Amazon Customer Book Review

"In this book, Lynn provides the reader with the tools to look inward towards what fuels the desire behind not only eating, but habitual responses to all internal and external signals. The book begins by asking a few simple questions, allowing the reader to relax & begin answering truthfully within." 

To read the full review, please click on the following link - http://www.amazon.com/THE-ANTI-DIET-Learning-Moment-Food/product-reviews/1621412830/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

Getting In Touch with KenKen

I've always been a crossword person, even if I couldn't finish the Sunday (or even the Friday) one in the New York Times. Since I got teased as a fifth grader for using big words in the schoolyard, language has always been the most inviting area of the playground, the place to develop mental strength and agility.  Numbers were my nemesis.  Growing up in the days long before calculators, I learned to be arithmetically reliable the hard way.  I still use my fingers, refer to deeply memorized multiplication tables, and add columns two or three times (in different directions). 

How peculiar, then, that I have become addicted to the KenKen puzzles along with my morning coffee.  It happened a while back – couldn't say exactly when – and I found myself trying to figure out what was expected of me in the easy version, just four squares across.  Cute!  Not too hard.  Very satisfying when after a few obvious clues were solved, the answers tumbled into place.  I began working on the daily six-square puzzle and could successfully complete Monday through Wednesday after a few weeks of practice.  Then I moved up to the big league, seven-squares on Sunday.

My style, as with the crossword, is to work in pen, lightly filling in the possibilities until they are certain.  In those tiny, unforgiving squares, it is sometimes necessary to use white out – or even to copy the whole grid on lined paper after a really a messy start.  How embarrassing.  Let’s not even discuss the nearly pathological compulsion that has driven me to work a Sunday KenKen puzzle until the Magazine Section appears on the stoop with next Saturday’s paper.  But it calms me, settles my mind, and kind of clears the decks for other issues and problems I need to sort through. 

What profound life change has made me a numbers person after all?  I ponder this while figuring out in which square the last “5” can reside, or what combinations can be eliminated to fill in the third row down.  What am I doing?  Testing a double “3” and a “7” to make “63X” resolves the connecting horizontal and vertical, and I experience a pleasurable tingle in the brain.

My neural fibers crave this activity.  I need this exercise – now.  I don’t need to be told that “Mental Stimulation Staves Off Dementia,” although I’m pleased as punch they’re doing studies to confirm what my mind and body are already whispering in my ear.  All I have to do is listen.  I’m sure that’s always the best place to start. 

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/3813.php   

Remember the Hypothalamus?

I’m thrilled to see the hypothalamus back in the news.  I've been intrigued for years with this pea-sized area deep in the brain that plays such an important role in our relationship to food.  Indeed, the title of a New York Times article that appeared on Sunday (April 28, 2013), “The Brain:  Our Food Traffic Controller,” echoed a title from the same paper I quoted in the late 1960s:  “Obesity is Traced to Signal Failure” (January 23, 1968).  Back then, long before the days of imaging, it was found that the hypothalamus provided “internal eating cues” to tell us when to eat and when to stop.  The mechanism might get out of whack and “set so high that normal amounts of food no longer satisfy.”  The old source proposed a complimentary theory that, without appropriate signals from within, people might become overly dependent on “external eating cues” instead.  To me, that meant diets, paying too much attention to other people’s idea of what we ought to eat.  And, I’m still convinced the stubborn, long-term and constantly escalating problem of overeating owes a great deal to this. 

An approachable synonym for the hypothalamus was coined in those days:  “appestat.”  I pictured a switch on the wall to regulate heat in the winter and thought the workings of the human brain had to be more elegant than that.  The term is defined now as:  “the neural center in the brain that regulates appetite and is thought to be in the hypothalamus.” My italics emphasize the difficulty in pinning down exactly what goes on in there when we eat.  And that’s what Kathleen A. Page and Robert S. Sherwin, authors of this Sunday’s piece, are working on.

Page and Sherwin call the hypothalamus a “primitive brain region” that evolved to support survival in a time when food was scarce and obtaining it was a lot more labor-intensive than a trip to either McDonald’s or Whole Foods.   As scientists and endocrinologists, they have been focusing on observable responses in the human brain to glucose and to fructose.  For example, they find that glucose – an energy source vital to brain activity – while calorically equal to fructose (no commercial pun intended), does not taste as sweet as its relative, and yet is associated with greater feelings of fullness and satisfaction.  Fructose, on the other hand, gets screened out somehow by the liver; not much of it reaches the brain, so the “appetite and reward areas remain active.”  Thus, the notion that sugar is sugar may be nutritionally accurate, but neurologically, it may be worth another look.

