Demi
Wed, Jul-04-07, 07:19
The Telegraph
London, UK
Published: 1 July, 2007
Are colleagues bad for your figure?
Every office has them: the woman constantly peddling cake or the one who only ever nibbles on raw carrots. But could their unhealthy attitude to food be more insidious than you imagine? Anna Chapman weighs up the evidence
Bridget, the 41-year-old managing director of an advertising agency, is scoffing a piece of Toblerone at 8am. 'When people go on holiday they always bring back chocolates for the office,' she explains, passing the bar to her assistant, who also takes a piece. 'I usually have muesli for breakfast.'
Across town Meg, a 28-year-old graphic designer, is in a breakfast meeting - watching a plate of croissants. Her client is explaining changes in a brand's logo, but Meg's mind is on food.
Having munched her way through two croissants, she's tempted to indulge in another one. But she's waiting for someone else to dive in first. 'If another girl takes one, it'll be OK for me to have one, too,' she tells me later. 'Otherwise, I'll look greedy.'
Women might think that they eat when they're hungry, but few of us actually do. 'Eating habits are contagious,' says the psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach.
'There's so much guilt, confusion and anxiety around eating that women don't listen to their appetites. They're only stimulated by food when somebody else starts eating.'
Part of the problem is that four out of ten British women are on a diet, and dieting breeds bad eating habits. A report published last month analysed 31 diet studies and discovered that most people who lose weight put it back on, many by bingeing.
When you have deprived your body of food it naturally wants to overeat. 'When you go on a diet you learn to override your natural hunger cues,' explains the nutritionist and therapist Judy Price. 'It's like stopping yourself from going to the loo.'
Nowhere is this more evident than in offices that are crammed full of weight-obsessed women grappling with birthday cakes, biscuits and sweets.
They're a breeding ground for competitive dieting and binge-eating. For years experts have been telling us that diets don't work, but it seems we're more interested in finding out how the colleague next to us lost a few pounds.
The prospect of appearing half-naked on a beach full of bikini-clad critics means that summer is peak season for infectious crash dieting.
While researching his book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink, the director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, found that female secretaries would eat 5.6 more chocolates if they were placed on the desk in front of them rather than if they had to stand up and walk two metres.
If food is near us, we'll eat it. 'You end up eating so much rubbish at work,' says Meg. 'The weird thing is that if you haven't consciously bought something, you often don't realise you're eating it.'
It takes a lot of self-control to be a healthy woman in an office. 'My boss is a bit uptight and brings her own cereal bars and pieces of fruit to meetings,' Meg continues.
'I often feel embarrassed for her. People think she's a bit uppity.' Says Orbach: 'Eating is a very social thing. There's a lot of pressure from the group to have a piece of cake.' That's why it seems churlish to turn down a home-made chunk of brownie when your colleague is thrusting a Tupperware box in your face.
But is the woman who is generously making you such an offer as sweet as her wares? 'There's a girl in my office whom we call the Tuck Shop,' says 27-year-old Lou, who works in television.
'She's always offering something to snack on, and keeps huge supplies of crisps and chocolate by her desk. She's really skinny, too.' What Lou has identified is a 'biscuit pusher': a woman who will buy sickly 'treats' for others and not eat any herself. Perhaps she just wants to be popular with her colleagues.
Gabrielle, 35, recalls working with another 'biscuit pusher' - purveyor of office HobNobs, which she never ate herself, almost every afternoon - who was eventually diagnosed as anorexic and ended up in a clinic for eating disorders.
In the course of his research Brian Wansink discovered that, because they are more likely to be restrained eaters, women tend to be more influenced than men by groups.
'When we put two women together, regardless of whether they're friends or not, they end up mimicking the eating habits of the other person.'
Mary, a 31-year-old art director, agrees: 'I love eating with my old college friend, George. She'll say she's on a diet then say "Sod it," and we have fish and chips.'
It's what Susie Orbach calls pack mentality: 'There's so much policing of women's food, by ourselves and by others. If one person says, "Let's have dessert," then we feel we can have dessert.'
According to Wansink, we eat 30 per cent more in company. When we sit down to longer meals and chat over dinner we are less likely to monitor what we eat, and will often copy the behaviour of the group.
'If the person next to you is eating fast, you'll find yourself matching their pace,' he says. Mary admits that she adapts what she eats depending on whom she's with.
