By OLIVIA TICE
It’s a Wednesday afternoon and I’m sitting in the back of Nutrition lecture, recently caffeinated and listening intently to Professor Levitsky orate about weight loss, weight control and energy expenditure. Okay, no one cares about my class schedule and all of this would be just as dull as the hump day grind, EXCEPT, then the slideshow changed and up on the screen appeared a CNN article titled “Twinkie Diet Helps Nutrition Professor Lose 27 Pounds.”
Basically, this guy ate nothing but convenience store snacks for 10 weeks, but because his caloric intake decreased on this diet, it didn’t matter that he was carbo-loading 24/7. What mattered was that he was only eating 1800 calories a day. That’s about 13 twinkies. Yes, I thought it would be more too. The point is, (or is supposed to be) that weight loss and management are primarily based upon controlling intake, i.e. the calories count and the organic/vegan/whole grain obsession falls to the wayside.
Rewind 12 hours. I’m on the couch, a few episodes deep into season six of Gilmore Girls. Long story short, just in case you haven’t looked at Buzzfeed, Facebook, Twitter or the Internet at all in the past couple of months, it’s a mother-daughter coming of age drama centered around Lorelai Gilmore and her teenage daughter Rory. The duo is coffee, pop culture and most importantly snack-obsessed. The show constantly references their eating habits, mostly junk food and diner food, to a point where it becomes almost impossible to be fully convinced (as a viewer) that these two attractive, slender actresses are playing characters who eat like truck drivers.
Fast forward to lecture. Staring at the hostess snack-filled screen, I had “what alcoholics refer to as ‘A moment of clarity’” when I realized my long-time theory that: A. Rory and Lorelai Gilmore are not human or B. Hollywood is doing what it always does in showing unrealistic outcomes of character habits was just proven wrong, in a Cornell lecture hall nonetheless. My brain did one of those life-flashes-before-your-eyes things, except that it wasn’t my life, and it was every season of Gilmore Girls with every scene involving food. The food is always on screen, but we rarely ever see the Gilmore Girls eat it; much less eat all of it (Calorie control people!). There you have it, today I learned that The Gilmore Diet is in fact a feasible lifestyle.
Olivia Tice is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. She may be reached at [email protected].