I find this stuff fascinating.  New technology allows even the layperson an appreciation of the elegance and complexity we all know is there.  According to Page and Sherwin, the hypothalamus constantly monitors blood glucose, hormones, and various contributors to metabolism that are intricately involved in energy maintenance, appetite and satisfaction.  The “integrated circuit” they outline includes “brain areas that control taste, reward, memory, emotion and higher-level decision making.” They question how this wealth of new information can be used to help combat the epidemic of obesity, but seem in no rush to judgment.  The work is just starting.

Dr. Norman Jolliffe at Columbia University’s School of Public Health wrote a piece available on the web entitled “How to Reset Your ‘Appestat’ and Reduce Hunger.” I cheer the following quote from his first paragraph: “Infants do not have the natural ability to overeat. Overeating is a learned behavior that needs to be unlearned to reduce hunger.”  Wow!  I couldn't have said it better, and I’m so glad he did.

Then, he loses me – fast.  “Eat less food more often to reduce hunger;”  “Choose lean proteins and healthy fats to keep your appetite at bay;” “Skip simple carbohydrates that cause sharp drops in blood glucose and cravings for more;” “Exercise often, but not for weight loss;” and “Skip the scale.”  There is not a single suggestion here without merit – even though 7 meals a day absolutely does not work for me, and I personally find the Atkins diet onerous.  What I do object to – have always objected to – is the list of guidelines that are nothing but “external cues” as far as I can see.  Jolliffe makes an exquisite case for each item on his programme.  Clearly, it works for him.  But, how can one re-activate one’s own primal, evolutionarily-tested internal cues while following someone else’s?  Sorry to criticize, but I think that’s the wrong way to go.

It’s not going to be so quick and easy to glean solutions to overeating from what we have begun to learn about the brain, I think Page and Sherwin would agree. One statement in particular suggests to me an area in which more study would be useful.  They write:  “When food is restricted, the hypothalamus sends signals that increase your desire to ingest high calorie foods.”   Wow!  I knew that.  My body knows that.  I couldn't have said it better, and I’m so glad they did.

So, how about doing a bunch of studies that follow brain activity under dietary restriction?  Does restriction trigger deprivation signals all by itself, without regard to what is forbidden? Let’s see what the brain does in the context of diet regimens of various kinds.  Let’s take a closer look at the mechanisms of desire. In those gorgeous scanned images of indigo, gold and magenta, could we observe the mechanism in the brain that makes going off a diet a sure thing?

  

I want to know what happens in the hypothalamus when one is made to feel chronically guilty or afraid about food choice.  How do we store in our memory and constantly reinforce the admonition that foods are fattening, unhealthful, or bad?  For example, would the phrase “Sugar is indeed toxic” trigger a stronger or weaker signal in my brain to eat more or less of it?  I only quote Mark Bittman here because he’s one food writer whose opinions I truly value.  Conversely, does a sense of self-righteousness about healthful choices affect satisfaction levels in a positive or perhaps in a negative way?  Do these effects last?  How are satisfaction levels affected by limited or unlimited choice?  Could we study how hypothalamic activity is conditioned, as well as the reversal of it?  Could we examine conflict of interest arising between “internal” and “external” cues?

I don’t think we’ll ever free up the channels to our “Food Traffic Controller” until we answer some questions like these.  They may not be tops on the agenda for endocrinologists, but they are certainly relevant to the issue of obesity, to health and to pleasure in eating – which is of course the object of the exercise. 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/its-the-sugar-folks/     

http://voices.yahoo.com/how-reset-appestat-reduce-hunger-8097866.html  

http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/appestat

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/opinion/sunday/the-brain-our-food-traffic-controller.html

Plaza College's Online "Seasons" Magazine Article: Professor Lynn McCann Publishes The Anti-Diet

Professor Lynn McCann Publishes The Anti-Diet

Professor McCann loves working with her students.

In addition to her success in the classroom, esteemed Plaza College English Professor Lynn McCann recently celebrated another major accomplishment: a published book!

Professor McCann recently spoke with Seasons about revisiting a book she first wrote in 1966, and the steps she took to publish the book once more … on her own!

Question: When did you first start writing The Anti-Diet?

McCann: In 1966. We actually did have electricity back then, but my typewriter was a manual, and it didn’t even have a plug. 

Question: What drew you to this particular subject?

McCann: I never dreamed I’d write about dieting.  A good friend who had watched me overcome an eating problem by increasing awareness instead of cutting calories suggested that I write about the experience. “I can’t do that!”  I said.  “Sure you can!”  She said, and kept encouraging me. I finally gave it a try, and it took about two years to write.  It was a learning process. 

Question: What response did your book receive when it first came out?

McCann: I appeared on a radio talk show and a TV program to promote the book in the U.S.  I also went to London to promote the book on TV there.  It was exciting.  But, I think the book was a little ahead of its time, and I was disappointed when sales didn’t go through the roof.  After a while, I began to get letters from people all over the country, and from Canada, saying that The Anti-Diet had really helped them a lot.

