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

   

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: 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"

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

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.