'When I go out to eat with my old school friends some of them give up halfway through, which is daunting because I've got a big appetite. I wouldn't choose three fattening things in a row, which I would with my husband. I'd go for the healthy option so that I could eat it all without feeling like a pig.'
How did we get into this situation, where we're obsessing over who eats what and how much? What's most worrying is that we could be passing on disturbed eating cues to our daughters.
'A lot of kids are growing up with mums whose own eating is troubled,' says Orbach. 'Mothers can have the best intentions, but they're often dieting or talking about how fat they are or how they shouldn't be eating this. It becomes embedded in a girl's mind that she should be worried about food. She doesn't even know there's anything wrong with that idea.'
When Sally was pregnant, her birdlike mother told her that she was putting on more weight than she should be. 'She's always commented on my figure, even though I've never been larger than a size ten. I didn't think anything of it until my husband got really angry.
'Looking back, I didn't produce enough milk to breastfeed and it was probably because I wasn't eating enough.'
The International Journal of Eating Disorders recently reported that daughters of mothers who like to diet have a tendency to binge and overeat.
Jane, whose mum is super-sporty, is in her mid-thirties and is tackling bulimia. 'My mum's always going on about how beautiful I look in a photograph that was taken when I was 15. All I remember is that I'd starved myself for weeks to get into that skirt.
'Sisters have an effect as well as mothers,' she adds. 'When I was a teenager I used to hear my sister throwing up all the time. My best friend and I had an unspoken pact that we wouldn't eat. We were always on diets - beetroot and ice-cream diets, the Cambridge diet - and we used to do manic exercise, often 250 sit-ups before we went out.'
But having an eating disorder didn't make Jane sympathetic to others who shared her plight. 'There was an anorexic girl at my school and everyone hated her because she weighed four stone and got loads of attention. We teased her after someone heard her eating crisps in the loo.'
That was back in the 1980s, but Orbach thinks things are worse for girls today, and blames 'the intensification of visual culture. Only a few body types are promoted and most of us feel that we don't fit in.'
Size-zero culture has swept Britain. The more we look at Victoria Beckham's skinny frame, the more our eyes get used to it. And, at the other end of the scale, we're getting fatter than ever. The Blood Pressure Association says that obesity has trebled among six- to 15-year-olds, from five per cent in 1990 to 16 per cent in 2001.
'Teens are very vulnerable to peer pressure because they're trying to fit in and find role models,' says Judy Price.
Orbach agrees: 'Eating problems are so rife in this age group that none of the girls feels comfortable with her body or what she's eating. It's starting earlier than puberty and gets accelerated about the age of 11.
'By the time they're 15 or 16 they have such chaotic eating habits they don't know when they're hungry, and they're only eating from external cues.'
Half of 12-year-old Nancy's friends are on a diet, and have been since they were nine. 'We go for pizza and often they won't eat it, or if they do they say, "I'll run it off tomorrow,"' she says.
Even when women adjust their diets for medical reasons, they can have an unnecessary influence on their peers. Ella is on a wheat-, dairy- and sugar-free diet to cure virulent candida.
'It's worked, and I've lost half a stone,' she says. 'Even though I didn't think I was fat, I look better in clothes and feel more confident.'
The diet hasn't gone unnoticed at her PR firm. For her birthday they skipped the usual chocolate cake and had a date and walnut cake. 'When she said she'd stopped eating wheat I thought it might be a good idea to try it, too - for general healthiness,' says her colleague Amanda, 26.
Amanda isn't the only one: across Britain women are cutting out wheat and dairy in the quest for a flat stomach.
'Some people look at their abdomen and tell me it's bloated when it looks pretty normal to me,' says Judy Price. 'Women are meant to have rounded abdomens.'
What's more, she's convinced that copycat dieting can be detrimental to your health. 'It's dangerous to cut out food groups without supervision,' she says. 'Wholewheat might be your main source of B complex and fibre, and dairy your only source of calcium.'
An obsession with eating pure food and preaching about it - dubbed 'orthorexia' by the Californian doctor Steven Bratman in 1997 - is on the increase.
Taken to an extreme this can easily flip into anorexia - a person can rule out so many things they end up eating nothing at all.
'Following crazy diets, detoxing, becoming a fruitarian - it's all worrying behaviour that suggests a lack of joy in food and eating,' says Judy Price.
'We're taking it all too seriously.'
One thing's for sure: if we continue to take our dietary cues from other women, rather than our own bodies, we're fighting a losing battle.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/fashion/2007/07/01/steat101.xml
London, UK
Published: 1 July, 2007
Are colleagues bad for your figure?