Question: How many years passed between its initial publication and your decision to revisit it?

McCann: It came out in the U.S. in 1971 and in England in 1972.  After many years, I noticed that some of the Anti-Diet ideas had gone mainstream (“conscious eating,” “mindful eating”).  Even Weight Watchers was talking more about the importance of awareness and satisfaction.  When I started teaching at Plaza College five years ago, I was already working on the revision.    

Please click HERE to read the entire interview

Original Anti-Diet: I Am Not a “Cougar”, But...

                                                    

I go to the gym in kind of a rush because my husband and I have a dinner invitation up in Westchester tonight.  We want to miss the Friday traffic, and I still have to find a little gift for our hostess.

I hop on my favorite bike, punch in the resistance setting and plug in my earphones. The little TV screen in front of me is tuned to The Talk. One channel up there’s a sloppy soap opera. Soccer dominates the next – and so on. I put the machine on pause and go over to the desk where the media controls are. I've never seen the guy on duty before. Not a day over 25 with bright eyes and dark curly hair. He’s very cute and fit.

“Could you get CNN on there, please?” I point to the rank of TVs over the machines.

“Whaddaya want that for?”  I’m surprised when he challenges me with a flirtatious smile.

“Well, it’s not a great station, I’ll grant you, but it sure beats a studio full of shrieking women.” 

Who is this cheeky upstart?  Just put on the damn news, I mutter to myself as I climb back up on the bike and start pedaling. 

A few minutes later, I still can’t get CNN.  I glance back at the desk.  The young man is sitting there slurping a smoothie through a straw.  I catch his eye and shrug reproachfully, like the school teacher I am.  He puts the energy drink down and strolls over to my bike, comes around to the side.

“It’s not on?”

He leans in toward the screen.  His well-defined bicep is brushing my arm.  How peculiar. 

I scroll to the channel where CNN is supposed to be.

“Looks like ABC to me.”  

To create a more comfortable distance, I sit back on my seat, but he closes it up.  What’s going on here?  I sense pheromones, and I’m old enough to be his great grandmother!

“Thought I had it right,” he’s checking very carefully indeed.  “Sorry, I’m new here. Guess I don’t know how to do that. ”

  

Now, I have a choice.  The kid is obviously trying to be friendly and nice.  I should probably drop my schoolmarm attitude and be nice back.  I pull out the earplugs and drape the cord around my neck.

“I thought so.  Congratulations!  Are you a trainer?”

He really lights up at this.  Besides athletes, he tells me he works with pregnant women and new moms, business executives and housewives. His pitch is infused with the unmistakable promise that working with him would bring, at least, a blush to my cheeks.  I know I’m getting the prospective customer treatment but I still feel like he might just climb on the bike with me.

So, I do my best to steer the conversation safely around to the topic of my book.  It’s part of my campaign for everyone on staff at my gym to know about The Anti-Diet and recommend it to the membership. This seems like as good an opportunity as any. Maybe I can get the guy to go to my website and “like” me on Facebook. 

“It’s all about awareness,” I say, “and it’s the same, I believe, with food and with exercise,” I’m pedaling hard now.  “Somewhere, somehow, we all know what we really need if we can just get in touch with it.  And that’s the best place to start.”   

“Definitely!”  My new friend has a dazzling smile.  “So, when did you publish this?”

“First time, in 1971, and the revision came out this November.”

He looks at me oddly.

“I’m 76.”  

“No way!”

“Way.”

Now, I’m impressed.  I feared I would scare him half to death by coming clean.  But he steps back, appraises me with a professional eye, then re-establishes the cozy distance he’s maintained from the start. 

“You really don’t look it.  You’re in great shape.”

“Thanks.”

“And your face – you just can’t be that . . .”

    

“Old.  I’m afraid so.”

He grins a little sheepishly but holds his ground.

“I would have . . . come on to you.”

I speed up a little on the bike – only three minutes left on the clock – and smile gratefully.

“I know.”

This really makes my day.  I must be doing something right.  

_________________________________________________________________________________
Please click HERE to read more about Lynn Donovan McCann and her book THE ANTI-DIET: Learning To Be In The Moment With Food

Into the Grammar Fray: “Healthy vs. Healthful”

Type this into a search engine and see what you get. I’m delighted there’s still an argument about how to use these adjectives when referring to food. The words that come out of my mouth are as important to me as the foods that go into it. In fact, I’d rank the need to preserve good grammar and promote healthful eating right up there with saving the planet from global warming.

