In my last post, I gave a brief history of being fat in the United States, and I also included a bit of personal history. I’d like to expand on the personal history before moving on to biology and will power.

I went on my first diet when I was 10 years old and was decidedly chubby. It was a 1,200 hundred calorie diet, and I bought a little book that listed the calories of commonly-eaten food so that I could make my very own food diary and keep track of how many calories I had consumed. Lo and behold, it worked! I lost weight and continued dieting all through my teens. At one point, I lost so much weight my shoulder blades stuck out. When I had the flu, I was delighted. More weight lost. In retrospect, I can see I was on the edge of anorexia, but I was too much of a foodie, even back then, to stay that way for long. I gained some of the weight back, but because I was such an active teenager, my weight stayed within acceptable limits. Then I had children, and ever since, I have swung back and forth between being overweight and being less overweight. How many pounds have I lost and gained over the past 30 years? Hundreds of pounds, I am sure, and the guilt of not being able to keep those pounds off weighed on me as heavily as the pounds themselves.

What was the matter with me? Why didn’t I have enough will power to eat sensibly and maintain a healthy weight? Spurred on by the literature of the 1980s and 90s, I was convinced I had some deep psychological issues, and this made me feel even worse. I got counseling, but the worst thing I could come up with was that food was a big deal in my family—my parents loved to eat and to cook, and grocery shopping was a joyous event in our house. Not so very bad, especially when compared with physical or mental abuse or deprivation.

Around that time, I was discussing dieting and losing weight with a friend of the family, who also struggled with being overweight. I suggested that there must be some underlying psychological disorder that prevented me from losing weight and keeping it off. She said, “Laurie, those theories are all very well and good. But let me tell you something. I just love food, and I love to eat. Plain and simple.”

At the time I dismissed what my friend said. Surely it couldn’t be that simple, that people just loved to eat. But as our country headed toward the 21st century and more and more people became obese, it seemed that my friend had a point. While there would be a certain percentage of the population that was overweight because of psychological issues, there were simply too many people putting on weight for this to apply to the majority. Unless, of course, we were afflicted with a national neuroses that was making the country fat. Possible but not probable. And with obesity spreading to countries that are becoming more affluent, there is even more indication that being fat is not just the province of a select group of neurotic women.

As scientists and food writers have studied food and human evolution, they have discovered that, in fact, people are prone to eating until they are really, really full, and the foods they are drawn to can jokingly be referred to as the true food groups: fat, salt, sugar, and carbs. (Chocolate, perhaps, should have its own category, especially for women.) While eating until very full does not make sense in the context of modern times in our country, with its supermarkets stuffed full of chips and donuts and cookies, it does make sense from an evolutionary viewpoint. It’s only recently that food has been so abundant. For most of human history, people had to work hard for the food they ate, and that work entailed lots of physical labor. Sometimes crops would fail, and people would face hunger and famine. In that context, it was very sensible to eat as much as you could whenever you could. I would also like to posit that people who gained weight easily had an advantage when hard times came. They had a surplus of fat that thinner folks did not have, which perhaps came in handy when food was scarce. (I want to emphasize this is my own supposition.)

As for fat, salt, sugar, and carbs—these are things that the human body needs—albeit not in the amounts we consume today—and once upon a time they were very hard to get. Again, from an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense to feast on them whenever you can. However, in almost a blink of an eye, modern society has skunked evolution. Fast food as well as stuffed supermarkets beckon from every corner, making it difficult to resist what our bodies naturally crave. Even worse, government subsidies go to supporting those industries that produce such a surplus of high-fat, high-caloric food.

Are we slaves, then, to our own evolutionary biology? No, but it’s important to realize how normal it is to want to eat until you are really full and how difficult it is to override this tendency. Bodies truly don’t like losing weight, and Parker-Pope’s “The Fat Trap” sheds even more light on how hard it is to keep weight off. More on that in a post next week.

But take heart! There are strategies that can be employed to convince the body to shed weight. It still isn’t easy, but there is at least some hope, and I will be writing about this as well.

A few weeks ago in the New York Times Magazine, Tara Parker-Pope wrote an excellent piece, “The Fat Trap,” which is, of course, about being fat, a problem that plagues many Americans and seems to be spreading to other countries as well. As I have dieted off and on since I was young a girl in the late 1960s, I was keenly interested in what Parker-Pope had to say. Because I have been dieting for so long, I have been able to observe, first hand, the developments that have unfolded around being fat in the 20th and 21st century. (That’s one of the benefits of aging; it certainly gives you perspective.) Therefore, the next few posts will examine being fat, being thin, and how hard it is to lose weight and keep it off, and I will be referring to Parker-Pope’s piece. I have recently lost 40 pounds, using a technique called “Controlled Cheating,” which not only works—albeit with a lot of effort—but which also seems to make biological sense, and I’ll be writing about that, too.

