Here Comes the Holiday
Food Assault

Every year at this time, just as Veterans’ Day rolls around, I have to hunker down and prepare to fight my own “Battle of the Bulge.” It is a two-front war that has been going on since my mid-thirties when my metabolism began to gear down and become as slow as molasses left overnight on the porch in mid-November.

The first assault on my waistline is the lack of exercise that I get this time of year. The mowing, gardening and other yard-work chores are pretty much a done deal by now and biking, hiking and horseshoe pitching just aren’t as fun when you have to wear mittens. The second, and much more sinister, assault comes in the form of holiday foodstuffs.

I defy anyone to find a person who is more enamored of holiday food than I am. I love it all. Thanksgiving is still a week away and already my mouth is watering for roasted turkey, cornbread stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, baked sweet potatoes with those little marshmallows melted on top, green beans with almonds (or green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup, if you prefer), deviled eggs, spiral ham with a honey and clove glaze, and big fat yeast rolls with butter, all of which can stand to get busy with some homemade gravy. Then, of course, comes dessert, which in my family means pumpkin pie, pecan pie, chocolate pecan pie, apple cake, and cranberry mousse, none of which is complete without a heaping helping of vanilla ice cream or Cool Whip on top.

And don’t even get me started about Christmas (let’s just say that it’s a good thing they don’t sell eggnog year round)!

This year I have attempted a pre-emptive strike on the War of the Waistline by going on the South Beach Diet. If you are unfamiliar with the South Beach Diet, it basically runs on the premise that if you take all the sugars, fruit and breads out of your diet, you will lose the will to live and in the days before you die of gastronomic boredom, you will actually drop a few pounds.

So far it seems to be working and I’ve lost about a dozen of the pounds that I will no doubt regain during the holidays. Hey, I’m not trying to get svelte here, I’m just trying to break even.

After all, they say that the average American is slightly overweight. What they don’t tell you is that average comes from weighing both people who are incredibly obese and young women like Nicole Richie who are starving themselves to conform to some warped notion of what the ideal woman should look like.

You remember Nicole Richie, don’t you? Last year she starred with her vapid, vain and vacant co-hostess Paris Hilton on the FOX television show The Simple Life. Nicole used to look fine and healthy but I guess someone referred to her as “the chubby one” and she decided it was time to become emaciated. Now I can’t get past the checkout line at the grocery store without eyeing a tabloid featuring a skin-and-bones photo of Ms. Richie on the cover.

The really sad thing about the situation is that Nicole Richie is not the only young woman out there starving herself in the name of beauty. According to estimates from the National Institute of Mental Health, between 5 and 10 percent of American girls and women suffer from eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and purging, and others. Those percentages go up for female college students, many of whom are away from home for the first time in their lives.

While many people think that these eating disorders can easily be reversed, the truth is that many young women cause irreparable harm to their bodies and internal organs by starving themselves. And the death rate for women suffering from anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the overall death rate for women in the general population.

Although I don’t have any statistics to back this up, I would wager that most young men are more attracted to the healthy body type as found on female tennis players, golfers or volleyball players than they are to the ultra-thin waif-ish body type typically found on fashion models.

Interestingly, one fashion organization recently struck out against the overriding “thin is in” mentality of the modeling industry. The elite annual fashion show in Madrid, Spain, caused an uproar two months ago when it turned away underweight models after protests that “girls and young women were trying to copy their looks and developing eating disorders.” The Madrid show used medics who measured the models using the body mass index (BMI) and ultimately turned away 30 percent of women who took part in the previous fashion event.

After that, the mayor of Milan, Italy, Letizia Moratti, told reporters that she would seek a similar ban for her city’s fashion show unless it could find a solution to “sick” looking models.

Many in the fashion industry are claiming that they are being discriminated against while others view the bans as the eventual backlash against the industry’s trend of using skinnier and skinnier models on the runways.

To those ultra-thin models who fear losing their jobs to the new healthy guidelines: I invite all of y’all to spend Thanksgiving with my family. If those sweet ‘taters with melted marshmallows don’t put some meat on your bones, nothing will!