Eat Pray Love? Diet, Blapshemy, Hate (audio)

CC Liu, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! (NPR, 9-27-14)

Eat Pray Love author gets quizzed on Dieting, Blasphemy, Hate

Elizabeth Gilbert was a successful magazine writer in New York when she went through a life crisis and decided to travel the world. When she got back, her book Eat Pray Love become one of the biggest best-sellers of the past decade, along with its sequel Committed. Her latest novel is called The Signature of All Things.
 
We've invited Gilbert to play a game called "I refuse to eat, pray, or love." Three questions about dieting, blasphemy, and hate.

 

PETER SAGAL, HOST: And now the game where we take people who have accomplished big things and ask them to do a very little thing, that is, play our game, Not My Job. Elizabeth Gilbert was a successful magazine writer in New York when she went through a life crisis and decided to travel. When she got back, her book Eat Pray Love became one of the biggest bestsellers of the last decade along with its sequel, Committed. She has a new novel out called The Signature of All Things. She joins us now. Liz Gilbert, welcome to WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME. (APPLAUSE)

 

Author Gilbert (Jennifer Schatten/The Penguin Group/NPR)

ELIZABETH GILBERT: Thank you.

 

SAGAL: So there might be one or two people out there listening who neither read Eat Pray Love nor saw the film with Julia Roberts. So could you describe it briefly for them?

 

GILBERT: There might be one or two men out there.

SAGAL: Yes.

GILBERT: Yeah, to be very specific.

SAGAL: Who were afraid to admit it to their significant other.

TOM BODETT: No, my wife and I sat in the warm morning sun feeding each other grapes and read it to each other. (LAUGHTER)

• AUDIO: LISTEN TO THE STORY (11:15 mins)

BODETT: Now I'm sitting between two women, I can't speak freely. (LAUGHTER)

 

SAGAL: Well, so this is -- you, as I said, you were going through a life crisis. Your marriage ended, it was not going well. You said, I'm hitting the road. You went to Italy, and then Indonesia and India. And then you wrote a book about these -- about the lessons that you learned. Am I summarizing it correctly?

 

GILBERT: Yeah, you just did it beautifully.

SAGAL: Thank you.

 

GILBERT: Yeah, I ate my way through India, and actually -- ate my way through Italy. What am I saying?

 

SAGAL: I was about to say, you haven't read the book, have you? (LAUGHTER)

GILBERT: I haven't, actually. I did it all in upstate New York. I was just hoping I wouldn't get busted.

SAGAL: And this -- didn't you sort of create a movement of women finding themselves?

Elizabeth Gilbert as played by Julia Roberts

GILBERT: I hope so. That wouldn't be such a terrible movement to be responsible for. I certainly didn't set out to do that. My first books, by point of comparison, sold upwards of dozens of copies each. So I was not in any way prepared for that kind of a response, but I'm so surprised by it but delighted by it.

SAGAL: Are there women or anybody who had negative experiences like, "Yeah, I tried to follow in your footsteps. I went to Italy, I got food poisoning, drugged, woke up with one kidney. Thanks a lot!"?

 

GILBERT: (Laughter) Yeah, but the kidney they woke up with was on their plate. It was actually their meal.

 

SAGAL: Oh yes, that's even better. So one of the things that's happened - and this was probably something you didn't expect when you were a working magazine writer, is that you'd become kind of a self-help figure. You just did a tour with Oprah, right?

 

GILBERT: Yeah. I'm actually on tour with her right now. Well, not right this very minute.

 

SHELBY FERO: Is she there?

SAGAL: Is she there? Is she there?

 

O'CONNOR: Could you put her on?

GILBERT: Hang on a second. Ladies and gentlemen -- no. Yes, that's been an amazing thing. That's sort of like getting a phone call from the president.

 

SAGAL: Oh, it's better than that. (LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: President has to call people, Oprah chooses. What is it like being part of like an Oprah revival meeting? More

• Playlist
• Download
• Transcript

Cravings (III): How and Why?

Sexualized food images encourage acceptable forms of lust in society; body building goes out of control.

Cravings

Part III of III

Devra First (Boston Globe)

That can be hard to do. Once we begin obsessing, a food craving is hard to shake. What's important to understand, Gilhooly says, is that these cravings are normal. She coauthored a study on the connections between craving and obesity, published last year in the International Journal of Obesity, in which calories were restricted for a group of overweight women. (The trial was called Comprehensive Assessment of the Long-term Effects of Restricting Intake of Energy, or CALERIE).

At the beginning of the trial, 91 percent of the subjects reported experiencing food cravings. After six months of dieting, 94 percent said they'd had cravings. But, Gilhooly says, "people who gave in less were more successful with weight loss." Instead of feeling guilty about cravings, she says it may be more useful to acknowledge them and teach ourselves to manage them by resisting more frequently and controlling portion size.

And as sticky as cravings are, we may be able to rewire ourselves to crave healthier foods. In a study Pelchat worked on in which subjects consumed a diet of the nutrition drink Sustacal for a week, several reported craving it later. "We were all surprised by that," she says. "They could have formed a lot of different associations drinking it. There was a little bit of habit strength there."

In a study on comfort food, Wansink found one out of eight Chinese graduate students considered cookies a comfort food, even though they didn't grow up eating them in their home country. Why? In the United States, Wansink suggests, a student might be exposed to cookies at receptions, study breaks, and birthday parties: happy, fun events. A positive association develops. If we eat strawberries instead of hot fudge to reward or console ourselves, we can learn to crave them.

"If you get in the habit of eating something good for you, you can strengthen the probability you're going to want to eat that food," Pelchat says. "It does happen that when people go on diets and get used to eating fish, if they haven't had it for a while they crave it. I don't think old cravings ever totally go away, unfortunately, but if you change your habits the probability you'll be exposed to cues that trigger them does go down."

Scientists aren't the only ones exploring these issues. Philosophers and religious thinkers have been pondering them for centuries, according to William B. Irvine, author of "On Desire: Why We Want What We Want" and the upcoming "A Guide to the Good Life," about the Stoics.

"Buddhists said your life on earth is going to be hellish unless you master desires," he says. "Philosopher Musonius Rufus said it's really important we get control over our food cravings because it's a craving we have to deal with three times a day.

Most people think of eating as a source of pleasure. As with most pleasures it has a dark side, it can capture us - that's what the Stoics and the Cynics would say." Surprisingly, it may be the Epicureans who offer the best dieting advice. "Everyone thinks they partied hard, but they didn't," Irvine says. In fact, Epicurus wrote, "It is not continuous drinkings and revellings, nor the satisfaction of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance."

That sounds a lot like the findings of the CALERIE study.