First, the grammar issue. A website called englishplus reminds us that “In formal English, things are healthful (i.e., good for one's health). People or other creatures are healthy (i.e., in a state of good health).” Thus, “broccoli is healthful” means that it’s good for you, and “broccoli is healthy” means that it’s still bright green, perky and undamaged by a long trip in a refrigerator container from Mexico.

Simple guidelines like this evoke my 8th grade English teacher, Georgiana Gilbert whom I channel daily as a teacher of basic writing skills at a small college in Queens, New York. “Use who for people, and use that for things,” Miss Gilbert would prescribe crisply as she wielded her red pencil back in 1951. When I quote her today, my students have no trouble understanding the rule when I ask them which pronoun they would choose to objectify their mother. “My mother who works in a hospital,” beats “my mother that works in a hospital,” hands down.

But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends – Miss Gilbert’s lovely candle is guttering in the meltdown of language as it is being spoken, written, tweeted, abbreviated and horribly abused today. Listen up, folks. You’ll hear everyone including me use that for people and breaking other rules with embarrassing frequency.

The author of the grammarist website explains why we’re throwing in the towel on good grammar. “We can’t fault writers for using healthy in place of healthful,” she writes. “This practice has been standard for so long that it’s probably irreversible, and we would be crazy to call it incorrect.”

Well, call me crazy. It’s not incorrectness, though, that drives me nuts. It’s lack of respect for simple logic. Here’s an example from a recent article in the “Dining” section of the New York Times. A chef at a high-end restaurant considered adopting a new symbol on menu items to make it “easier for customers if they choose to be healthy.”

Well who wouldn't choose that? Are the customers who choose not to be healthy still chain smoking out on the sidewalk? Choosing food that is healthful makes good sense both personally and grammatically. Options are not people; abstractions cannot choose. And you just can’t pack a life choice for good health into the selection of a luncheon dish.

The author of the grammarunderground website rationalizes that “most people would say that ‘healthy diet’ is more popular and more natural-sounding than ‘healthful diet’,” and calls traditionalists like me “misinformed sticklers.” According to her, “in language, you have to pick your battles.” Mercifully, someone blogged right back: “To follow your usage logic . . . we should just go along with the 'dumbing down' of society!”

Not on my watch. I’m sick of dialogue sprinkled with redundancies like one I recently heard on the 6 O’clock news, “iconic images,” and larded with meaningless hyperbole. (Might we consider retiring the word “devastate” in all its forms?) I refuse to accept the text message on the wall that says grmr rls r 86. Why do I think it’s so important to be precise, to think about the words we use and how they relate to each other?

Here comes the food part. Language, great language, nourishes us greatly. Thoughtless, careless, empty language is our verbal fast food, devoid of nutritional value. It clogs the imagination and generates the emotional equivalent of a sugar high. Weighed down and numbed, we tune out on content and wait for the next tempting morsel of phony drama. This is cause for alarm because language connects us and defines us as human. Learning language in the first years of life informs the way we learn everything else, the pleasure, the curiosity and the diligence we bring to every enterprise. We disrespect and diminish language at our peril.

And how does this relate to the dangers of an overheated of our planet? Of course, there are natural changes in our environment, and surely much of that process is beyond our control. But denial of global warming and/or refusal to deal with whatever we do have the power to reverse, prevent, rescue or protect is just plain dumb. Likewise, dismissing egregious insults to the spoken and written word as inevitable or wave-of-the-future could someday leave us, as the blogger who defends my position concluded, “Emoting sounds and groaning at each other like cave people again.” I would have thought that notion ridiculous until I began to face classrooms of young people who have never acquired the habit of speaking in complete sentences and who find it extremely uncomfortable when they attempt to do so. It’s a slippery slope!

If you want to hear “the King’s English” beautifully written and exquisitely articulated – watch “Downtown Abbey.” Apparently 7.9 million people tuned in to the 2-hour third season debut episode. It can’t be just the fabulous costumes, the intrigue, and the restrained romance. Clearly audiences will sit still for its tightly compressed lessons in history and social class. But why doesn't anybody mention how easy this show is on the ear? All the characters both upstairs and downstairs speak gorgeously and employ a rich vocabulary I wish I could offer my students in a daily pill. No viewer to my knowledge has ever complained, “I don’t understand what they’re saying.” I think people relish whole language the way they take to whole grains and garden greens. I’ll do what I can to stimulate this healthy appetite. (Whoops! Please forgive my exception to the rule in using the term to imply “robust.”)


http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000219.htm
http://grammarist.com/usage/healthful-healthy/ 
http://www.grammarunderground.com/healthy-vs-healthful.html

Original Anti-Diet: In The Moment Eating - 2013

I still love Mark Bittman. He’s always there with the inspiration I need, say, to recover from an indulgent holiday season in which routine went out the window, where unaccustomed richness lured, when the menu was heavily laced with nostalgia.

