Forbidden Foods Dietitian Makes A Case For Indulging In Foods You Really Want To Eat

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 over-eating 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. 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 days.

Her next book, “Why Women Need Chocolate,” will be 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 teenage 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 5-feet 6-inches.

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 asked 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 her companion’s bowl. 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.