Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro, available in multiple formats.
This is a pretty interesting book, and I enjoyed reading it. Dani Shapiro is an accomplished and best-selling author of several previous memoirs and novels. If you like real-life mysteries, especially ones that involve delving into the past, you’ll probably get seriously drawn into the story. I read it in big chunks over the course of a couple of days.
The plotline of the book centers around Shapiro’s discovery, by way of an impulsive DNA test, that the man she considered to be her father, whom she loved and revered, was not. She had been conceived with the help of a sperm donor. I won’t give away more of the story as I don’t think that’s fair, so you’ll have to read the book to find out if she finds her biological father and how she handles all the fallout. But here’s the central question for the purpose of my post today: Would she have been better off not to have known? Or, to put it the other way: Is it always better to know the truth?
I would come down squarely on the side of knowing all you can know. If I may put the question into a dramatic context, consider the situation of a woman who considers herself to be happily married but whose husband is actually carrying on an affair. Sorry to use such an obvious example, but I think we’d all agree that she needs to know. As long as she goes around thinking that all is well, she’s living in a fool’s paradise. She can’t make good decisions because she doesn’t know what’s really going on. And let’s face it—the truth will come out eventually. “Truth is the daughter of time” the proverb says. We can’t know what we don’t know, so who can say how much covered-up stuff is out there? The current DNA testing craze is telling lots of people that they, like Dani, aren’t who they thought they were—nor are their parents, grandparents, etc. And that’s just the point: the truth is coming out, test kit by test kit. The people who suddenly find out that they have a whole new set of ancestors often experience great relief along with their shock and dismay: “I always wondered why I never felt that I belonged in this family.” Our hypothetical betrayed wife has to figure out how to react once she finds out the truth, especially if there are children involved, but at least she knows.
So what does all the foregoing have to do with the topic of this blog? It fits in with my current run of posts on fad diets. They do work in the short term for almost everyone, and they work in the long term for a very few. The two factors playing into any weight loss are:
1) calorie restriction in general (because you have to have a deficit that your body makes up for by burning nutritional stores, although you have to be careful not to cut calories too drastically)
and
2) sugar and other refined-carb restriction (because of the uniquely-fattening effects of these substances).
Let’s say that you know someone who’s on one of the fad diets floating around: keto, paleo, vegan, pegan, Whole30, the Virgin Diet (it’s not what you think),* intermittent fasting, carb cycling, the alkaline diet . . . whatever. And it’s “working.” The person is shrinking before your very eyes. So what if the person doesn’t realize what’s actually going on? Does it matter?
Yes, it does matter, for a whole host of reasons. Some I’ve addressed before, but here’s at least a starter list:
1) First and foremost, when the person grows weary of following the diet’s restrictions he/she has no understanding of why those restrictions were causing weight loss in the first place. Since there seems to be a binary choice of following/not following the diet, our person will just go back to the old ways of eating that caused the excess weight in the first place and it will all come back on.
2) Needless dietary restrictions can lead to nutritional deficiencies.
3) Focusing on what you can’t have and thinking of your diet as “virtuous” can lead to what some have dubbed “orthorexia”–an eating disorder akin to anorexia in which you have developed a mindset that equates food choices with virtue and guilt.
4) Food becomes a source of anxiety instead of pleasure and nourishment. Also . . . sort of an uncharitable thing for me to say, I guess, especially when I’m capable myself of going on and on about dietary issues, but it must be said that someone whose whole life centers around the latest and greatest wonder diet can be pretty boring to talk to. Hey, let’s just eat this good food and get on with life!
Remember The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right? (I’m not linking to it because it was an utterly ridiculous book.) I was reminded of that book as I was writing this post. It came out in 1995 and purported to be this magic formula for women to succeed in romance. You were supposed to be “easy to be with but hard to get.” You were supposed to rarely return phone calls to a man in whom you were interested and certainly never call him. You were supposed to project an aura of independence and mystery. But guess what? There’s no secret about the idea that those qualities are a lot more attractive than neediness. My mother used to tell me when I’d have a crush on some random boy or other, “Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve!” If I’d followed her advice I’d have saved myself some grief. I didn’t need to read The Rules; I just needed to listen to my mom! The truth was obvious in that sphere, and it’s also obvious in that of eating well. We all know at least something about what we need to do; we just need to do it. There’s always more to learn, but we can start from where we are and go from there.
*Here’s all, yes, all, you have to do to follow the diet popularized by the celeb diet guru J. J. Virgin: Cut out these seven foods: gluten, dairy, eggs, soy, peanuts, corn and (grouped together) sugar and artificial sweeteners. She promises that you’ll lose seven pounds in seven days by dropping these seven foods. What a bunch of baloney! (Even though you might indeed lose those seven pounds.) This diet plan is very similar to the Whole30 Diet, which I’ll be discussing as part of my Fad Diet Debunking (FDD) series, so stay tuned.