So I'm attending my cousin's wedding in NYC, and we get to the hotel early today--early enough that we got lunch in the city as opposed to along the way. We ended up at a national chain restaurant because it was near the hotel, and I sat down and opened my menu, and...

I totally forgot that calorie counts on menus were mandatory within New York City. Totally forgot. At first, I shook my head a little and tried to clear my vision, hoping that it was some mistake or maybe the little numbers just accompanied some of the dishes.

Oh no. Every appetizer, every entree, every sandwich, every dessert, every beverage had a calorie count next to it.

My head started spinning and hasn't stopped, nearly twelve hours later. Numbers swam in front of my face. I didn't look at what the food was- all I could see was calories, calories, everywhere the calories. I don't remember anything on the menu, except what I ordered. Thankfully, I have a meal plan from my dietitian that helped me focus a bit, and I did pick something reasonable.

I struggled the rest of today. All I could think when I ate was "How many calories would be listed on the menu for this? How many calories are in this bite? How about this one?" It's bad enough for the numbers to be buzzing in my head all the time, but to see them in front of my eyes, in black and white, when eating at restaurants is hard to begin with, was a little too much. If my obsession with calories and numbers is supposedly a Bad Thing--and given the effects this obsession has had on my health and my life, I can see how my treatment team might think that--why are there calories on the menu? If calories could turn into a life-threatening obsession for me, couldn't it turn into an obsession for others?

I understand, to some extent, that the purpose of printing calories on menus is intended to be positive, a way to empower people to make better choices. I get that. But all of that empowerment! and knowledge! and health! might not be what goes through people's minds when they order. Even before the ED, I would be self-conscious about ordering something too "high calorie." I would feel guilty. I wouldn't want to call attention to myself. What would the other people think?

Here's the less-than-pretty corollary to the above: I would compare myself to what others ordered. If I ate something "healthy" and they had the cheeseburger and fries, I might very well have felt virtuous that I was "better" than them. I mean if eating a salad is a so-called "good" choice, and eating lots of fries is a "bad" choice, then it would make me "better" because I had the salad. Right?

For the record, I had a sandwich, not a salad. My mom offered to read me the menu choices and/or decide for me, which would have been a good thing had I not already seen the calorie counts by the time my mom figured out that I was silent not out of awe for the spectacular menu choices but that my brain was spinning from all of the calories. By then, the damage was done, and I simply found the first thing where the number didn't totally freak me out, that wasn't on the diet menu, and also fulfilled most of my meal plan requirements. And then I snapped the menu shut and stared off into space.

As I was staring off into space, calorie counts clicking through my head on a frenetic abacus, all I wanted to do was to find the person who first had this bright idea and introduce them to the madness in my head. I want them to understand what it is like to be me. I want them to understand that good intentions can have very bad effects. I want to explain to them that people making "healthier" choices because they feel guilty eating what they want isn't really any better.

Wouldn't someone take about 30 seconds out of their day and think about the "downsides" to this obesity hysteria?

I did something fairly unusual for me last week: I went out to lunch. I had a coupon for a buy one get one free item at a casual sit-down chain restaurant that sells (essentially) sandwiches, salads, and soup. So I asked my co-worker and we had a nice lunch. Both of us ordered entree salads.

We were sitting and eating when he made a comment that really stuck with me:

I feel so virtuous when I get a salad. It makes me want to go home and do something not-so-virtuous this evening.

I'm kicking myself for not asking: like what? I'm assuming he doesn't mean decapitating a small animal, as he doesn't strike me as the type. To many people, especially dieters, this kind of thinking can lead to eating a package of cookies in the evening because you were "good" at lunch.

Except neither my coworker or I were "virtuous" or "good" at lunch. We just ate a salad.

At the heart of these kinds of statements, aside from the good/bad food issue, is self-control. And self-control typically doesn't come natural to humans. You exerted "control" at lunch, so you can let loose later. If you feel you overate last night, you can show your "self-control" today and eat lettuce. Or so say the diet/nutrition columnists, anyway. In an obvious irony, I have problems with self-control of my self-control, letting my controlling behaviors run amok.

