Omnivore's Solution

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You spend a month in residence in Italy, writing several hours a day, and eating the other hours. Pasta at lunch. Pasta at dinner. Breadsticks. Olive oil. Even (horrors!) fried food on occasion. Wine with each meal. Dessert. Carbs, carbs, carbs . . . You even go on a food blow-out in Parma (cheese, prosciutto, all that). And, guess what, you can still fit in the skinny jeans when you come home. You haven't lost weight, but you haven't gained any either---and you are eating three full meals a day and you haven't been near a gym. (There's one in town but you need a doctor's note to use it and, peering through the window, it is not clear if anyone ever has.). How can this be? How is this possible?

O, Michael Pollan! O, omnivore's dilemma! Can he really be right? That this ridiculous fad dieting American's subject themselves to perennially really doesn't do any good at all? One year there's a new anti-carb diet study and then every American stops eating pasta, another year it's meat that's the culprit, another year dairy, another year rice. Gym memberships soar. Bogus exercise machines that promise weight loss without effort sell like hotcakes (that, of course, we're not allowed to eat) on Infomercials endorsed by aging, surgically-enhanced former minor stars. And we get fatter and fatter and fatter as a nation. How can we work so hard at losing weight and gain so much?

Parma, by the way, pays its citizens 100 Euros per bicycle, and everyone is peddling away, in high heels or business suits, on old-fashioned "girls'" bikes, with a big basket and a bell, to and from work and sociallizing. Young kids and oldsters, peddling away, looking hip or dapper. The citizens we talked to seemed to think it was a great investment of tax dollars since it means everyone stays trim, healthy, and happy too. Lowers stress, cholesterol, and waistlines.

Instead of spending this amazing month writing on everyday neuroscience, on how we have the power to learn and unlearn and learn anew from infancy to rejuvenation, if I'd had any sense at all I should have been writing a diet book. Eat pasta twice a day! Drink wine! Visit Parma and pig out on all the goodies in the Slow Food gourmet capital of the world! I know it seems un-American to believe you can incorporate exercise into your daily routine (walking, riding bikes) and then simply eat sensibly, without giving up a single thing, and not suffer, not be punished. (Punishment, of course, is depressing so in the U.S. you have to console yourself for all that starvation dieting with a bag of chips.) It's counterintuitive, but the best solution to the omnivore's dilemma seems to be: Move to Italy!