I am a big fan of FlyLady because she has helped me get my life in order. For nearly 12 years of marriage (to say nothing of my single years), my husband and I have had goals that include washing and putting away dishes every day, cleaning house once a week, and going to bed early enough to get 7 or 8 hours of sleep. We’re still working on the sleep part (and let’s be honest, probably will be for the rest of our sleep deprivation-shortened lives), but FlyLady has enabled me to, for really the first time in my life, meet the dishes goal (and certain other goals) on a consistent basis. This may not sound like a big deal to those of you who are, as she puts it, “born organized,” but it is a huge deal for me after beating myself up over this issue for years.
So anyway, I get her emails and am generally a big believer in the system. She is kind of cheesy and occasionally throws a bit of a petulant fit when people disagree with her, but who’s perfect? Certainly not me. That’s why I like her.
One of the offshoots of her philosophy that I don’t so much enjoy is the concept of “body clutter.” She tries to loosely apply her strategies for decluttering to weight loss, and predictably, it doesn’t seem to quite work out. For one thing, she herself is still fat, which is certainly fine by me and none of my business, but it’s interesting since I have no doubt she has tried to lose weight using her own system.
Note that I haven’t read the book and the description sounds like weight loss is de-emphasized, so I’m sure this is not the worst diet ever invented or anything… I just feel like the whole “fix your emotional problems and get skinny” thing has kind of been done to death, and surprise, we are not all skinny. Anyway, the email list is not terribly diet-y but there is an overall attitude (to be fair, this hardly originated with FlyLady) that getting your weight “under control” is part of getting your life under control.
There is also an emphasis on cooking at home to save money and improve your health–and there’s nothing wrong with that unless it becomes a moral imperative. The tips and recipes provided are probably helpful to a lot of readers. Unfortunately, in a recent email from FlyLady’s food expert, Leanne Ely, it did become a moral imperative, in a way that really pushed my buttons. Ely put together a “top ten list” along the lines of Michael Pollan’s Food Rules (unfortunately I can’t link to it because it was posted to FlyLady’s email list and login-required message board, not to Ely’s blog), and number 10 read as follows:
10)To afford to eat food worthy of consuming, eat only quality, real food and eat less of it.
Who does she think she is? “Eat only quality, real food and eat less of it.” So basically, in the real world, if you are poor, this means you’ll be taking the same food budget and using it to buy more expensive food (usually read: fruits and vegetables), necessarily in smaller quantities than you were buying before of other foods. This could result in a huge loss of available food energy. Possibly enough of a loss that you will no longer be able to afford enough calories to live on. It is not necessarily the overall concept of changing the choices you make that bothers me–perhaps if you are lucky enough to not be all that poor, you can make some substitutions and still be able to afford adequate nourishment. (After all, leaving aside non-trivial issues of the time it takes to prepare such things and whether you can find them in your local store, say, dried beans or canned vegetables–which she also nixes in one of her other “rules” due to sodium, but screw that–can actually be affordable compared to prepared foods. In fact that makes the “rule” kind of bewildering because it seems to imply that “high quality” food is always going to be more expensive. Kind of leads you to wonder what she means by “high quality,” but anyway.) No, as screwed up as some of the other assumptions implicit in this rule are, it is the apparent belief that less is always better when it comes to food intake that is causing me to experience a simultaneous sort of white-hot rage and terrible hopelessness.
I think this reaction is mostly because deep down I know how common this view of fat people is–that somehow, because we have larger bodies, we can subsist on air and a few broccoli florets and that will actually be good for us, whereas a thin person gets a pass to consume, you know, an actual reasonable quantity and variety of food, as needed to live and thrive. (I wish I could find it now, but I remember someone in the fatosphere being told by a doctor to buy a head of broccoli and make it last all week as the entirety of her dinners.) Ely seems to make it even worse by extending this “less is better” belief to all people, probably because “everybody knows” that Americans are pretty much all too fat, right? This “rule” implies–intentionally or not–that it is a universal moral good for all people to constantly strive to eat less and less and less.
Anyway. Wrong. Fat people need adequate quantities of nourishing food–note: 1000 calories is not usually an adequate quantity, and you need protein and fat too–in exactly the same way that thin people do. To think otherwise is to deny that fat people are… well… actually people; and, in this case, to dismiss the difficulties of poor people and those who can’t afford “high quality” food as something they could overcome if they just tried a little harder. There is way too much of this crap out there as it is.
