Cultural Influences on Eating
iets can be found everywhere: on television, in magazines, doctors’ offices,
and bestselling books.  You can stand in line at the movies, sporting events,
or in the mall and overhear people’s personal experiences regarding weight
loss or gain.  Your best friend probably has ten new diets she can let you borrow this
week.  Chances are there are at least thirty plans you have personally tried. Some even
worked – for a while. With all this free information floating about, more people than
ever are trying to lose weight.  
Obviously, dieting is not the answer.  Dieting is merely a temporary solution to a
permanent problem.  It is placing a Band-Aid on an injury that needs intensive care.
It’s vital to understand that losing weight is complex.  It is not merely a physical
problem. Even though it manifests itself in an apparent way in the physical body, it has
direct effect on the emotional and spiritual side.  Even in determining its root cause,
emotional, mental, spiritual and sociological disruptions must be factored in. In order to
remove excess weight permanently, we must go to the original cause.
For example, could your weight, or any part of it, be inherited? The answer is
found by simply looking at your relatives: are they obese? In my family, one side is
morbidly obese. Most are as round as they are tall. The other side is tall and thin.
Where does this place me? I’m only 5’3”, so tall and thin is out.
We can’t choose our family and our genetic pool. Being overweight carries a
social stigma, and it’s not a good one. Others automatically assume that overweight
people are lazy and don’t care about themselves. They envision a person who sits
around and eats constantly. Nothing could be further from the truth! Every client I had
that weighed in excess of four hundred pounds did not eat the quantities most believed
they did. When I would tell them I knew they didn’t eat as much as people thought, they
would begin crying – tears of relief that finally someone understood.
Culture also plays a tremendous role in weight gain.  Were you raised eating
fattening, unhealthy foods?  So many of us that complain about the foods on our socalled
“diets” will sit down happily to a grease-laden meal, thinking it’s “good food”
because Grandma cooked it.  Being from Tennessee, I was taught to eat things such as
fried potatoes, fried squash, fried pork chops, fried eggs…. pretty much fried
everything.  Cornbread, biscuits, pinto beans in fatback, and turnip greens with hog jowl
were a common mainstay of our daily diet. This, of course, was washed down by
gallons of very sweet tea.
The first time I ate squash that was steamed, I honestly didn’t know what it was.
I begged the cook to tell me, because I’d never tasted anything quite like it. I had no
idea you could cook vegetables any way other than battered and fried. This is a true
story! I was taught that each meal needed these things to be healthy: meat, two
vegetables (of different colors), and bread. This was not a wrong concept.  The only
thing it left out was teaching to cook without frying! Most societies have various subcultures
that pride themselves on many recipes indigenous to their area. We all know
what foods these are, because we are told to be sure and eat such specialties while we’re
there!