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Image above is the logo for the Canadian
cupcake franchise Cupcake Girls
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The New York Post recently had an article on the Manhattan Diet. This is not some new, weight-loss program, but a strategy on how to keep looking thin even in the midst of indulgence. Here is one advice:
Eat what your body craves. Just because it’s 8 a.m. doesn’t mean you have to have eggs, fruit, oatmeal or Pop Tarts. At midnight, how about a bowl of granola (actress Christine Baranski’s default snack)?What busy, enterprising New York woman eats at midnight? Shouldn't she be getting her beauty sleep to prep her up for the next day?
Then there is list of "24 key foods" for "A smart NYC gal’s perfect pantry" which includes:
- Pickled ginger (no calories) [who eats pickled ginger?]
- Mar tuna (Drain, break over a bowl of lettuce, and dinner is done.) [Real masochism of the dieter here. Tuna with no mayonnaise!?]
- Boiled egg whites (Keep bowls of them handy in the refrigerator for a quick kick of protein.) [For real?!]
- Gnu Bars (all the fiber you need for a day) [I have no idea what Gnu Bars are, but I wouldn't want my fiber from them]
- Frozen grapes [enough said]
Some of the items are not so wacky, although they are not original either. Everyone with a little diet background knows that beans are a good substitute for meat, especially with their high fiber, which helps with digestion. And having a packet of dried fruits at hand calms down the sweet tooth.
This is really just another diet writer who is narrowing in on the modern career woman's paranoia that she's too fat.
To balance that off, from one extreme to another, there is the cupcake craze which has finally hit its pinnacle. Busy New Yorkers (and Vancouverites, although not Torontoists - yet) can now buy cupcakes from vending machines. How genius is that!
So, indulge in a mini-cake, maybe two, for your daily sugar fix. Then eat a sensible meal of tuna on plain salad, and have a Tofutti Cuties tofu "ice cream" sandwiche for desert. This is the perfect feast and famine vanity diet, or decadent indulgence followed by Spartan expiation.
Yet, women cannot seem to get a grip on that "skinny" ideal. Most of the middle-aged women I see have spreading hips and bloated faces (I don't mean to be unkind here, I know that a certain weight gain is inevitable in women as they age), but there is an unhealthy puffiness in these women, as though their bodies have had enough of the inflation/deflation process they've most likely been through for most of these women's lives, and have simply pumped up with permanent fat: it is there to stay, and to grow!
And there are those who wallow in their curviness, even in this age of the coveted bony femme fatale. It is because that is what men prefer, I am convinced. So as usual, these air-brained, modern feminist-when-it-suits-them-but-sluts-at-heart women take things up a notch and try to glorify their plus-sized bodies (which they are really not happy with) with bulging breasts.
Below is a photo of Gail Simmons, recently profiled in the New York Post's Entertainment page as a "Gourmet Goddess" (article here, and photos here), who can't decide if she wants to be a professional chef or a fashionista. To give her some credit, she does say that her bigger size won't get her on the fashion files. But she seems to be overcompensating for that with her exposed flesh (at least in the photos at the New York Post). And how hard is it really, as a woman who is not close to the middle age puffiness I talked about above, to slim down by ten pounds, which is what it would take to make her look less corpulent? Giving up those cupcakes? Never!
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This article tries to understand the cupcake craze :
The unstoppable rise of the cupcake over the past five years has been analysed in terms of retro-food chic and nostalgia, the infantilisation of Western civilization, the triumph of appearance over substance, and even American political culture. After all, a cupcake is both democratic (one equally-sized cupcake each) and libertarian (there is no imperative to share and everyone can have a different flavour), in marked contrast to the communal cake.I tend to think it has a lot more to do with the "infantilization" of Western culture, or Western women in particular. "When things get rough, and the diet is depressing, go to the cupcake vending machine and get a glimpse of your carefree, weight-free childhood."
What cupcakes are really hiding is an uber-indulgent (infantile?) psyche, which is likely to get out of control at any moment. And at $1.95 (before tax, which makes it more like $2.15) per "mini-cupcake" which is the going rate at as my neighborhood's Prairie Girl "Live Life One Cupcake at a Time" Bakery, they are not cheap, considering you can get a Tim Horton's donut, from around the corner, at $0.95 (tax included).
They are not low in calories either. A small red velvet cupcake with all that sugar frosting from Starbucks (I couldn't find the calorie count for a Prairie Girl cupcake, but the Starbucks' size and frosting are comparable) is 450 calories. This is about 1/4 of the daily caloric intake recommended by the Food and Drug Administration for women from ALL foods, and of course, from nutritious foods, and not sugar-rich cupcakes.