The Subway Diet

(This is a repost from my old WritingUp blog, it's a busy day)

Jared, the Subway diet guy, really gets on my nerves. On the latest commercial he's got the whole "I blame it on fast food burgers" thing going. The commercial then goes on to point out that those that eat the low fat/low calorie Subway sandwiches instead of burgers can lose weight.

No shit, Sherlock.

I'm not a person who can eat whatever she wants and remain thin. I've got (at least) twenty pounds of baby weight to lose and clothes in my closet that come in four different sizes. So I don't say this out of some sense of skinny superiority. I don't say this out of a sense of healthy living superiority, either. My eating habits leave a lot to be desired. And that's why I'm chubby. I eat too much and much of it is not good for me. But that doesn't mean I need a diet, or to cut out carbs or whatever the latest trend is these days.

America, put down your diet books and stop believing that Subway can save you from yourself. If you want to lose weight you have to choose to eat like a healthy person with a normal relationship with food. And exercise.

And that's it. Billions of dollars are spent on all these weight loss programs and diet books and diet food and it's all so freaking stupid!

Don't tell me that adults raised in this country don't know what they're supposed to eat. We all know what's good for our bodies, it's just that our minds and our taste buds don't always agree. And that's when you have to make that choice.

Jared, our buddy the Subway guy, made the choice. Now he's skinny and has a career as a spokesperson for Subway. He's smarter than we are - he turned his decision to let go of the fattening food binkie into a career. But we all can make the same choice. It's not rocket science, although there may be a good deal of psychiatry involved.

When I decide what I'm going to eat, I am making a choice about whether I want to continue being chubby or whether I want to eat something that sounds really, really good at that moment. There are undoubtedly lots of deep psychological reasons why french fries usually sound better to me than salad. In my youth, I spent some time analyzing them. I wrote a whole notebook about my relationship with food.

It didn't change my passion for french fries. . .or my desire to fit in my skinny jeans. All it did was make me realize that how I ate was my choice. When you follow a diet or an eating plan (ie no carbs), you're having someone else make the choice for you. And what happens when that person isn't there? You're back to square one, making the choice between skinny jeans and chocolate cake for breakfast again.

Why can't we skip the middle man and realize we make this choice from the beginning? Why aren't we smart enough to realize that eating a bag of fat free chips is still 2,000 calories of a bad nutritional idea? Why is the idea that a low fat Subway sandwich is better for your weight than a McDonald's meal worthy of a commercial?