Some have proposed teaching kids better self-control as a way to prevent obesity. Researchers found that those kids who could wait for a longer period of time before obtaining a food reward had higher BMIs. Maybe it's a problem with self-control, or maybe these kids were just hungry. We don't know.

I find it ironic that the solution to supposed "lack of control" around food (as if that could be the only reason that anyone had a BMI above 25!) involves more self-control, when we know that humans, as a rule, suck at this. When we also know that imposing self-control leads to out-of-control behaviors later. Why not remove the "control" aspect entirely? No one over-consumes oxygen. Outside of obvious medical pathology, people really don't berate themselves for producing too much urine. It might be a trifle inconvenient, but no one measures their self-worth or self-control by how much they do or don't pee.

It is the human intervention and need to control that people start dieting, which typically ends in net weight gain, not weight loss. People can and do self-regulate around food. No really. They do. Our environment doesn't like to give them that chance. There's too much money to be made on diet products, obesity prevention and the health scare du jour.

But the healthiest eaters I know are the ones that don't show deliberate self-control around food. A salad lunch doesn't lead to a doughnut binge later on. They eat when they're hungry and stop when they're full. The rest takes care of itself.

It's already been law in NYC that all chain restaurants must have the calories posted on their menus.

LA--that city of billion dollar starlets and frightening poverty--has taken this a bit further. The local government in a poverty-stricken area of South Los Angeles (an area with, it might be noted, a large minority population) has decided to ban the building of new fast food restaurants. Some cities will ban the construction of these restaurants to preserve a small-town culture, or a particular appearance. But the government here is banning new fast food restaurants due to fears of the "obesity epidemic."

In an essay in Slate magazine, William Saletan writes:

What we're looking at, essentially, is the beginning of food zoning. Liquor and cigarette sales are already zoned. You can't sell booze here; you can't sell smokes there. Each city makes its own rules, block by block. Proponents of the L.A. ordinance see it as the logical next step. Fast food is bad for you, just as drinking or smoking is, they argue. Community Coalition, a local activist group, promotes the moratorium as a sequel to its crackdown on alcohol merchants, scummy motels, and other "nuisance businesses." An L.A. councilman says the ordinance makes sense because it's "not too different to how we regulate liquor stores."

He gets at the crux of the issue a few paragraphs later:

I assumed this idea would go nowhere because we Americans don't like government restrictions on what we eat. You can nag us. You can regulate what our kids eat in school. But you'll get our burgers when you pry them from our cold, dead hands.

How did the L.A. City Council get around this resistance? By spinning the moratorium as a way to create more food choices, not fewer. And by depicting poor people, like children, as less capable of free choice.

A Big Mac doesn't evaluate your income before attacking your arteries- so why are we seeing these zoning laws in low-income areas? Because these are precisely the people who need cheap, fast food the most. And, I might add, the jobs that these restaurants provide.`

The council said that they were trying to promote "food diversity" in the area, that all of the food options were the essentially veggie- and fruit-poor fast food items. But banning new fast food restaurants doesn't mean that fresh fruits and veggies will all of a sudden appear in this neighborhood. It just means there won't be any more fast food restaurants.

Maybe it's me, but I don't think you can effect true change through negatives. If the city council wanted more fresh fruits and veggies, perhaps they could do what one of the health departments around me did: make WIC coupons good at local farmer's markets. The city of Detroit has NO supermarkets at all within city limits. Convenience stores aren't known for fresh apples and carrots. Why doesn't the city council propose incentives for supermarkets and other stores that carry these items?

Maybe, as Saletan suggests, what is standing in the way isn't fast food. It's poverty, crime, and urban blight.

Another thing I find interesting is this proposal essentially treats poor, minority residents as unable to choose proper food for themselves. Many non fast food restaurants have menu items that have far more fat and calories than things at McDonald's- yet these aren't targeted. And I don't think they would be targeted even in my hometown, where chains like Applebee's and Ruby Tuesday abound. But they have a more "upscale" aura about them- even though nutritionally, their items might not be a whole lot different.

