Saying that we're making a change for reasons of "weight" (short for weight management) is new for us in the issue of the 16th of April 2008. Before then, when we made such changes we subsumed them under the heading of making a recipe "healthier," but as Margaret has been telling me for months, that's not correct. Adding more vegetables to a recipe makes it healthier for anybody. Using olive oil instead of butter in a recipe makes it healthier for anybody. But reducing the amount of olive oil from two Tablespoons to one makes it healthier only in the context of weight management.

I've resisted using that label because I'm in no position to help anybody else manage their weight. The last 25 years have been an unending struggle against gaining more and then again more, to the point where I'm now quite fat. I'm a continuous-binge eater, not the kind who has a concentrated spell of devouring vast quantities of food in an hour or a few hours. My kind of binge is less visible as a behavior (although the results are certainly visible on my body). I want to finish every meal stuffed and then to eat again as soon as I can fit more in.

So that's been one reason to keep my mouth shut about changing a recipe to help with weight management -- I should keep my talking mouth shut because my eating mouth is all too wide open.

The other reason is that I'm not at all sure such minor adjustments to individual recipes actually help with weight management. They could even be counter-productive. I feel so righteous for ratcheting down the oil that I eat twice as much. Or the dish tastes so pallid with half the oil that I eat twice as much trying to satisfy my desire for good food. (I've noticed, as have many others, that bad food weirdly makes us want to eat more, rather than less. The old joke about the restaurant food was terrible and the portions were so small, only in real life, not in a joke.)

This website is not a diet website or a weight-management website and I have only negative expertise about weight management. I can tell you a lot of stuff that hasn't worked for me, but who knows, it might work for you. So when you see "weight" as the reason listed for a change in one of our recipes, I advise you to take it with a grain of salt. Wish me well; I wish you well. -- m-c