Every office has them: the woman constantly peddling cake or the one who only ever nibbles on raw carrots. But could their unhealthy attitude to food be more insidious than you imagine? Anna Chapman weighs up the evidence
Bridget, the 41-year-old managing director of an advertising agency, is scoffing a piece of Toblerone at 8am. 'When people go on holiday they always bring back chocolates for the office,' she explains, passing the bar to her assistant, who also takes a piece. 'I usually have muesli for breakfast.'
Across town Meg, a 28-year-old graphic designer, is in a breakfast meeting - watching a plate of croissants. Her client is explaining changes in a brand's logo, but Meg's mind is on food.
Having munched her way through two croissants, she's tempted to indulge in another one. But she's waiting for someone else to dive in first. 'If another girl takes one, it'll be OK for me to have one, too,' she tells me later. 'Otherwise, I'll look greedy.'
Women might think that they eat when they're hungry, but few of us actually do. 'Eating habits are contagious,' says the psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach.
'There's so much guilt, confusion and anxiety around eating that women don't listen to their appetites. They're only stimulated by food when somebody else starts eating.'
Part of the problem is that four out of ten British women are on a diet, and dieting breeds bad eating habits. A report published last month analysed 31 diet studies and discovered that most people who lose weight put it back on, many by bingeing.
When you have deprived your body of food it naturally wants to overeat. 'When you go on a diet you learn to override your natural hunger cues,' explains the nutritionist and therapist Judy Price. 'It's like stopping yourself from going to the loo.'
Nowhere is this more evident than in offices that are crammed full of weight-obsessed women grappling with birthday cakes, biscuits and sweets.
They're a breeding ground for competitive dieting and binge-eating. For years experts have been telling us that diets don't work, but it seems we're more interested in finding out how the colleague next to us lost a few pounds.
The prospect of appearing half-naked on a beach full of bikini-clad critics means that summer is peak season for infectious crash dieting.
While researching his book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink, the director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, found that female secretaries would eat 5.6 more chocolates if they were placed on the desk in front of them rather than if they had to stand up and walk two metres.
If food is near us, we'll eat it. 'You end up eating so much rubbish at work,' says Meg. 'The weird thing is that if you haven't consciously bought something, you often don't realise you're eating it.'
It takes a lot of self-control to be a healthy woman in an office. 'My boss is a bit uptight and brings her own cereal bars and pieces of fruit to meetings,' Meg continues.
'I often feel embarrassed for her. People think she's a bit uppity.' Says Orbach: 'Eating is a very social thing. There's a lot of pressure from the group to have a piece of cake.' That's why it seems churlish to turn down a home-made chunk of brownie when your colleague is thrusting a Tupperware box in your face.
But is the woman who is generously making you such an offer as sweet as her wares? 'There's a girl in my office whom we call the Tuck Shop,' says 27-year-old Lou, who works in television.
'She's always offering something to snack on, and keeps huge supplies of crisps and chocolate by her desk. She's really skinny, too.' What Lou has identified is a 'biscuit pusher': a woman who will buy sickly 'treats' for others and not eat any herself. Perhaps she just wants to be popular with her colleagues.
Gabrielle, 35, recalls working with another 'biscuit pusher' - purveyor of office HobNobs, which she never ate herself, almost every afternoon - who was eventually diagnosed as anorexic and ended up in a clinic for eating disorders.
In the course of his research Brian Wansink discovered that, because they are more likely to be restrained eaters, women tend to be more influenced than men by groups.
'When we put two women together, regardless of whether they're friends or not, they end up mimicking the eating habits of the other person.'
Mary, a 31-year-old art director, agrees: 'I love eating with my old college friend, George. She'll say she's on a diet then say "Sod it," and we have fish and chips.'
It's what Susie Orbach calls pack mentality: 'There's so much policing of women's food, by ourselves and by others. If one person says, "Let's have dessert," then we feel we can have dessert.'
According to Wansink, we eat 30 per cent more in company. When we sit down to longer meals and chat over dinner we are less likely to monitor what we eat, and will often copy the behaviour of the group.
'If the person next to you is eating fast, you'll find yourself matching their pace,' he says. Mary admits that she adapts what she eats depending on whom she's with.