A healthy diet isn't about good or bad, yes or no. It's about choices. And fast food is a legitimate choice, just like fruits and veggies. All people should have all of these choices- regardless of where they live.

In a follow-up article, Saletan concludes:

In general, I detest fast food. I try to keep it out of my house and away from my kids. But here's the thing: It's food. If you're starving, cigarettes and whiskey won't keep you alive. But hamburgers will. A Big Mac is hardly ideal. To turn it into a proper meal, you'd need leaner beef, less bun, less sauce, and a lot more vegetables. The thing I love about Roy Rogers is that you can do exactly this by loading up the burger with a heap of lettuce and tomatoes. But these are all modifications of the noun food. And that's the fundamental difference between whiskey and fast food: Food is necessary and, when properly modified, good for you.

In treatment, we not only referred to the eating disorder voice as "Ed," we also named the enforcers of his laws. They were the "food police," the "diet cops," and any number of other incarnations. That police are sometimes referred to as "pigs" didn't escape my notice, either.

So here we are, describing all of the laws that the food police tell us we must follow or all manner of mayhem will ensue. Measuring your food. Counting calories/carbs/fat grams. No liquids with calories. No desserts. Only veggies.

These were rules that did not lead to a whole lot of fun around mealtime.

Breaking these rules wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs, either. You see, after so many years of living with Ed and his food cops, I began to agree with the rules. See the need for them. Feel somehow superior because I could follow them at every meal, no exceptions. That I would always eat and exercise perfectly. And that these rules protected me from bad things happening.

No rules = very bad shit.

But I managed to break many of the rules, and even bend most of the other ones. I locked the cops up in Alcatraz and threw the key in San Francisco Bay.

Apparently, Ed broke out the food police. And they've come to my area.

Here was the Op-Ed headline in the Baltimore Examiner:

Food police coming to a restaurant near you

Uh-oh.

They didn't.
They did.

Indeed they did.

The Montgomery County Council has a bill up for vote that proposes all menus have nutrition information printed on them. This was already declared illegal in New York City, though on a technicality, so I suppose that these county officials either a) don't read the New York Times or b) didn't care.

See, here's the thing that gets me. The assumption is that if you eat fried chicken, you are doing something naughty. And that, unless you know exactly what is in your food, you are going to make the wrong decision.

Anorexia is thought of as control because the sufferer things that s/he is controlling their food intake. I get that comment a lot: But I don't want to give up control. My dietitian had the best comment. "You're not giving up control, Carrie. You're just handing it back to where it belongs- your body."

Holy leaping lizards! did that make sense.

The Op-Ed author Richard Berman had this to say in his article:

Nutrition activists have already tried and failed at the knowledge-equals-behavior approach. In the early 1990s, they pushed the government to mandate nutrition information on grocery items, but healthier eating habits didn’t follow. Most people who reported using “Nutrition Facts” to fill their shopping carts were the people who already considered themselves health conscious.

Proponents often cite studies based on focus groups or questionnaires. These data come from asking individuals — in front of several other people — what items they would likely order from labeled and unlabeled menus. Not surprisingly, most publicly boast that they would certainly select the lowest-calorie food.

While people talk a big game in phone surveys and focus groups, few Americans change their eating behavior when faced with a nutritional profile of their food. In the real world, studies show that meal selection is primarily influenced by factors like smell, taste, texture, hunger, cravings, time and convenience — not diet facts.

Later on, he says

Love handles don’t distinguish between the calories from a butter-drenched lobster tail and those from fast-food fruit parfait. So if the intent of the legislation is truly to focus on people’s weight, it shouldn’t make a distinction either.

While anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows the difference between a bucket of fried chicken and a mixed green salad, most restaurants provide nutrition information anyway. Dieters and picky eaters can already find nutrition facts on posters, brochures, Web sites and 1-800 numbers.

I actually do agree that calorie and nutrition information should be readily available. Upon request. I know plenty of people with food allergies and medical conditions that require them to closely monitor food intake.

But if food knowledge were going to help "fight obesity," I think it would have done so by now. Why? Our bodies didn't evolve like that.

So please, Montgomery Council, respect our bodies' natural wisdom.