Bittman’s piece in the New York Times this weekend headlined What to EAT Right Now, starts the New Year with “more than one way to skin a potato.” I rush right out to the farmers’ market at Union Square where creamers, fingerlings, russets, Yukon gold, little gems in purple skins and at least a dozen heirloom varieties I never heard of beg to be mashed, baked, braised or fried. I fill an enormous bag with anything that’s priced $1.50 per pound. Of course, I have to tuck some sweet little carrots and parsnips in the mix. It’s topped off with a hoard of Jerusalem artichokes with skins so light they’ll hardly need a scrub.

It’s so humble, so real – the root vegetable – so in-the-moment. Now is all we have. Enjoy it.

Original Anti-Diet: Celebrating 2013

This New Year marks an important 50-year milestone for The Anti-Diet. In January  of 1963, I was cast in a 2-character play, a little showcase, and before the rehearsals  began, I crash dieted down to 118 lbs. After the play closed, my weight soon spiked to 133. This was the last straw, the moment when I decided to stop dieting for good. And it certainly was one of the best decisions I made in my life. Within six or eight months I had ended a war with food and self-image that had raged since my teens. A few years later, I began to write about what I had learned and eventually published the first edition of the book.  

Here’s a little more of the personal back story, a reminiscence I share, in part to acknowledge this anniversary, and in part because I think it still rings true today.  

In those days, I was a dancer uncertain where to put her feet. My training was in  modern dance, a field that could hardly be called a profession. The brilliant and transcendent modern dancers of that time were admired for their asceticism, even if  they “made it.” Most starved until they married well, or capitulated and went to teach in the suburbs. Some of my friends defected to show business, a career move that involved technical re-tooling, months of rigorous ballet and jazz training to prepare for auditions. With a lot of hard work and luck there might be income-producing work as a chorus gypsy on Broadway. I could not decide whether choosing this path would brand me as an artistic sellout, or qualify me at last for the world of adults.  

This was by no means my only area of confusion in those days. The city I was so determined to make my home terrified me. Streets were a menace; solitude was suffocating. I spent days so paralyzed with depression I was barely able to leave  my apartment to get to class. I clung to an amusingly mismatched relationship with someone I have since described as my baby-sitter. 

My college classmates moved on to marriages and children and careers while I tried to make sense of a cold and incomprehensible society of others who seemed to know what they were doing but had no desire to do it with me. Remembering the utter loneliness and fear I felt in my first few years in New York is like revisiting a hometown that was wasted by natural disaster, or the sickening flashbacks of a wounded veteran years after the war. It’s easy now to understand why I tried to medicate this state with food.  

There were brief periods of relief, usually associated with some dance performance or commercial work I often got through my boyfriend’s connections in film and TV. I  always expected to fail at these things, was chilled with anxiety until they were over, and then disbelieving of my solid if un-extraordinary success.  

A few years ago I visited the Museum of TV and radio with my sister-in-law who’d also done some acting work. We thought it would be fun to dig up old kinescopes from our early days trying to make it in the theatre. We found one in which I’d been a “dancing  extra” in a live (meaning real-time) production for TV of Silas Marner, starring Julie Harris. She was fantastic! At the climax of the drama, a cleverly shot snow scene,  Harris flopped down with her co-star, Sterling Hayden, on a wooden sled and crashed  to her death, her little high-booted feet in the air, a thin scream of exhilaration turning to  sudden recognition of her fate. The vintage kinescope that we replayed in the museum barely does justice to the wonder of watching Harris rehearse this and other intimate scenes with a quiet intensity that commanded the attention of everyone on the set.  

I had been hired for a party scene in the show to square dance and socialize around a table of punch and cookies. There were only a few background shots of me in black and white, so very young and dressed to look even younger. But, even on the little screen in the museum I saw an actor focused, relaxed and alive every second on camera.  I suddenly recalled the quick choices I’d made for the scene: to examine the spread on the table completely before filling my plate, to allow my sweaty and over-attentive partner to cause me to recoil before throwing myself into the dance. I saw exactly the sort of incidental player I love watching today. Back then, I didn't know that I knew what  to do.  

Discovering that – learning to trust myself and respect my process – that’s what discovering and writing about The Anti-Diet was all about. It still is. Happy 2013!

The Ant-Diet: First Reviews

Someone close to me who does not “do” Facebook emailed me the following comment:
“The Anti-Diet requires that people take responsibility for themselves. Other
diet ‘experts’ require people to make them the authority, pay them lots of money and
follow their program of torture which is unsustainable.”

Someone else who is close to me – and who does “do” Facebook – posted about the
Anti-Diet: “For all of us control freaks who can’t control what we put in our mouths, this
is a most empowering book.”

I feel like I am getting through. The message is all about trusting yourself and owning
whatever lies within your power to change.

