taken off the hem.  That is just how short I am.  But except for being short, pants-buying is just not the traumatic experience it used to be, and maybe that is why I remembered to stop by the bookstore and pick up the Taubes book.  (I did it for you, just so I could write this review!)

    I finished the book in an afternoon.  That isn't in itself proof that the book is a quick read:  I was already familiar with most of Taubes' arguments, because I've churned through Good Calories, Bad Calories twice.  I probably skipped stuff.  But then I showed it to my father-in-law.  He wandered off with it, came back a few hours later having finshed it, and wondered aloud if maybe the reason his triglycerides had been shooting up the past year or so was because he'd consciously switched from bacon-and-egg breakfasts to cereal with dried apricots four days a week.   So.  This is a nice book to have in your library.

    + + +

    In the first part of the book, Taubes marshals the arguments against the "calories in-calories out" hypothesis, the idea that obesity is caused by eating more calories than one burns.  It's obviously true that obesity, and eating excess calories, go together; but Taubes shows rather convincingly that rather than one causing the other, they're both caused by the same main culprit:  high levels of insulin in the blood.  (Other hormones play roles, notably estrogen and cortisol, but insulin is the most important).    As Taubes puts it, "obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation," and it just happens that adding extra pounds — whether you are a growing child, a burgeoning pregnant woman, or a slowly-fattening adult — drives you to eat more.  Hormones cause growth, and growth causes eating.

    The evidence for this is abundant, and most of what is presented here was already described in  Good Calories, Bad Calories.  For instance, identical twins often have identical body sizes, and some disorders cause people to accumulate enormous localized fat deposits while remaining underweight elsewhere (do they both undereat and overeat?).  An anecdote that was new to me was a report of poverty-stricken families in Sao Paulo, Brazil:  overweight mothers bringing "thin, stunted" undernourished children to the clinic.  The author of that report implied that the mothers needed counseling for their overeating at the same time as their children were starving (and can you imagine being the mother, under such a judgmental eye?); Taubes points out that this assumption goes against everything we know about maternal care.

    Remove the ovaries from a rat, and it gets fat, even if you starve it.  Certain genetically-fat rodents, deprived of food, die of starvation without getting thinner first.   To lose fat, you don't just have to eat less; you have to move the fat out of your fat cells so that it can be burned, and that can only happen if your insulin levels allow it.

    Taubes lays these all out very concisely, mostly uncluttered by footnotes and references; no worries, if that's what you are after you can find them in the first book.  It's still a damning debunking of the conventional wisdom regarding obesity.

    + + +

    In the second part of the book, Taubes turns from showing that many nutritionists are wrong, to promoting his alternative model of obesity (or "adiposity," a term that means the same thing but carries less judgmental weight).  In this model, a regulatory defect (high insulin levels) causes obesity, and in most of us who have it, the defect is caused by poor diet – not by overeating, but wrong-headed eating:  more refined sugar, flour, grains, and starches than our bodies can handle.  

    Sugar and flour and rice eaters don't always get fat; and most cigarette smokers don't get lung cancer.  But that doesn't stop us from saying cigarettes cause cancer, and so we should be willing to say that sugar and flour and rice are fattening.

    Here's one difference between the books: Taubes wrote with some reservations when he was penning Good Calories, Bad Calories four years ago,  advocating only that the matter be studied more thoroughly in order to establish whether the alternative model is correct.  These reservations seem to be gone now:

    The bottom line is something that's been known (and mostly ignored) for over forty years.  The one thing we absolutely have to do if we want to get leaner–if we want to get fat out of our fat tissue and burn it–is to lower our insulin levels and to secrete less insulin to begin with….

    If we can get our insulin levels to drop sufficiently low (the negative stimulus of insulin deficiency), we can burn our fat.  If we can't, we won't.  When we secrete insulin, or if the level of insulin in our blood is abnormally elevated, we'll accumulate fat in the fat tissue.  That's what the science tells us.

    +  +  +

     I have to stop here, but I'll post this for now and write the rest of the review later, including my thoughts on Taubes' specific dietary recommendations, and why I don't think gluttony is entirely off the hook.  Stay tuned.

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    14 comments on Why we get fat: a review. (part 1)

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