COOKIE PIECES HAVE NO CALORIES

Do broken cookies contain calories? Can we have our
cake and joke about it? This study focuses on
women's humor about dieting in a culture where women
are expected to diet. Participant observation in an
Israeli Weight Watchers group, interviews with
female dieters and qualitative text analysis on a
wide variety of humorous texts about dieting were
used to generate themes relating to the variety of
ways in which diet culture affects women's lives.
The appearance of diet humor is viewed as resistance
to the power diet culture tries to exert over women.
Findings show that resistance is weakest in regard
to the basic ideological concepts of diet culture
and its expression through consumer culture.
Resistance is more evident when diet culture causes
conflicts with the dieter s social network and
attempts to change eating habits and exercise
patterns.
Since they can t have it both ways, diet humor
enables women to eat the cake and joke about it.