The Anti-Diet: I'm Launched

For a second informal book signing at my local gym, expectations are low. It’s 9:00AM when classes of ladies are jumping and spinning in the big, glassed-in studio at the back of the place. My morning coffee has barely kicked in. This time, I set up right on the floor where the desk makes a big U-turn and a computer is available for patrons wishing to check email. I’ve signed on to www.originalantidiet.com to create another visual presence and a reason to strike up conversation. After ten minutes of standing before my display, feeling utterly invisible, I decide that for me this marketing approach ranks right up there with having root canal work done.

I try to look beautiful, happy, animated (and thin, of course) but nothing happens. It’s nearly 10:15 and I’m feeling less squirmy. Just resigned. A young woman walks up, fresh from her workout. She fingers a copy of my book.

“It’s different,” I say, “not like any other diet book you’ve ever seen.”

Her pretty and clearly very intelligent face turns to mine.

“Why?” Her directness engages me.

“No rules, no quick fixes, just tuning in to the very excellent equipment we all have to tell us what we want and need.”

We have a grown-up conversation that lasts about ten minutes and I’d love to get to know her better. She likes me on Facebook on the spot. She buys the book, the very first copy sold from my own hands to a complete stranger. As I sign it, I know I’m really launched.

Thanks, Jessie!

The Anti-Diet: Love For Sale

I’m dressed for a workout, but this time I’ve splashed on a little make-up and done my hair. My usual tunnel vision at the gym is replaced with a panoramic view of The Rock patrons pedaling, treading, lifting, and grabbing tootsie-rolled towels when they check in or dropping their limp remains in a hamper on the way to the shower. I sit at a round table near the desk where my husband has fanned a dozen or so copies of my book before a plastic display frame with my picture in it and a bunch of cards in the pocket. The book cover looks really beautiful. I open one and admire the design, then close it so I can attend to business. What business?

“It feels like doing a trade show,” my husband muses, recalling a familiar blend of adrenalin and lethargy.

There is absolutely no action at my first book signing event. I muse that one of the most powerful spiritual postures for any new undertaking is to assume “nothing may happen.” I know this is supposed to feel weird, and it really does. I’m a 76-year-old woman in black Under Amour trying to drum up interest in passersby: a curious 3-year-old on her way to the supervised playroom, a new mom on her first day trying to get back in shape, a 70-year-old Bangladeshi marathon runner with a torn cartilage in his knee, and – the most promising – a guy in a do-rag who exclaims: “Wow! I know you work out here – it must work!” I give a card to the Latina who tidies the ladies dressing room and always greets me warmly, and tell her “I’d love to translate it into Spanish.”

Finally, three young hunks gather near the door and one balls up his towel, tosses it at the hamper, misses, and looks embarrassed when it rolls to my feet. He dives, apologizing.

“No problem,” I soothe, “but it’s a heck of a way to make a pass at a girl.” The three guys crack up.

Ah, well. As Cole Porter would write it: “Love . . . for sale.”

Original Anti-Diet: At Last, Folks - It's HERE!

Wednesday the 14th of November was a double birthday.  "The Anti-Diet" book was officially launched, and it’s the day I turned 76 years young – yikes! There’s so much to celebrate. The book looks beautiful, the website spectacular, and I keep visiting my Facebook page to see who’s there. The possibilities of connecting with readers through social media are thrilling and, I must confess, a little scary. Who could have anticipated all this when my book came out in 1971?

I put 13 candles on a cake, the sum of 7 and 6, because that’s about how old I feel right now. Kind of giddy, adolescent, taking a deep breath to blow them out and wishing . . . Please “like” me here!  

"The Anti-Diet - learning to be in the moment with food"

The Anti-Diet: SLEEP...An Anti-Guru Rant

Nobody has to tell me that insomnia is a miserable affliction.  I adore sleep, and I know it’s good for me.  But I really hate feeling guilty – as well as dog-tired – if I don’t get the amount of it I’ve been told a woman of my age needs.  Tossing and turning all night is bad enough without feeling like there’s something wrong with me if all the clever cures the sleep gurus offer (no computer, no TV, bedroom blackout, meditation) are ineffective. 

But the experts keep nagging about the importance of a solid 8 hours.  They say that bad sleeping habits in our workaholic and digitally driven lives set us up for serious illnesses from cancer and heart disease to diabetes and even (gasp!) overweight.  Their warnings to get our act together sleep-wise are backed up with hard science.  The Washington Post cited a study suggesting that rampant obesity in the U.S. is linked to people sleeping less, due perhaps to disruption of the hormones that regulate appetite. “The analysis of a nationally representative sample of nearly 10,000 adults found that those between the ages of 32 and 49 who sleep less than seven hours a night are significantly more likely to be obese,” Rob Stein reported (10/09/05). 

