Food thoughts
If you haven’t read the comments in yesterday’s post about the Hunger Diaries, I suggest you do.
Photo from Stephen Lewis.
Since writing my reaction, I’ve had a chance to read the responses of the girls highlighted in the article, and I’ve come to a firm conclusion on several bases:
1. Yes, blogs about food, eating, or exercise can trigger or encourage unhealthy behaviors.
2. Yes, blogs about food, eating, or exercise, can encourage or inspire healthy behaviors.
3. Lying to your contributors and blatantly ignoring an entire side of a story, and not disclosing your own personal bias, is poor journalism. If you have to get sneaky, you don’t have a good story.
The end.
Yesterday Bess said it’s not the reader’s responsibility to sift through good & bad information; bloggers are viewed as experts, especially those with more than just a blog.
Well I think it is the reader’s responsibility. Even if your doctor tells you something, don’t you weigh the options and decide what’s the right decision for you? (Ahem you should.)
But the more & more I thought about her comment, the more and more I realized she was right- whether they are or not, bloggers are viewed as experts by people that read them.
As I was sitting eating my lunch yesterday, I thought about my nutrition training. In school we learn about each nutrient thoroughly and in depth. We learn how to counsel. We learn how to perform and evaluate research. We learn chemistry. We learn biochemistry. We learn how to treat diseases with nutrients.
And we learn about calories. What they are, how to calculate needs, and how to gain or lose weight. Calories in equals calories out. I’ve talked about disagreeing with this before, but never really thought about it in terms of my education.
If I wrote an essay on an exam that said eating whole foods was a healthier weight loss option than counting calories, I would’ve gotten a big fat F. But I believe it.
What I’m saying is that even the experts may not get it. I could spit out exactly what I learned in school word for word if you wanted me too. But it’s not what I’d tell you if you asked me how I eat or advice I would give you.
I graduated summa cum laude from undergrad, completed a highly competitive internship to become an RD, and am halfway through a Masters degree. And I’ll still tell you my own real life experiences with food are more useful than anything I’ve learned.
I know my education has had an influence on knowing what I’m eating, but I don’t think it’s responsible for my behaviors. I would’ve failed a class or two if I said brownies with real sugar are healthier than using a heap load of Splenda.
Sure, we’re taught healthy fats are good for you, but I don’t remember talking about eating peanut butter by the jar as a healthy behavior. (Ok, you know what I mean.)
I can honestly say I’m 100 times healthier now than I was in college, or even high school. Gosh especially high school. I’m not scared of fat, or sugar, or calories. I eat them with abandon. And if I didn’t have a nutrition degree and told you this, you’d still believe me. [I think].
So what’s the difference between a blogger without a health degree telling you what they do?
So this really has nothing to do with the damn over-discussed article. It’s just a personal revelation. I think it’s why I struggle in loving my profession whole heartedly…
(And I promise I will not write about this again tomorrow. Instead, I will write about something delicious like cinnamon rolls or enchiladas. Yes, enchiladas I believe. :))
And P.S. I don’t give two sh**ts about the food pyramid. In case you cared. 🙂
Food thoughts
I’m going to get tarred and feathered for this.
I didn’t think that Marie Claire article was that bad.*
Let’s say you’re an outsider. You’ve never heard of food blogs before.
Then suddenly you hear of someone writing one. “You do what? You take pictures of what you eat and post it online?”
Having never heard of this before, it sounds quite bizarre. Especially if you go on to explain that you post every thing you eat, three times a day.
Even more bizarre? To have a conference about blogging about what you eat.
So now let’s go on to say you’re a reporter. You need to write about this blog phenomenon, so you start researching by examining the “big blogs”; you dig through old blog posts, search for the entries with the most hits or the most comments.
Of course you’re going to stumble upon the more controversial ones.
And you’re probably not going to read on a daily basis and get to “know” these people. It’s certainly doubtful you’re even going to meet these people to find out what they’re really like.
As a reporter, you should know that not everybody comes off the same in print as they do in person, but you brush this aside.
So, with many blogs to examine, a conference to attend, and an article to write, you skim for the “good stuff”. Like I said, it’s no shocker that you’d come across popular posts- which doesn’t always mean popular in a positive sense- controversy is popular too.
You come across an entry that talks about someone pouring salt over their dessert so they don’t eat too much. You find another entry that where someone says they’re hungry, right after an entry where they ran double digit miles.
You know what you’d be thinking. *Danger, danger* bulbs flash in your head. Disordered eating is staring you in the face. You’re a reporter- you have to share this. You have to let those blog readers know that this isn’t normal behavior.
And you’re right. You do.
**Here’s where me being objective ends.**
[And the un-objective me says that article blowed.]
As an outsider, I too, would say these blogs are contributing to disordered eating and promoting poor body image. Especially if those are the only posts I’ve read. But I’m lucky enough to actually know many of these girls the reporter is writing about. I shouldn’t really say writing. I should say smearing.
If this is the article that needs to be written, it could’ve conveyed an equally emphatic message without names. Honestly, I think it could have more impact without names. Although now it will have huge impact because everybody that knows these bloggers is going to talk about it and well, any publicity is good publicity.
Bottom line? I don’t think it was necessary to trash these girls and their blogs. For the number of people that are negatively affected by them, 100s more are inspired and motivated. Seeing how a “real” person handles being healthy can have more of an influence than reading how you “should” be healthy.
But on the other side of the fence, some behaviors demonstrated on blogs is in fact disordered. Disordered is the wrong word. I don’t know the right word.
But it depends on who’s doing the behavior, why they’re doing it, and who’s reading about it. Nobody would blink twice if a woman weighing 300 pounds dumped salt on her dessert when she was done if she was trying to lose weight. But a healthy 20 something that lost college weight and suddenly it’s an eating disorder? Everything needs context before judgment.
So I say the article wasn’t that bad, because I’ve seen disordered behavior on blogs. And I’ve seen some of it in person too. But that doesn’t mean each and every food blogger has an eating disorder or is encouraging others to do the same. Just because someone does something on a blog doesn’t mean you can or should yourself (hello, not everyone can run marathons or mile repeats at a 6 min pace!) Make decisions and smart judgments for yourself- nobody else can do it for you.
They aren’t writing these blogs and saying DO THIS. They’re saying this worked for me. Readers need to take responsibility for their own actions.
Rant. Over.
I think….
The issue of sponsorship and big companies paying for things is a whole different bag of lemons. Bag of lemons? Who says that.. Oh I meant can of worms.
[P.S. I think the girls specifically mentioned in the article were unabashedly slammed for the wrong reasons and can imagine how they’re feeling right now. They didn’t deserve it. The reporter literally ripped them a new one, and whether you’ve met them or just read them, you know it was a low, low blow.]
*If you don’t know what I’m talking about: an article was written about how food bloggers have eating disorders. I debated joining in the hubbub but obviously I went for it…. I have to say if I didn’t know the who the article was talking about, I probably wouldn’t have blinked twice.
Thoughts?
