Not a valid diet tip, IMHO

"USA Weekend" magazine should stick to fawning over celebrities or offering Sudoku games, I think. This was a "quick tip" from this week's issue:

"Most apples, bananas, oranges, and peaches are larger than one serving size. To control your portion size, buy smaller fruits or split larger ones."

Okay. This is the kind of "diet advice" that makes my head explode. For one thing: We have nutritionists yelling at us to eat more fruits and vegetables. Pack in those antioxidants! Get that vitamin C! And now you have other ones telling you to limit your fruit intake, because some fruits are "larger than one serving size."

The biggest objection I have is this, though: If I really needed to strictly limit calories in my diet (or if I were choosing to), I would NOT do it by either buying "smaller fruit" (which sometimes are not as good, because in some cases they're underripe or had some accident of development). I'd do it by limiting calories somewhere else.

Telling me to cut any of those fruits is kind of counterproductive - one of the reasons I LIKE those fruits is their portability. I can toss an apple or an orange in my lunch and it's portable. If I had to also bring a knife to cut it with, and plastic wrap (and ascorbic acid powder for the apple, so it wouldn't get quite so brown and slimy), that's a whole extra mess of steps that may make me NOT bring the fruit.

(And for how many years have the told us to eat fruit "in place of dessert." So now instead of a nice orange, we get a half an orange. Lovely. I don't like feeling like I'm living in Ration-Land.)

I don't know. I fear that the "portion control" mantra is going to, like so many things our society does, get out of hand. Cut your fruit in half and only eat half. Limit orange juice to four ounces a day. Water down the juice you give to kids. Hell, probably water down the skimmed milk while you're at it. "Eat this, not that."

And I saw a feature - I was only half-watching - on the "new" cafeteria meal at Wellesley. While a lot of the food they showed looked more appetizing than the cafeteria food I remember (lots of salads and noodle dishes), they showed the portions - and they were tiny.

I don't know about you, but when I was in college, I had lots of afternoon labs. Labs that ran from 1 pm to 5 pm or even later. And in a lot of cases they were outdoors - in Michigan, in the fall, when it was cold and rainy. If I ate my little 200-calorie, portion-controlled dish of noodles and edameme, and washed it down with a big calorie-free water, I'd be hungry - and very likely, shaky - before lab was over. (And while in some cases, dragging a granola bar along would be possible, for the laboratory-based labs, it would not: no eating in lab.)

I wonder if some of the students ever pass out after their portion controlled meals? Or if they get hungry and grumpy and unfocused? (I've also heard of a study that said people whose brains were deprived of glucose - from fasting - were more likely to make poor decisions.)

Don't get me wrong: you don't want to go overboard on lunch in college; it's as bad to be sleepy in lab because of an overload of spaghetti and garlic bread as it is to be hungry. But there's got to be some kind of balance, and it seemed to me the "nouvelle" cafeteria meals were going too far on the small side. Some of them looked like they consisted of maybe a half-cup of food. I know, I know, most college students are pretty sedentary - but there's a point where people need to just be able to eat.

I usually made a dormitory lunch of yogurt (I usually disliked the "hot meal choices," which tended to be things like "meatless jambalaya" (combine the leftover veggies in the fridge) or meat-patties in sauce.) And I'd have some fruit and maybe a piece of toast or some crackers with peanut butter. And a glass of milk. Or, I'd have a salad in place of the fruit. And I did OK. And I didn't really gain the "freshman 15." (An added thing: many campus cafeterias have reduced hours on the weekend. I know on Sundays if I went to church I missed the one offered meal. A meal for which I had already paid.)

I admit, this is one of my hobby horses, one of my worries. I can just see a future where people are so afraid of getting fat - or so afraid of being unhealthy - that they become willing to let someone else tell them what to eat. (Millions of people do this already, see all the rigid diet plans out there, especially the "meal replacement" plans).

And the thing is: one-size-fits-all solutions, which any large scale "Tell us what to eat" situation would be, generally fit most people very badly. So you have some active folks not getting enough calories, and they get grumpy and hungry in the middle of the day. Or you have people who have some kind of allergy or intolerance to some food, and they have to fight to get a plan with a substitute. Or maybe there are some people whose genetic make up requires a higher-protein, lower-carbohydrate diet, and other people who need more carbohydrates and less fat - but everyone will get the same plan, because that's easier, and that's "what's best for them."

And the other thing - so much of the diet industry, so much of the "nutrition" industry, and even some of the cooking magazines now, seem to have the side effect of sucking the joy out of eating along with trying to promote health. Have you tallied off ALL your vegetable servings for the day? Hey hey, ho ho, white bread has got to go! Are you REALLY going to put sugar on that fruit? I don't care if it tastes sour, sugar is unnecessary calories! And don't forget to eat local! Oh, and don't eat ALL of that apple, it's just FULL of calories!

And it's tiresome and maddening. Don't tell me to cut my apple in half, dammit, USA Weekend. How about, instead, just shutting up and letting ME decide if that extra 45 calories or so is going to kill me?

Incidentally, here are some counts, this is from a "living with diabetes" type website so I assume they're fairly accurate, and they jive with what I learned years back in Health class:

Apple: anywhere from 50 to 80 calories depending on size
Banana: in the vicinity of 100 for a medium-sized one
Orange: from 60 to 80 depending on size
"Medium sized" fresh peach: about 40.

Seriously, USA Weekend. SERIOUSLY? Fruit is not a Big Mac. It is not even like a fruit pie. Telling me - if I, by some miracle of marketing, manage to actually buy a peach that TASTES like a peach, that rather than eating and enjoying all of it now, I must "save" those 20 to 40 calories by CUTTING IT IN HALF and putting the rest of it away? Forgive me, but that seems to be encouraging eating-disordered behavior. ("Always leave some food on your plate.")

As I said: If I'm going to consume that "whole" 40 extra calories by eating an entire large apple, if I really need to cut that much out, I'll cut it somewhere else, thanks so much. (The other thing? Fruit has fiber, which helps keep you full. I daresay eating 40 or 50 calories of an apple will keep you fuller longer than an equivalent amount of calories from - I don't know, what is it that's OK to eat now? Lean broiled chicken? Poached fish?)

Also: I seriously doubt people who are big fruit-eaters are the people who are really having problems with nutrition and health. But I guess the nanniers have worn out their interest in wagging fingers at people who eat fast food and now they're going to move on to harass people who might actually be trying to eat healthy. What's next? "Too much salad can slow you down"? (I remember years back, I read a novel about a girl suffering from anorexia; she would periodically spout off "diet advice" - that line being one of the pieces of twisted logic she had in her mind).

Frankly? I just want to be left the hell alone. Let me eat my damn fruit in peace.