“Cookies.” Marissa realized she sounded like she was praying. “I love cookies.”

“Then get some of the individually-wrapped snack packs of your favorites. Portion controlled that way, but still a reward. As for the protein, you can add powder to nonfat milk for a shake or increase the portion size of the fish and lean chicken. You need about ten grams more a day, preferably without a lot of fat. Without enough protein, your body will cannibalize your muscles to allow you to exercise.”

“And that’s completely self-defeating.”

“Right. The more muscle you have the more calories your body will need to keep going—the more you can eat. At some point the amount of lean body mass to fat will hit equilibrium and that’s where you’ll be for the rest of your life if you continue the exercise. Does that make sense?”

“Sure.” Marissa could easily picture the intersection of weight and lean body mass on a chart. Getting to that point was what she wanted. “I can follow that. I was reading about how a lot of information about body mass index and body fat percentage is too simplified. You can have a body fat of twenty percent and still be unhealthy.”

“That’s my goal—I want you to find the healthy spot for you. That could be twenty-five percent body fat. Technically, that’s overweight. But if you are carrying solid lean body mass and able to do all the activities you want and eating a nutritious diet, then what’s the percentage matter? And it’s depressing but true, it’s easier to get from thirty-five to thirty percent body fat than it is to get from twenty-five to twenty-four. Your body is smart. It has perfected a lifetime of saving fat in case you need it.”

“I’ve never thought about food that way. That eating badly and sitting on my hinder was a kind of training. Anti-training, even.”

They chatted for a few minutes about gaps in public education and resource materials with scientifically-grounded information.

“It is frustrating,” Helena acknowledged. “If I really want to depress myself I go web surfing for diet advice. There is downright dangerous stuff out there that somehow sounds reasonable on the surface. Urban myths, especially, with ridiculous celebrity diets.”

Thinking of Heather, Marissa said, “I have a friend who’s really frustrated and she wants to try one of those five-day shock loss low-calorie diets. She says she wants to ‘jump start’ her system.”

“Talk her out of it,” Helena said immediately. “Let’s say she eats two thousand calories a day. Not unreasonable but for her, it’s too much. So one day she eats five hundred. The hormone leptin stops producing—it’s the hormone that tells you to stop eating and it also tells your body it’s okay to burn energy. She spends the night too tired to move and feeling quite hungry.”

“In college there was this so-called Dolly Parton diet and I didn’t make it two days.” She could still recall the smell of onion and cabbage soup.