How ominous! Carbs, calories and fats threaten, and now we have to worry about sleep too?  The research raises my hackles.  Surely, other factors contributed to this particular age group’s overweight, like lack of exercise. Last I heard, sleep won’t fix that.  Maybe the pre-middle-agers in the study lay awake at night because they were overweight and miserable about it.   

In another finding – here’s a quote from the same article – "’Melatonin can prevent tumor cells from growing – it's cancer-protective,’ said Eva S. Schernhammer of Harvard Medical School, who has conducted a series of studies on volunteers in sleep laboratories. ‘The theory is, if you are exposed to light at night, on average you will produce less melatonin, increasing your cancer risk.’"

Now, this logic is really a stretch.  To paraphrase:  there is some possibility that, all other issues notwithstanding, melatonin (which we do not entirely understand yet) limits to some unknown degree the development of cancer cells of one variety or another.  Thus, a preventative benefit from melatonin production in indeterminate amounts could possibly be implied.  And therefore, the inhibition of this production, to some un-established degree, could be seen as having a possibly negative effect. 

Oh, just turn out the lights at night and save electricity!

What is “enough” sleep, anyway?   Who says 8 consecutive hours of slumber is best for everybody?  Beyond being basically diurnal creatures, there must be broad latitude for individuality with sleep, as with everything else.  A recent piece in the New York Times Sunday Review section (09/23/12) offers a refreshing perspective:  “Rather than helping us get more rest, the tyranny of the eight-hour block reinforces a narrow conception of sleep and how we should approach it.”  In Rethinking Sleep, David K. Randall contends that our idea of a good night’s sleep is a relatively modern affectation.  In olden days, people habitually dozed off for a few hours after sunset and awoke after what was called a “first sleep” to putter, ponder or read by lamplight.  

Aha!  Reason rules.  Here’s validation for my often very productive wee hours and freedom from “sleep anxiety” and what Randall terms “needlessly rigid and possibly outmoded ideas of what constitutes a good night’s sleep.”  There are lots of ways to get your zzzzzzzs and perform at your mental best.   

Sleep is just one more basic human activity to reclaim from experts who love to measure, standardize and pontificate. Why are we always looking for people to tell us “the right way” to sleep, to eat, to exercise, to raise a child or find a lover, to save our money or organize our closets?  Why are we such suckers for expert opinions, scientific credentials, and folks who have figured it all out, only to become irritable or outright rebellious when the answers they offer just don’t fit?  Life is messy and complex.  Gurus and experts can’t tidy it up for us.

Q&A with The Ant-Diet Author Lynn Donovan McCann

Why did you rewrite The Anti-Diet?

This question posed by friends and strangers can be “bookended” by two articles from the New York Times. The first one appeared Sunday, April 12, 1992, authored by Molly O’Neill, and was titled: “A Growing Movement Fights Diets Instead of Fat.” The story hailed a new “anti-diet” movement and featured Jane R. Hirschmann and Carol S. Munter as founders of a group called “Overcoming Overeating.” O’Neill focused on the failure of dieting, the dangers of “yo-yo” dieting (including its very own addiction), and our cultural bias against weight. She referred throughout to a new, “anti-diet movement.” I devoured the piece hoping to find my name mentioned in it somewhere – but no such luck. The news pages (now yellowed) got filed away, but I knew I had to do something.

“Food for Thought,” by Jeff Gordinier appeared on February 8, 2012. I seized gleefully on his subtitle: Could relishing food more be a way to eat less? Damn straight, I thought, and read on. Gordinier related the new, mindful eating approach to roots in Buddhism and quoted Dr. Jan Chozen Buys: “This is anti-diet.” His article made me feel like my moment had finally arrived, but still no mention. So I emailed him, introduced myself and attached the manuscript of the new edition I had already begun working on. He was very gracious and encouraging.

Eternal thanks for that! A mere seven months later, the all-new Anti-Diet is on sale and I’ve joined an important conversation that began as a monologue 40 years ago.

Please click HERE to learn more about "The Anti-Diet" by Lynn Donovan McCann

You Really Got a Hold On Me. I Don’t Want You, But I Need You…

Can this be? Is my passion for dark chocolate cooling? What’s that half-eaten bar of 80% cacao doing on the shelf? Do I really think a date – I mean the fruit – would do as well? I’d prefer a baked apple? What’s happening to me? This feels like a major life change. There’s a ripple of something like grief! “Oh, Lynn,” I scold myself, “you’re so dramatic. Cut it out!” But, no. There’s a little lesson here worth teasing out. The lecture to myself continues. “You assume that you’re forever bonded to dark chocolate and that no day is complete without it. You’re so convinced of this that it’s become automatic to reach for the after dinner treat. You probably don’t even taste it anymore. As in the case of all great loves, my dear, your relationship with chocolate is changing. And as in the case of all lifelong relationships, you may need a little distance, a rest to permit re-flowering.” It does not take very long.

