I went to a local farmer's market this morning, since the weather was nice.  I was visiting the various booths, sampling things and just seeing what was available.  The farmer's market had more than just produce--there was quite a few stands with gourmet prepared food.  One was sampling roasted coffee, along with applesauces and such. 

As I was standing there, sampling the coffees, she kept saying how her foods were low in sugar and easy on the waistline.  And so on.

My first thought: is it that obvious that I've gained weight?

My second thought: why are you assuming that I'm worried about stuff like that?

I don't blame her, exactly.  She's just trying to sell her stuff.  I know from when I worked craft fairs that a lot of making a sale is trying to figure out what the customer is thinking.  I guess I fit the bill of the food obsessed: young, female, decently dressed.  And part of it was probably a reflection of what the woman herself was thinking, what she thinks when she decides whether to buy food.

But it irritates me that being diet-obsessed is considered the default mindset.  It's sad, really.  That it's safe to assume that the majority of people look for what's not in a food than how it tastes or what is in it (flavor, texture, etc).  I know plenty of people have to read labels, and that reading labels isn't necessarily disordered.  It can be a very normalized thing.  But still...  It's become so not only are people expected to be obsessed with food labels, but it's expected that they should be obsessed.

I know the lady was just trying to make a sale.  She did annoy me, but it was more the assumption that I found irritating rather than the lady herself.  It would be really nice if I could find somewhere where people didn't obsess.

A girl can dream, right?

"Oh, I'm being so bad!"

I can't tell how many times I hear that at the bakery over the course of a day. It's mostly women who say this, although it's not exclusively women. I keep asking myself: how did dessert get defined as bad or sinful or off-limits anyway?

I'm aware that the history is rather complicated, and I've read many books looking at the subject. It all seems to stem from the premise that under-eating is somehow virtuous, and over-eating is a sin. After all, gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly sins, but dieting is nowhere to be seen. I find the religious overtones fascinating, too: desserts as sin and exercise as atonement. It seems these religious sentiments are particularly associated with Christianity (although living in suburban America, Christianity is the dominant religion wherever I've lived). I mean, have you ever seen a fat Jesus?

Yet with all of the evil and wrongs and despair in this world--the oil spill in the Gulf, the wars, the economic difficulties--we most frequently refer to "bad" in context with dessert. It's cake! Eating it doesn't make you a sinner or a saint. It just makes you an eater of cake.

So when yet another women gave me her order ("One cannoli and a red velvet cupcake, please!") and then lamented, "Oh, I'm being so bad!" I looked at her and said the following:

"Ma'am, you said please and you're not stealing anything. How could you be bad?"

She looked at me.
And laughed.
And ruefully admitted: "I guess not."

Sometimes, this world just makes me wonder. Several times this past week (on TV, in the grocery store, and on a menu), I have seen "guilt-free" products advertised. You know "pasta without the guilt" or "this type of meat is super low-fat, so you can eat it without guilt!"

There are many reasons I don't like these types of ads (because...we're supposed to feel guilty when we eat?) but right now, they're really frosting my (full fat) cookies because I hate it when my disordered thinking seems normal. Granted, the few items I would allow myself to eat in minimal amounts without guilt were both paltry and pathetic, but still. It's the same idea. I felt guilty if I ate anything besides these four items at the wrong time or in the wrong amounts. These foods had some sort of magical air about them, that they were sacrosanct, and I could never go wrong eating them.

And here I go, back into the "real world," trying to recover again, only to learn, again, that most of the world is really screwed up about eating. It would be SO MUCH EASIER if I could just figure out if my thoughts were being driven by the eating disorder, or if they were my own thoughts. And when you can almost reliably go into a restaurant or grocery store and find little slogans that could have sprung from your eating disordered brain, well, it's screwing with me.

