ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 5, 1997 TAG: 9702050048
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BALTIMORE
SOURCE: LAURA LIPPMAN< THE BALTIMORE SUN
Nutritionist Debra Waterhouse knows exactly what she wants for dinner at Donna's, the ravioli on special. Her dining companion, however, is a little more conflicted, so Waterhouse coaches, using tried-and-true techniques from her books, seminars and one-on-one counseling sessions.
I think I want the brownie, her companion ventures nervously.
``Then have the brownie!'' Waterhouse says.
Have the brownie for dinner?
``If that's what you want, you can have the brownie for dinner.''
But they have good pizza here, too, her companion says, waffling.
``Take a minute,'' Waterhouse advises. ``Think about what you really want. Your first impulse is usually your best. How long have you been thinking about the brownie?''
Um, all the way over here in the car.
``Then go with the brownie,'' she suggests.
A la mode?
``A la mode.''
What do you expect from a registered dietitian who admits - brags, really - that her favorite foods are potato chips, pizza and chocolate? Yet Waterhouse, who is promoting her latest book, ``Like Mother, Like Daughter'' (Hyperion, $22), is slender and svelte in a black pantsuit. No weight gain over the holidays for this 37-year-old, who flirted with anorexia and compulsive overeating before finding her body's comfortable weight by swearing off diets.
First, the good news: Waterhouse wants you to stop dieting. Stop denying yourself food, stop eating carrots when what you really want is carrot cake. Stop getting on the scale at the doctor's office. Listen to your body, and your body will tell you what it truly desires. Do I dare to eat a peach? Do I dare to eat peach melba? Your body knows what it wants.
The bad news is that your body probably does not want to take on the proportions of Demi Moore or Teri Hatcher, or even Waterhouse. (It is possible that Demi Moore's body does not wish to be Demi Moore's body, that it is screaming for mocha gelato and she is feeding it mashed gluten, but that is her problem.)
But isn't it awfully easy to preach this let-your-body-be-your-guide approach when one is as slim as Waterhouse?
``These are my genes,'' she says of her taller-than-average, thinner-than-average frame. ``I know this is the way nature intended me to be because my mother is built exactly the same way. We can wear each other's clothes.''
Waterhouse's ideas are not strikingly new. More than 20 years ago, Susie Orbach - a London-based therapist rumored to have been consulted by the former Princess Diana - wrote ``Fat is a Feminist Issue.'' That book also detailed women's obsession with food and advocated they learn to recognize - and respect - the physical sensation of hunger. Given a chance, your body will choose a variety of foods.
But Waterhouse, through three books published by Hyperion over the last four years, has designed a behavioral model for following this deceptively simple advice. In her first book, ``Outsmarting the Female Fat Cell,'' she gave women a week-by-week guideline to changing their eating habits.
She also designed a 3-to-1 low-fat eating program. Have a high-fat meal? Make sure your next three are low-fat, and things should balance out. Have a high-fat day? Then try to eat low-fat the next three.
Her next book, ``Why Women Need Chocolate'' was about, well, why women need chocolate - albeit not in unlimited amounts. (One key element in Waterhouse's advice: Women not only have to learn to identify hunger, they also have to recognize the sensation of being over-full.)
In ``Like Mother, Like Daughter,'' Waterhouse examines intergenerational food obsessions. In her family, for example, her mother encouraged her daughters to eat because she had been deprived of food as a girl in Poland during World War II. But the teen-age Waterhouse, a perfectionist, decided she should weigh 10 pounds less.
``I remember the day I reached that weight. I thought, OK, now I'm going to go to school and someone's going to ask me out, and everything will be perfect,'' she says. When that didn't happen, she lost five more pounds, and five more, until she was 98 pounds - dangerously thin for someone who was 5-foot-6.
Then, as a graduate student in nutrition at the University of California, Berkeley, she began eating her favorite, ``forbidden'' foods in private. Her weight ballooned to 150.
Finally, she gave up diets entirely. It took three years for her body to reclaim its ``normal'' weight - a weight where she has remained for 10 years. (Waterhouse, who counsels her clients to stop weighing themselves, stepped on the scales again recently for the first time in years. She shares the number with a reporter, but asks it not be printed because she doesn't want other women to fixate on her weight.)
Dinner is drawing to a close. Waterhouse leaves a few raviolis on her plate. At least half the brownie remains in the bowl of her companion. It was a pretty big brownie. Besides, not cleaning your plate is OK on the Waterhouse plan. ``Would you rather it go to waste, or to your waist?'' she asks.
Waterhouse is given to such puns. In ``Like Mother, Like Daughter,'' she offers ``The Bill of Female Food Rights.'' Those interested in constitutional law will note that her fourth amendment guarantees the right to bear hips and thighs. Quick, someone tell Kate Moss.
THE DEBRA WATERHOUSE
BILL OF FEMALE
FOOD RIGHTS
1. Freedom of food preferences: Acknowledge the foods that you like and that are important to you and eat them regularly.
2. Freedom of food choices: All food choices are good choices. Listen to your body and choose the food it wants.
3. Freedom of meal times: Give yourself permission to eat when your body tells you it's time to eat, not society or the clock.
4. The right to bear hips and thighs: Women have the biological right to be pear-shaped and wear a larger pant or skirt size than top.
5. The right to assemble peacefully for a meal: Make your meals free of anxiety, pressure and control by putting the fun back into food and the enjoyment back into eating.
6. The right to be free from unreasonable scrutiny and suffering with food: Don't judge anyone else's eating habits and don't let anyone else's negative comments affect you.
7. The right to eat what we want in public: When you eat exactly what you want in public, you'll eat less in private.
8. The right to eat ice cream for dinner: Or anything else if that's what you really want.
9. The right to dislike broccoli: Despite nutritional quality, don't force yourself to eat food you don't like, you'll only end up searching for satisfaction elsewhere.
10. The right to not have a perfect body or perfect eating habits: A variety of body shapes are healthy and a range of eating habits are acceptable as long as you are listening to your body's food messages and feeding and respecting the body you were born with.
LENGTH: Long : 127 linesby CNB