To learn more about The Ant-Diet by Lynn Donovan McCann, please click HERE

Original Anti-Diet: How Do I Cook Thee? Let Me Count The Ways.

One of my favorite food writers, Mark Bittman, regularly offers 16 (or more) ways to fix one great ingredient in its season, like pears, or corn. I rip out the recipe page and tape it to my kitchen cabinet until I've tried at least 3 of his ways and discovered 2 of my own. Bittman’s improvisational approach to cooking allures me, invites me to imagine and savor in my mind. I‘m not a careful measurer, and frequently add or substitute this or that even when trying a recipe for the first time. This keeps me attentive to the dish as I prepare it. 

I don’t want to cook on autopilot. I bypass the overly cerebral and scientific cooking shows. Perfection chills me. Give me Mike Colameco at his most visceral. Give me Lidia Bastianich on a messy day. Preparing food should be a pleasurable, playful activity that centers you in the moment, just as eating should be.

The Original Anti-Diet

Original Anti-Diet: Toggling Between Pollan and McCann

Joy!

The all-new Anti-Diet (ebook format) is now cuddled on my Kindle close to one of my food heroes, Michael Pollan.  I can toggle between Food Rules and my book to places where the man who coined “edible foodlike substances” (Pollan, loc 180) and I are on precisely the same page.  He’s referring to camera-ready products with a binge baked into them, the so-called foods that make your body long for the real thing and keep on eating even if you’re full.  I say that besides perpetuating cravings, they desensitize and render you numb to your needs (McCann, loc 216).

Pollan declares that he is “not antiscience.” He has “made good use of science,” and only wishes remind us how successfully humans have managed to nourish themselves “for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it” (Pollan, loc 164).    

I love Pollan for that!  Pop over to my Introduction, where I encourage readers to trust the “fantastic equipment” we are born with, a “complex biological, neurological and psychological system” that has kept most of us healthy “since we rose up on two feet” (McCann, loc 37).  And while I call my book, The Anti-Diet, I confess to an ingrained awareness of caloric intake.  I too read food labels for content and seek the most bang for my nutritional buck. 

Yes!  I prefer to “eat foods that will eventually rot” (Pollan, loc 313).

Yes!  I “avoid food products with the wordoid ‘lite’ or the terms ‘low-fat’ or ‘non-fat’ in their names” (Pollan, loc 202).  Indeed, I stand in the aisle and laugh out loud at the fat free labels on strawberry jam that has never harbored so much as a nano-gram of any oil or butter in all its days. 

Pollan’s Food Rules is a pleasure to read and his simple admonition to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” (Pollan, loc 155) is a model to live by – exactly what I hope my book will grow up to be. 

My “rules” take a few more words, but are just as flexible: “Eat everything you want. Eat nothing you don’t want. Eat only when you are hungry. Eat only what you really want. Stop when you are full” (McCann, loc 952).

  

OMG, this is fun!

Original Anti-Diet: Are you secretive about eating? Do you always clean your plate or never skip meals? What do you forbid yourself?

Try not to judge; just observe.

“I watched other women pick at their dainty portion while I loaded up my fork, and wondered why the standard four ounces never satisfied me.  Standard schmandard!  Stomachs, like other parts of our anatomy, come in different sizes.  I still tend to eat big meals but no longer eat to excess.  Please don’t urge me to eat when I don’t feel like it!  I don’t care if it’s “time” or if it’s “good for me.”  My afternoon snack may become dinner.  I may graze in one major food group for a whole day.  Some people might think my current eating habits are a bit strange.  So what!” 

Your Desires Are the True Representatives Of Your Needs

Your appetite is there to tell you when and what to eat.    

When you ignore it, deny it, mess with it, you have no choice but to eat compulsively. This contributes to the dulling of your inner signals, the most important tools you’ve got!  Desensitized and feeling guilty, you cannot really taste and relish anything you eat, on or off the diet, but continue to seek satisfaction – eating more and enjoying it less.

The Anti-Diet: Let Go, Eat Everything You Want and Look Great

Imagine how good it would feel to let go, eat everything you want, and look great – to have your cake and eat it, too.      

If the idea of abandoning restraint fills you with horror, it suggests that you do not trust yourself in regard to this fundamental human need.  So, you accept restrictions in many forms, almost anybody else’s idea of what’s good for you.   Minimum daily requirements, high protein, high energy, high fiber, low carb, low fat, low calorie, and a balanced diet (which no one can agree on) – you feel you must stick to standards and guidelines set by others without stopping to consider first of all:  do I want it now?  Will it taste good to me?