I saw an ad for milk yesterday that trumpeted the benefits of low-fat and fat-free milk. Um, I'm drinking whole milk for the foreseeable future, and thanks Milk Council, for the reminder that I'm a freak. Yes, I know, most people don't need to regain X pounds, but still. And then a little TV segment for making a blueberry smoothie. I love blueberries, I love smoothies, so I watched to see what the lady was doing. She used fat-free yogurt and fat-free milk- "all of the nutrients, none of the fat!" she chirped. I'm sorry, but my dietitian has been telling me for years that fat is a necessary part of the diet. Even with my (relatively) short relapse, the lack of fat has led to colorful bruises all over my knees, brittle nails, and really dry hair. And last time I checked (a decade ago in biochem and five seconds ago on Google), fat was still a nutrient. So skim milk doesn't have quite the same nutrients as whole milk. My parents drink skim--there's a hella lotta milk in the house right now--and I don't necessarily care, but they're not the same, and one is not better than the other.

Maybe I'm over-reacting. Maybe I'm over-sensitive. Both are probably true. But it irritates me. It's hard enough to recognize ED thinking within the confines of my own skull because I've heard it for so long and bought into it for so long and this damn disease distorts reality so well that it sure seems real to me. So when our whole freaking culture buys into the idea--lock, stock, and barrel--that low fat is better than "regular," that we should feel guilty for not eating the lowest calorie item in the store or on the menu, that we should download the latest iPhone app to keep track of our food intake, I can't help but feel betrayed. I know "they" aren't doing it specifically to piss me off, but it still feels incredibly unfair.

When I started trying to sort my way through the OCD that dogged me through high school, I had a fair amount of certainty that circling the block because you thought you'd hit a duck, or scrubbing your hands with Clorox because you were petrified that you would give someone a fatal disease were abnormal behaviors. I knew they were screwy even if in the moment I felt compelled to do my rituals. I also have some amount of awareness that a steady diet of sugar-free yogurt, apples, and lettuce is also screwy (even if in the moment I felt compelled to eat them and then frenetically exercise those calories off), but so much of the ED mindset seems so normal. Parents don't necessarily worry at first when their children kvetch about their stomachs and butts, or they don't want mayo on their turkey sandwich anymore because those "hidden fats" make a huge difference, simply because it's so normal. And most kids who say and do these things won't develop eating disorders--but some will.

When you're fighting your way out of a seriously messed up value system, only to find that your values are simply extreme versions of what the vast majority of people are thinking, you have to stop and ask: whose disorder is it anyway?

"I feel so terrible about myself...I ate that big donut this morning and I just feel so disgusting. Huge. Ick."

"Hey, V, don't get any thinner or you'll make J jealous!"

"When I do my last weigh-in next week, I'm going to strip down to my bra and panties! I want to be as light as possible!"

These people do not (as far as I know) have eating disorders. They are my co-workers. Reason #481 that I'm leaving my job. They are average, middle-aged women. Many of whom are Registered Nurses.

Yet they are as fluent in "anorexic" as I am. I've done the whole take-off-every-item-of-clothing-including-earrings to weigh as little as possible. I've felt guilt for donuts (carrots, lite bread, apples, etc). I've been jealous of women I thought were thinner than me. I could let them in on a thing or two.

Then again, do I really need to?

A diet isn't anorexia. Dieting is deliberate; anorexia is not. However, it seems that all women share this common language of body hatred, food guilt, and weight obsession. Eating disorders can be confused with a diet because they sound so much like one. How many people with eating disorders have either a) started out by dieting, b) said they were dieting as a means to conceal ED behaviors or c) both?

Anybody? Anybody?

That's what I thought.

Now, I'm not an old person, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I also know that it's not all that realistic to expect myself to look like the girl who graduated from high school 10 years ago. Yet, on newsweek.com, there was a little ad for their online weight loss program that said:

Your high school jeans MISS YOU!!!

Actually, I don't miss my high school jeans. They've long since made their final journey to the land of Goodwill.

But please tell me: why should a 40, 50, 60 year old woman think she should fit into her high school jeans? Or that the jeans care anyways? Your jeans miss you? Why doesn't your car miss you? Or your old boyfriend? This is a newsmagazine people. If I want to read about weight loss, I can certainly find more titillating sources.

Besides, all I need to know about food groups I learned on a recent postcard from my favorite local crab house:

"Our Irish Coffee contains all of the four essential food groups in one glass: alcohol, coffee, sugar, and fat."

You go, little leprechaun. You go.