A Disappointing Study, but – Carry On!

“Mind What You Eat: Can ‘intuitive eating’ be as effective as calorie counting?" (Gretchen Reynolds for The New York Times Magazine, 11/22/15) got me all excited.    Reynolds cites a study conducted by Judith C. Anglin and published in Nutrition and Health that compared weight loss success between subjects who cut calories and subjects who ”practiced intuitive eating – a program, according to intuitiveeating.org, guided by 10 principles like ‘Reject the diet mentality,’ ‘Honor your hunger,’ and ‘Make peace with food.’”  At last!  I thought, and read eagerly, until Anglin’s blunt conclusion that sensitivity to internal cues alone will not keep weight off for the long haul. She says: “Calories matter.”

I beg to disagree.  Of course weight loss can be achieved without counting mathematical abstractions.  I published a book about this in 1971.  I completely revised and republished “The Anti-Diet: learning to be in the moment with food” after forty five years of maintaining a desirable weight just by listening to my gut.  

    

What’s wrong with Anglin’s study and others like it?  Well, for one thing, it was much, much too short.  It spanned just 6 weeks (with a follow-up at 9).  That’s hardly time enough to re-wire the brain for a discipline of focus rather than restraint, to undo years of ingrained guilt, to send the mental clutter of misinformation about what is good or bad for you to the recycle bin. It took me a good 6 months to make a turnaround back in 1967.  Fine-tuning awareness in eating (or any important human function) is a lifelong process.  It doesn’t follow a straight line, and it differs for every individual.
      

Anglin’s study was designed around Tribole and Resch’s well-respected program that systematizes many of the fundamentals I discovered on my own.  But, programs must be “followed,” and studies are inherently “controlled.” I can’t imagine doing the kind of thorough, quirky, and intensely individual work I did to revitalize my relationship with food while being scrutinized, interviewed, and weighed on a weekly basis.  You have to really want to give mindfulness a wholehearted try. It’s an inside job, an enormous lesson in self-trust and “letting go.” Signing up 16 distractible college students for 6 weeks (and maybe paying them a small stipend) is a set-up for negative results.  It couldn’t begin to measure the effectiveness of intuitive eating, as I understand it.
       

The results of my own, successful 45-year “study” strongly suggest that our innate capacity to know when, what, and how much we want to eat is actually sufficient, probably for most of us.  Hasty conclusions to the contrary only benefit the quick fix gurus and hucksters of often dangerous remedies that put overeaters even further out of touch.  They perpetuate learned habits of eating that are also promoted and reinforced by institutions we like to think of as reliable.
   

To understand how medical research, the food industry, and the government have contributed to mindless eating on a national scale, may I recommend NinaTeicholz’s “The Big Fat Surprise.” There is a link between this important book and the stubborn resistance to alternatives to conventional dieting like the ones Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch (of intuitiveeating.org) and I offer.  And, while we wait for widespread acceptance of the simplest, most natural, most logical way to lose weight and keep it lost, enjoy Karen Wexler’s delightful book, “Having My Cake.”  Our day will come. 

Lynn Donovan McCann

   

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

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

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.

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"

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?

Original Anti-Diet: Sneak Peek at a Book Excerpt!

Way – way  – back in the late 1960s, I wrote a book called The Anti-Diet: the new “pleasure power” way  to lose weight. The good friend who provided a sounding board for my project called it a manual for living disguised as an innocent little diet book. When The Anti-Diet was published in 1971, it didn’t change the world, but I began to get thank-you letters from  all over the U.S., England and Canada. People said my idea worked for them where other weight loss solutions had failed. 

The Anti-Diet proposed that the wonderful apparatus we all have to nourish ourselves and maintain appropriate weight might work better than any diet. It said:

* A fundamental reason why we overeat is lack of awareness about when we are hungry, when we are satisfied, what we really want to eat, when, and how much. 

* Rules, restrictions and other interventions put us further out of touch with our needs and desires. They tend to make the problem worse. 

* You can lose weight and keep it off through self-awareness rather than self-control. Pleasure is your greatest ally in this process.

The Anti-Diet also introduced an unconventional how-to format for its time: no rules, no measurements, no menus or recipes. No impressive degrees or credentials appeared on the cover. The author, then in her late twenties, offered only the personal experience of a chronic overeater and dieter who learned, literally, to trust her gut.

I am now a slender, vibrant septuagenarian – did I really say that? This fully revised edition of my book draws on nearly half a century of following and developing its principles. It retains much of the original text with its youthful perspective, but speaks to a far wider audience than originally envisioned. I promised no miracles then and promise none now; however, I’m living proof that The Anti-Diet works. I’m not the most willing, consistent, determined, or sane person in the world.  But, I have what it takes. We all do.  We are born with fantastic equipment to deal with the elemental need for food. This complex biological, neurological and psychological system is sturdy, adaptable, and has withstood the test of survival since we rose up on two feet. The hardware is built in and the software innate. I discovered, with a little experimentation and thinking outside the box, that the whole thing runs elegantly, given half a chance.  

Click HERE for more information about The Anti-Diet by Lynn Donovan McCann

When You Feel Guilty, You Don't Process The Food

I print out the Anti-Diet for final proofreading. As I’m swiping my credit card at Staples,
a pretty woman eyes the manuscript on the counter. She couldn't be a day over 25. I
wonder what she’s thinking.

“How interesting . . .” she points to the title.

Here’s an opening I’d be crazy to ignore. I’m supposed to be networking!

“Have a look.”

My tone is casual and I linger at the register. By the time the receipt has been tucked
away, she’s on page 5.

“This is true!” Her voice expresses personal conviction. “When you feel guilty, you don’t
process the food.”

It took me years to figure that out and she already knows it. I feel a surge of hope that
young people today are really going to get what I have to say.

I add a name to my mailing list, and expect to see her. at a book signing event in my
neighborhood.