In which "healthy eating" articles are like baby books. In a bad way.

[marnanightingale]

It is not actually the sole and only goal of parenting to get your child to go to sleep. I admit, it can feel like it when they're very small [1], but there is actually a whole lot of stuff you can and want to do with babies: feed them! Wash them! Play with them! Dress them in cute outfits and take them places! Teach them to walk, talk, and play the accordion!

You could, however, be forgiven for getting confused about this if you just scanned the titles at the bookstore.

Similarly:

Ok, look: first of all prescriptivist language about food is mostly[2] total bullshit.

But even were I prepared to stipulate the contrary: if your headline is "X food: not The Healthy Choice After All", is it too much to expect your thesis to be more like: "the iron in dark green leaf vegetables isn't very bioavailable, don't try to use spinach as a main source", not just "omg, X actually has A LOT OF CALORIES!!!"

Because, you know what?

Food is supposed to contain food. It's like we're supposed to believe that our single overriding goal when we buy food is the maximum number of chews with the minimum actual results.

And, um, no. Food is supposed to be made of food. Take your zero-fat fake-sugar flavoured gelatin mislabelled as yoghurt and stuff it up your jumper and give me some gods-damned breakfast.

I have shit to DO today.

ETA: I can tell the outside temp has gone up; the X-ray TV tonight at the nurses' station is all lungs and skulls instead of hips and arms and ankles



[1] it's not that all these tricks for getting kids to sleep don't work; trust me, by the time your kid is, say, 15, they'll sleep right through, no problem, and often well into the next day as well.

[2] And when I say "mostly" instead of "completely" it's to allow exceptions like "don't leave raw poultry at room temp, especially if it's stuffed, ok?"

This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth. where there are comments. Comment here or there as you prefer.

Comments

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

Well put! I like your brain.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Yes, but if I don't get them to sleep sometime soon none of us are going to survive to 15...

(n.b. not actually a problem in my household at the moment; the twins are actually pretty good sleepers overall. Just don't talk to me at naptime.)

[rottenfruit.livejournal.com]

I have Opinions on both these topics, which are pretty much in line with yours. I recently wrote about how people talking about cry-it-out sleep training bother me in the same way as fad diet zealots.

So anyway. While my little one can start sleeping through the night ANY TIME NOW, I'm tired of feeling like a failure as a mother for not achieving this. I don't think my son is a failure either. He's tiring, but he's pretty darn cool.

And don't get me started on that "yoghurt" crap!

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Well said.

When we were new parents, lo, these many years ago, we read a bit of a couple of books and then gave that up. (Though I do wish that Go the F**k to Sleep had been written back then.) The advice we ignored the hardest was about toilet training, and you know what? Not one of our kids wore a diaper to kindergarten.

[amberfox.livejournal.com]

I have this whole rant on Diet Everything and how food is supposed to contain some kind of nutritional value, of which calories is a traditional ingredient. Seriously people, eat or don't eat, but don't fill yourselves with chemicals and call it healthy.