'When I go out to eat with my old school friends some of them give up halfway through, which is daunting because I've got a big appetite. I wouldn't choose three fattening things in a row, which I would with my husband. I'd go for the healthy option so that I could eat it all without feeling like a pig.'
How did we get into this situation, where we're obsessing over who eats what and how much? What's most worrying is that we could be passing on disturbed eating cues to our daughters.
'A lot of kids are growing up with mums whose own eating is troubled,' says Orbach. 'Mothers can have the best intentions, but they're often dieting or talking about how fat they are or how they shouldn't be eating this. It becomes embedded in a girl's mind that she should be worried about food. She doesn't even know there's anything wrong with that idea.'
When Sally was pregnant, her birdlike mother told her that she was putting on more weight than she should be. 'She's always commented on my figure, even though I've never been larger than a size ten. I didn't think anything of it until my husband got really angry.
'Looking back, I didn't produce enough milk to breastfeed and it was probably because I wasn't eating enough.'
The International Journal of Eating Disorders recently reported that daughters of mothers who like to diet have a tendency to binge and overeat.
Jane, whose mum is super-sporty, is in her mid-thirties and is tackling bulimia. 'My mum's always going on about how beautiful I look in a photograph that was taken when I was 15. All I remember is that I'd starved myself for weeks to get into that skirt.
'Sisters have an effect as well as mothers,' she adds. 'When I was a teenager I used to hear my sister throwing up all the time. My best friend and I had an unspoken pact that we wouldn't eat. We were always on diets - beetroot and ice-cream diets, the Cambridge diet - and we used to do manic exercise, often 250 sit-ups before we went out.'
But having an eating disorder didn't make Jane sympathetic to others who shared her plight. 'There was an anorexic girl at my school and everyone hated her because she weighed four stone and got loads of attention. We teased her after someone heard her eating crisps in the loo.'
That was back in the 1980s, but Orbach thinks things are worse for girls today, and blames 'the intensification of visual culture. Only a few body types are promoted and most of us feel that we don't fit in.'
Size-zero culture has swept Britain. The more we look at Victoria Beckham's skinny frame, the more our eyes get used to it. And, at the other end of the scale, we're getting fatter than ever. The Blood Pressure Association says that obesity has trebled among six- to 15-year-olds, from five per cent in 1990 to 16 per cent in 2001.
'Teens are very vulnerable to peer pressure because they're trying to fit in and find role models,' says Judy Price.
Orbach agrees: 'Eating problems are so rife in this age group that none of the girls feels comfortable with her body or what she's eating. It's starting earlier than puberty and gets accelerated about the age of 11.
'By the time they're 15 or 16 they have such chaotic eating habits they don't know when they're hungry, and they're only eating from external cues.'
Half of 12-year-old Nancy's friends are on a diet, and have been since they were nine. 'We go for pizza and often they won't eat it, or if they do they say, "I'll run it off tomorrow,"' she says.
Even when women adjust their diets for medical reasons, they can have an unnecessary influence on their peers. Ella is on a wheat-, dairy- and sugar-free diet to cure virulent candida.
'It's worked, and I've lost half a stone,' she says. 'Even though I didn't think I was fat, I look better in clothes and feel more confident.'
The diet hasn't gone unnoticed at her PR firm. For her birthday they skipped the usual chocolate cake and had a date and walnut cake. 'When she said she'd stopped eating wheat I thought it might be a good idea to try it, too - for general healthiness,' says her colleague Amanda, 26.
Amanda isn't the only one: across Britain women are cutting out wheat and dairy in the quest for a flat stomach.
'Some people look at their abdomen and tell me it's bloated when it looks pretty normal to me,' says Judy Price. 'Women are meant to have rounded abdomens.'
What's more, she's convinced that copycat dieting can be detrimental to your health. 'It's dangerous to cut out food groups without supervision,' she says. 'Wholewheat might be your main source of B complex and fibre, and dairy your only source of calcium.'
An obsession with eating pure food and preaching about it - dubbed 'orthorexia' by the Californian doctor Steven Bratman in 1997 - is on the increase.
Taken to an extreme this can easily flip into anorexia - a person can rule out so many things they end up eating nothing at all.
'Following crazy diets, detoxing, becoming a fruitarian - it's all worrying behaviour that suggests a lack of joy in food and eating,' says Judy Price.
'We're taking it all too seriously.'
One thing's for sure: if we continue to take our dietary cues from other women, rather than our own bodies, we're fighting a losing battle.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/fashion/2007/07/01/steat101.xml