First, a brief history. In the United States, being fat started becoming a real problem in the 1960s, when the ultra-thin Twiggy became oh so fashionable. Before that, being a little “fleshy,” as one of my aunts would have put it, was considered not only acceptable but also sexy. (Marilyn Monroe and her generous proportions come to mind.) After Twiggy, that all changed, and for women, thin was in, so to speak. Nobody wanted to be fat, and dieting became the norm for most American women and girls. Ironically, in the following decades, although thin continued to be in, many woman’s bodies blossomed until they went past Marilyn Monroe’s voluptuousness to become truly fat. (Men, too, have put on weight since the 1960s, but a thin man is not considered as sexy or as desirable as a thin woman. Buff, yes. Thin, no.)

All sorts of theories developed as to why women couldn’t be as thin as they desperately wanted to be. They were weak; they lacked will power; they had psychological issues; they were compulsive; they were food addicts; they couldn’t control their appetites. (And is there anything worse than a woman who can’t control her appetite?) All these theories created a lot of guilt, and much shame and scorn was heaped on overweight women. The feminists, bless them, sensing that something was rotten in the land of being thin, claimed that fat was their issue, and to hold women to impossibly thin standards was damaging both physically and mentally.

The older I become, the more I am aware that life is full of contradictions, and in this country, being fat is rife with them. Women are held to impossibly thin standards, and fat is a feminist issue, although perhaps not in a straightforward way. (Can it be a coincidence that the thin craze began at around the same time as the women’s movement and the advent of birth control pills? It could be, but I don’t think so.) Yet women, and men, have indeed gone beyond being fleshy to being truly fat, and children are fatter than they ever have been in our nation’s history. We are an obese nation, despite our almost crazed obsession with being thin, and with this obesity come real health problems, ranging from diabetes to strokes to joint problems.

Here’s another contradiction to consider. Back in the supposedly repressed 1940s and 1950s, when it was acceptable to be a little plump, men, women, and children ate cake, cookies, and other sugary treats with a guilt-free abandon that we in the 21st century can only marvel at. But on the whole, they were thinner and healthier than we are today.

There are several hypotheses for this: more home cooking, less commercially processed food, less high-fructose corn syrup, less fast food, more time spent outdoors, and less time in front of a screen. Who knows? Perhaps all these things play their part, and maybe over time there will be a definitive answer.

One thing is certain: fat is a complicated issue as well as a feminist issue. Will power is also an issue, but in an unexpected way. Perhaps even more surprisingly, it seems that our own biology and how we evolved as humans play a big role, and in upcoming posts, I’ll be writing about how will power, biology, and evolution have influenced obesity.

On New Year’s Eve, I thought it would be fun for the family to come up with some New Year’s resolutions, which I would then duly record in my calendar book so that when 2013 rolled around, we could see how well we all did. Yes, I know that New Year’s resolutions have a bad reputation. How easy it is to disregard them after a month or so and to keep making the same resolutions year after year. (I have certainly been guilty of this.)

But another way to think of them is as “challenges,” which, if approached with the right spirit, can add zest and excitement to our lives. I do realize that if approached with the wrong crack-the-whip spirit, challenges can drive us crazy, too. But this is the new year, so it is perfectly appropriate to view challenges in an optimistic light.  And if we fall short, well, there’s always next year.

I’m not going to share the family’s challenges, but I will share mine. I came up with three, but there are a couple more that are simmering, and if all goes well, then who knows? Perhaps I’ll tackle them as well.

First and foremost is to finish Maya and the Book of Everything, the children’s novel I have been working on for the past three years. As I am truly coming down the homestretch, I made a really, really optimistic resolution to finish the first draft of Maya by the end of February. Definitely a poke to get going.

Second is to reach my goal weight by the end of the year. Since May, I’ve lost 40 pounds, and I’d like to lose another 40 pounds or so.  I’ll soon be writing more about this in upcoming posts.

I got the idea for my third challenge from my friend Jill Lectka. She wants to bike up the Winthrop Street hill starting from downtown Hallowell. It might be wrong to call this hill the mother of all hills, but it is very long and very steep, and it would take a fair amount of training to be able to pedal to the top of this hill. Somehow, though, when Jill mentioned she wanted to bike up this hill, I couldn’t get the notion out of my head and found I wanted to bike up that hill as well.

Lucky me! I live in Winthrop, where there are hills galore, and some very challenging ones, too. Perhaps not quite as challenging as the Winthrop Street hill, but challenging enough for plenty of training opportunities.

Another resolution, but not recorded: Bike and walk more; ride in the car less. This can be difficult, especially in the winter and especially with a daughter and son-in-law living in South Portland and another daughter living in New York City. We will visit them. That is a given. But perhaps we can cut down on local driving to make up for an occasional trip to South Portland and to New York. This one will take quite a bit of planning as well as keeping track of mileage. But each and every one of us is responsible for our carbon output, and, as the saying goes, talk is cheap. It is time for me to put words into action.

A longer-term goal, perhaps when Maya is finished, is to publish a cookbook for family and friends. Over the years, I have come up with some good recipes, especially for soup. Unfortunately, I am also a rather disorganized cook, and these recipes are scattered everywhere—in cookbooks as scribbled additions, in folders, on this blog, and sometimes even I don’t know where to find them. And though I am somewhat ashamed to admit this, I don’t always correctly translate my own scribbles. Anyway, it seems to me that the cookbook would not only be a nice legacy but also a way for me to become more organized, a goal and a challenge that I am always working on.