Dear Eric Hentges

Dear Eric,

I read about you over at Mo‘s blog — no, Mo’s other blog. She linked to the article about the new food pyramid. You know the one. The one where you were talking about how if people eat wisely and exercise, they can earn “discretionary calories” that are the ones that are available for things like the occasional pat of butter or the occasional small dish of ice cream. It’s the article that has this passage in it:

Discretionary calories are the reward for living right. And Americans who are overweight or obese don’t have discretionary calories, Hentges said. “They used them up a long time ago,” he said. To get them back, they will have to burn more calories by being more active, he said.

Eric, don’t take this the wrong way, but I say this in total seriousness. The article says you are the executive director of the Agriculture Department’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, so it sounds like your job is mostly giving general advice about eating healthy, and perhaps in that role, you are qualified.

But I am here to tell you this: You owe it to the health of the people you have been appointed to serve not to say one more word about obesity, obese people, or losing weight until you have figured out what you are talking about, because as it stands now, you are one of those people who makes it worse.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Your background, after all, isn’t exactly in medicine or psychology. Your background appears to be in political advocacy. For pork, specifically. No — literally, pork. I see from the press release announcing your appointment that you were “vice president of Applied Technology and Education Services for the National Pork Board” before arriving at the USDA. As I understand it, the National Pork Board doesn’t actually work to improve the health of fat people. Neither does the National Pork Producers’ Council, where you were the director of Consumer Nutrition and Health Research before that, and neither does the National Livestock and Meat Board, where you were the director of human nutrition research before that. These groups are there to put money in the pockets of pork producers, Eric, not to give sound medical advice.

What you say suggests that when it comes to fat people, you don’t know anything. And because you don’t know anything, you owe it to the people you’re supposed to be helping in your capacity as a government official to shut your mouth.

You see, your little comment — your smug, self-satisfied, tsk-tsking, finger-waggling, smirking little comment — is, while far from the most offensive thing I have ever heard, a remarkably concise, perfectly formed, densely packed example of the one approach to helping people get and keep their weight under control that I absolutely promise you will never, ever work.

It does not work to tell people that they must suffer now to make up for their past mistakes, and that they’ve already spent a lifetime of indulgences and can now look forward to living like monks. Let me repeat my objection, lest you mistake it for a soft-focus, psychologically generous, misty-eyed plea for kindness to people who have suffered enough. It does not work.

I’m appealing to your practical side. I’m appealing to you as a strategist. You know, the kind of strategist who knows how to move some money on behalf of the National Pork Producers Council. I’m appealing to you as a planner. As an operator. As a guy who wants results.

Trying to shame people — to embarrass them, to make them hate themselves for every drop of Coke they have ever swallowed, to make them believe that the reason they haven’t changed their habits yet is that they have not offered adequate repentance for a lifetime of sin — this does not work.

I mean, honestly. This is the one approach that has been tested on more people than any other. Telling fat people how much they suck, how much they have to make up for, and how much they should appreciate all of the great times they’ve had eating ice cream because they will never know them again? This does not work. It doesn’t.

You know why, Eric? Because no one knocks herself out if the only reward is absolution. If all she can hope for is to get back to zero. To be forgiven.

Don’t you see it? All of these people you are talking about, who have “used up” all of their calories — used up their treats, their slivers of birthday cake, their opportunities to have just a taste of what everyone else is having — they don’t owe a debt to anyone but themselves, and deep down, they know it. They are the only ones they’ve put at a disadvantage. Oh, sure, public health implications and so forth, but that’s not really what it’s about. When it’s just you and the mirror — or you and the scale, or you and the bread, or you and the treadmill — it’s not about insurance costs or the national debt. It’s about you.

You’re the one who’s going to benefit. You know who benefits when I choose to change how I eat? Me. You know who benefits when I hit the Precor? Me. Those benefits go to me.

Is this beginning to make sense to you? Are you there yet? Do you get it?

You’re asking all of these people to stop treating themselves. You want them to live a pared-down, apologetic life until the scale says “Ding!” and they can live among the Regular People again. Sure, you say they could earn their “discretionary calories” back by being more active, but there is no mistaking what you are really saying when you say we have “used them up a long time ago.” You are saying that the cupcake we do not eat today is to make up for the cupcake we ate . . . when? Last week? Last year? When we were six years old? How long will it take? How sorry do you want me to be about a handful of potato chips when I was twelve?

See, all of this debt? It’s not owed to you. It’s not owed to the Vatican, or the United Nations, or the Pork Board. It’s owed to ourselves. And because it’s owed to ourselves, you can’t convince us to pay ourselves back if you tell us all we’ll get out of it is that we’ll be as virtuous as everyone else has been all along.

Don’t you get it?

Do you really think I could get up at 4:00 in the morning to pay a debt I owe to someone I don’t have any respect for? Do you think I could change the way I eat, or drag myself into the kitchen to make dinner instead of ordering in, or pass up the free pizza lunch . . . in order to pay off a wedding from 1993?

People don’t work that way. They don’t. You don’t work that way, and neither does a fat person.

I do not work hard to make up for the things I’ve done. I work hard to put myself in the position to have the things I want. I haven’t been sentenced to three hundred hours at a cardio sweat to make up for anything. It’s not punishment, and it’s not penance. I’m not bailing out a sinking ship, you arrogant jackass, I’m just steering it in a different direction, and nothing makes it harder than people who can’t tell the difference.

And it’s so sickeningly ironic, because speaking solely for myself, nothing worked until I gave myself a clean slate. Nothing worked until I stopped writhing around trying to make up for everything I had done wrong. Nothing worked until I stopped assuming I had “used up” anything. Nothing is used up. There’s no expiration date on your right to make your own choices and make yourself feel better. You wake up every day in whatever situation you’re in, and if you do it with shame, like you’re sorry — like you’re apologizing for being in the room, for making people see you, for taking up space — you will get nowhere. It’s unfair, isn’t it?

Yeah, I think so, too.

But do me a favor. Until you’re ready to talk to me about what’s in front of me instead of the pouring sand into the barrel of guilt you expect me to be lugging around? Just close your mouth. You’re making it worse.