Thumbs down, Leanne. Keep the cooking tips coming, but lose the self-satisfied judgment next time.
(Incidentally, in rule #6, she also states “They are the enemy” with reference to regular and diet sodas. Dramatic much?? I tire of the scapegoating of soda. Sure, it’s bad for you. I am just finding it harder and harder to care.)
January 29, 2010 at 10:09 pm
I know how common this view of fat people is–that somehow, because we have larger bodies, we can subsist on air and a few broccoli florets and that will actually be good for us, whereas a thin person gets a pass to consume, you know, an actual reasonable quantity and variety of food…
Fat people need adequate quantities of nourishing food–note: 1000 calories is not usually an adequate quantity, and you need protein and fat too–in exactly the same way that thin people do. To think otherwise is to deny that fat people are… well… actually people
This really can’t be said often enough.
January 31, 2010 at 4:57 pm
I cannot understand why people think someone who weighs 50 lbs. less than me should somehow be eating 800 calories a day more, or whatever. Yet it’s just simple calories in, calories out, right?! Even in my dieting days I wondered why people who wanted to lose weight weren’t advised to simply eat like thin people (e.g. reasonable amounts) rather than diet rations. Of course now I realize there is really no such thing as eating “like a thin person” or “like a fat person” because everyone is different, but still, the logic of diets is very weird. People love to have their “it’s so easy not to be fat, the only reason you are is because you’re a disgusting glutton” and “you have to eat 1200 calories a day and no carbs for the rest of your life to be thin” (not to mention my favorite, “I would weigh 300 pounds if I let myself go, I am constantly vigilant and you have to be too”) all in one argument.
January 30, 2010 at 12:27 am
This is part of the reason I stopped receiving her e-mails – they did a whole year, I think, of the diet e-mails and I couldn’t cope. It’s a shame, because she’s empowering in a lot of ways!!
January 31, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Yikes, an entire year. I really hope they don’t do that again. 😦
January 30, 2010 at 1:37 am
Oh my God, I love Flylady too. Without Flylady I’d still be more or less living in a health and fire hazard. “You can do anything for 15 minutes” is my mantra now.
But I never read the “Body clutter” or excercise or food emails. I know there’s nothing in there for me. I was a little intrigued by the Michael Pollan one but I didn’t bother reading it and now I’m glad.
January 31, 2010 at 4:53 pm
I know, it is amazing how simple it sounds (like a lot of people, I pooh-poohed it and didn’t try her methods for a while… yeah, like my way was working so well) yet it is the only thing that has really ever worked for me. Now I can recognize when I am engaging in perfectionism that isn’t productive, and do things a different way.
Speaking of simplifying things, you’re right, I should just not read the diet or exercise emails. I could save time, irritation AND bad feelings about myself all in one step. Sounds like something FlyLady would approve of “flinging.” 🙂
February 1, 2010 at 4:44 am
Reminds me of a book called Does this clutter make my bum look big? or something along those lines…
I love this post, I linked to it in my Recommended Reading post for the day : )
Bri
February 1, 2010 at 8:22 am
Bri, I have never seen that book but yeah, it sounds like exactly the same kind of thing.
Thanks for linking the post, I really appreciate it!
February 1, 2010 at 5:43 am
That was very eloquent.
There’s a lot of ranting to be done on the topic of how not only fat people, but women in general, should subsist gradually on less and less, but you made your point sans rant.
I mean, where do they think the energy to be servile will come from?
*eyeroll*
February 1, 2010 at 8:31 am
Hi littlem. 🙂 Me not ranting, that has to be a first. Anyway, thank you.
You’re so right… this also is right there on the continuum of how stricter and stricter diets can function to preoccupy and weaken women in society (though the fat person who is told to subside on a head of broccoli is probably not really considered a “woman” by that doctor in that moment, more of a thing or a problem). I didn’t consider that part.
March 15, 2010 at 8:24 am
[…] The researchers, in any case, conclude that a “sin tax” is therefore the way to go. Great. That should really help poor people get the calories they need to function and survive. WHY do these people always assume that the ideal that we should all be striving for is to live on, like, vegetables and air? […]
March 29, 2010 at 9:52 pm
[…] Food rules for self-righteous people « spacedcowgirl […]