Math is on the menu

Still enjoying a  little relatively quiet time before my fall work overload kicks into gear, I set the arbitrary goal of putting together a day's menu to follow the requirements set forth for female dieters in the Weight Watchers New Program Cookbook (Jean Nidetch, 1978). I had no idea it would be so complicated and the takeaway would be that '70s women had amazing math skills. The basic guidelines take up a page:

I initially found it interesting that there is just one set of guidelines with no recognition that women with varying heights, body types, goals, etc. might need different plans. Once I started looking around at recipes, I was glad for only one set! It's hard enough to fit a menu into this without having to add all kinds of other rules that this summary doesn't get into, but that I picked up as I paged through the book. (FWIW, the men's menu was almost the same. Men could have two extra servings of bread and fruit per day, plus a little extra protein at the evening meal.)

Since I'm still amused by the Prune-Filled Omelet recipe, I decided to start the day with that.

Now we've got our fruit and egg servings taken care of. Add a piece of toast (one slice, weighing about an ounce and with  no more than 75 calories) with a teaspoon of margarine (for a fat serving), and you're all set.

One thing that fascinated me about this book is that it seems convinced that baked goods should never start with flour. They should start with bread that is mashed up and repurposed into a different baked good than what it was originally. (I guess that's somehow supposed to make them lower carb, or maybe prevent the cook from being overly generous when measuring flour? Don't ask me about the logic.) The book often suggests sweet-ish things for lunch, perhaps to make up for the lack of desserts, so I decided to choose a blueberry muffin as a lunch dish.

I love that there's so much effort for a single muffin: turning a slice of bread into crumbs, separating an egg, whipping the white and then folding into the batter carefully, and then baking that single tiny serving. (Maybe the title is plural just to make it seem like the recipe has more of a payoff for all that effort.) With our second bread serving, that's it for the day. We've also got a second of our three fruits, an egg, and a serving of milk (from nonfat dry milk, that health food mainstay of the 1970s).

Lunch requires a little more protein and some vegetables, so I'll round this out with a very 1970s diet recommendation: a garden salad of non-starchy vegetables (say, iceberg lettuce, sad tomatoes, carrot curls, radish roses, and cucumber coins) with a third-of-a-cup plop of nonfat cottage cheese.

On to dinner! Let's be sophisticated and have something French.

Ah, yes. "Cassoulet" is apparently French for beanie-weenies. (Okay, fine. I know this isn't exactly beanie-weenies since it doesn't start with a can of baked beans and it has carrots, but you have to admit that it's closer to beanie-weenies than to cassoulet recipes calling for some type of confit, luxuriously seasoned beans, and fancier sausages.)

Now we need a salad to go with it and to meet our vegetable and fat goals.

Oh, crap! Three servings of fat! Now we're over the day's limit. You can either add just two teaspoons of oil instead of the full tablespoon to the salad to make up for the margarine at breakfast, or if you're planning ahead (as seems necessary unless you want to scramble at the end of the day to find recipes that have exactly what you need and/or cut random parts out of recipes/ eat random things to make up for shortcomings earlier in the day), you can just skip the margarine at breakfast. Add a half-cup of fruit and you're done for the...

 

Wait. I forgot the second serving of milk! Well, if you're planning ahead, you could have had a cup of skim milk with breakfast. Or if you waited, you can have a half-cup of plain yogurt over your half-cup of fruit for dessert with dinner.

I'm frankly feeling worn out after planning for just one day, and I haven't even thought about the minimum number of fish servings per week, or the maximum number of processed meat servings, or grappled with vegetables in the "limited" category, or considered the requirement to eat liver once a week, or figured out what "bonus" foods are and how they fit, or....

So, yeah. Whoever spent their days figuring out how to count half a serving of tomato sauce in the meal plan might have sharpened their math skills, but they probably didn't have much time to join consciousness-raising groups or fight for the ERA. Those who argue that diet culture is a great way to distract people from putting their energies into more important matters are probably on to something.