Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (154 page)

You can be a powerful influencer of others—particularly your own children. Make every effort to spend time with people who are on the same lifestyle path as you and with whom you can find support for the inevitable times when you feel as though a hot fudge sundae is the solution to your problems!

Nourishment is not just the food that we put in our mouths. It is also the environment around us: the people we’re with, the sunlight and starlight from the skies, and the color of our walls. These things affect how food is metabolized in our bodies. You need to reevaluate any friendships you have that support unhealthy eating. If you always spend time with those who use eating to suppress their emotions or as their only form of entertainment, you will quite literally feel and act heavier around these people—and you are apt to gain excess fat. You may need to make some new friendships. On the other hand, when you eat with people who enjoy food fully and without any guilt, you may well find that you feel more satisfied than in the past.

For example, many women notice that they eat much less when they go out to eat than when they’re at home. The entire process of being served and having to wait between courses results in a very different digestive process and an enhanced sense of well-being.

Step Five: Update Your Cultural Programming

Eighty-five percent of women report that they bear the primary responsibility for taking care of their families, including planning, shopping for, and preparing meals, according to the recently published
Shriver Report: A
Woman’s Nation Changes Everything
(Center for American Progress, 2009). We therefore have tremendous power over the food we and our families eat and the potential to have a significant impact on the health of ourselves and our loved ones.

Women’s roles as traditional mothers—providing the “tribal foods”—is out of date because women are now working outside the home in greater numbers than ever. When my daughters were in college, most of their friends couldn’t wait to get home to Mom’s home cooking. However, my daughters weren’t brought up on much of my home cooking. I had help. And so the chain of mother as the sole provider of food was broken with them. Neither of them expects much more than my company in the food department. Even at Thanksgiving, we go out for dinner and have a spectacular organic meal at a lovely local inn—an annual ritual. What a relief!

Many men’s nutritional and emotional needs have been met by women since birth, which is how mothers program their sons to expect women to serve them. When they marry, their wives often take over where their mothers left off. If such a man cooks the occasional meal or volunteers to take care of the children to give his wife a break, it’s not culturally expected, and so it is almost always regarded as a gift, as something extra that he does for the family. When a woman tells me that she’s exhausted from cooking three separate dinners every night because of all the various food preferences in her family, I immediately prescribe for her a book or meeting on codependency. Cooking separate meals for people who don’t appreciate the effort—who take it for granted as their due—is a classic relationship addiction. (If, on the other hand, she’s well rewarded for her efforts, loves to cook, and she and her family have all agreed on the arrangement, no problem.)

It took me years to become aware of my own programming in the cooking and cleaning department. In the early days of my marriage, when I arrived home before my husband, I was very aware that he expected me to clean up the house and start dinner before he arrived home from work, even though we both worked long hours at the same job. I also sometimes got resentful when my hus band would innocently ask me, “What are we doing for dinner?” I used to think that he was
making
me plan the meals, shop for food, and prepare the meals. He didn’t understand why I became irritable. For a while, neither did I. Then it became clear to me that I was automatically assuming that feeding him was my responsibility.

Once I became conscious of my programming (which I brought into my marriage as surely as I brought my hopes and dreams), I stopped blaming him for
the fact that I felt compelled to
cook and clean against my wishes. I also started to change my behavior. For example, I didn’t necessarily pick up unless I wanted to. At the same time, he also began to take a look at his programming—with some help from me. He came to see that he
expected
me to do the jobs that his mother had always done. Once both of us made conscious our unconscious expectations about food, cooking, and cleaning, our relationship improved in this area. (In most relationships the unspoken
shoulds
and
oughts
for both members need to be articulated—I don’t pretend that this is easy.)

Increasingly, I’m finding that young men are being brought up to perform household tasks like cooking, cleaning, and laundry. This stems directly from mothers who have changed the cultural programming. Interestingly, the boyfriends that my daughters have chosen have all been skilled in the kitchen, which makes me really happy!

I encourage you to review some of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which you have been conditioned. You cannot make any dietary improvement until you’ve mapped out your personal food mine field (from childhood to the present) and have honestly examined your assumptions about being the chief cook and bottle-washer or that you cannot take the time to prepare and enjoy good food for yourself. Especially now that the majority of women are working outside of the home, our expectations of ourselves about food preparation need con siderable updating from our mothers’ day. Ask yourself the following questions:

Do you feel personally responsible for thinking about, shopping for, and preparing the family meals?

If the refrigerator is empty when family members are hungry, do you feel guilty? Inadequate?

Have you ever discussed this with your spouse? Your children? Your other loved ones?

Do you enjoy preparing food?

Do you prepare delicious meals for yourself even when you’re alone? If the answer is no, do you make healthy choices when you eat out or when others prepare food for you?

Now that I’m single and my daughters have left home, I eat out nearly every day with friends at restaurants that serve organic food. This nourishes me at all levels and is well worth the expense, which I am fortunate enough to be able to afford.

The women’s movement of the late 1960s gave unprecedented num bers of women the impetus and means to support themselves financially for the first time. Women no longer need to marry for economic survival. This makes true partnerships between men and women a viable reality.
The
Shriver Report
documented the fact that the war between the sexes is over. Both men and women are negotiating everything in new ways. It’s time for women to change their outmoded conditioning about who should do what— and also to lower our standards rather than criticize when a man cleans and cooks but doesn’t do it the same way we would. If you value yourself, know what you want, and ask for what you want without anger, guilt, or self-doubt, you’ll find that many men will knock themselves out to please you.

Step Six: Make Peace with Your Size and Shape

Excess weight is dreams in storage. There’s a myth that we can
store up time. Primitive cultures store up for the winter. We store
up time in our hips.

—Paulanne Balch, M.D.

Countless women over the years have asked me, “How much should I weigh?” Though all of us have been weighed and measured since birth and compared with the cultural ideal, each individual woman has a natural weight at which her body will stay, for the most part, if she is eating according to physical need and exercising regularly. A woman’s weight will often fluctuate by two to four pounds in any given week, and it will also vary with her monthly cycle or annual cy cle. This fluctuation is almost always due to changes in fluid levels, not fat or muscle, and is normal. A woman’s natural, healthy weight may not match the weight tables of any insurance company or doctor’s of fice, and it may not be related at all to clothing size.

Weight as a measure of health doesn’t address body composition and is therefore misleading and ambiguous. The concept of “ideal” body weight is not only extremely destructive for many women but also an obsolete way of thinking about health. A much more meaning ful measure is your percentage of body fat, which I will cover on page 705, and also body mass index (BMI). To determine your BMI, simply find your height and weight in figure 20. A BMI of 24 or less is consid ered ideal, while a BMI of 30 or above is defined as obese and carries an increased risk of death and disease. BMIs between 25 and 29, though not ideal, do not necessarily increase health risk.

Though I’ve told you that weight is an obsolete measure of health, I do want to help you heal from your past misconceptions about the subject. Take a look at the USDA suggested weights for adults—both men and women—in table 9, as well as the BMI chart in figure 20. You’ll see that, depending upon your frame size, there’s a very large range that is perfectly acceptable and healthy.