The Beginning of the End of Dieting

The voices that speak about healthy weight loss are hard to hear above the din and clamor of "instant weight loss" ads and marketing campaigns. Immediate results - in anything -are a magnet for us Americans, especially for women. If you (or someone you know) are overweight, have you stopped to think recently about how much time it takes to go from normal weight to overweight? Regardless of when weight increase starts - childhood, teen years, during or after pregnancy (applies to some expectant fathers, too!), middle age, after leaving the military - chances are it takes years to become overweight.

Now think about the feelings associated with overweight... guilt... embarrassment... poor self-esteem... anger... and so forth. Do you know people who have experienced discrimination because of their size? How do you feel about people who are significantly overweight? Do you ever consider them less competent or intelligent than thinner people? In your own thin days, do you remember having those thoughts about heavy people, and has your inner voice now turned those thoughts in your direction? So, how did all this negativity get started in the first place, and how can it be stopped?

In societies ancient and modern where hard physical labor is/was essential to survival (hunter-gatherer societies and "Third World" societies not affected by famine and conflict), overweight is not an issue. In many ancient cultures, the full figure (especially in women) represented fertility and was highly esteemed. Seventeenth and eighteenth century paintings from "western" societies, demonstrate that a moderate amount of weight gain during mid-adulthood was considered normal and attractive, as it represented the full flowering of the body. Then in the 19^th century, odd shapes came into vogue, especially for women, whose natural shapes were hidden and manipulated by huge skirts, bustles, collars, and corsets. As lifestyles became more active and clothing became less cumbersome in the 20^th century, more and more of the human body became exposed. Hollywood and the fashion industry began to promote thinness as attractiveness, and the natural beauty of the wide variety of real, age-appropriate body shapes was rendered unacceptable.

Enter the convenience food industry! In the '50s it was the original TV dinners, proportionately very high in fat and sodium compared to Mom's cooking. My brother and I received them as a special treat when our parents were going out for the evening. In the '60s the Baby Boomers learned to drive and date, and hamburger joints and pizza parlors multiplied accordingly. Also, fewer and fewer jobs required vigorous physical activity. The rest, as they say, is history: faster, fattier food that added pounds to first the boomers and then their children. Perversely, concern and obsession with getting back to that ideal, still actively promoted thinness also increased. But lifestyles included spending more and more hours in sedentary activities (TV and carpools and so much more). Two generations of convenience food-consuming, fast-paced people were primed and ready for the myth of instant, effortless weight loss. The stigma associated with even moderate increases in weight made the hope for easy slenderizing stronger and more desperate.

So, what's a body to do? Faced with a vast array of tempting, low food-value foods being heavily marketed and the constant societal pressure to be thin, people have become obsessed with food and dieting. According to Dr. Kelly Brownell of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, the mixed messages are way out of control: while three new McDonalds restaurants open every day, society continually pressures overweight people to lose weight quickly, a tactic which "will be counterproductive and make people even more obsessed with what they eat." (Source: Interview in the July/August 1998 Nutrition Action Health Letter).

Most dieting involves either the psychological impression or the actual fact of starvation. As recent studies have shown, starvation causes the body to slow metabolism and retain more calories. According to Robert Pool in Fat: Fighting the Obesity Epidemic (Oxford Press, 2001), "...the brain actively attempts to reestablish homeostasis by adjusting metabolism and hunger, driving an individual who has lost weight back to his or her prediet weight. Thus it explains why so few people who lose weight are able to keep it off over the long term." In his new book, Fat Land, Greg Crister points out that a "Regular" serving of McDonalds french fries contained 200 calories in the 1960s and in 2003 contains 610 calories! WOW!! The myth that humans will naturally arrive at a sensible level of intake has been exploded by studies showing that from age 5 on, humans consistently consume as much food as is offered.

A much more successful and seemingly simple concept is healthy weight loss and maintenance. "Seemingly" simple because, says Jeffery Sobal, a Cornell nutritional sociologist and co-editor of Interpreting Weight: The Social Management of Fatness and Thinness (Aldine de Gruyter, Hawthorne, N.Y.), "What you weigh is a simple fact. But what you do with that fact in developing your identity or resisting stigma and eating disorders in a society that highly values thinness and often discriminates against fat people is complex." Most people who are under age 50 have been steeped in the conflicting cultures of "thin is beautiful" and "fast food/crash diet" their entire lives. Both wreak havoc with most people's self-esteem because they are no-win propositions. In this cultural climate, research shows that individuals who are overweight at age 20 are much more likely to be obese at age 35 than their normal-weight peers.

So it's not so simple, but it is essential if we are to curb the growing obesity and obesity-related health problem epidemics such as, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and joint collapse. It seems that countless people will have to readjust their weight-loss goals and methods. Sensible weight loss involves establishing a program that allows two pounds of weight loss per week - no more! The overarching principle is "calories in/calories out:" more calories have to be expended through exercise than are consumed in food and drink.

For more information see:
AR 600-9, The Army Weight Control Program
Realistic Ideas and Information for Losing Weight and Keeping it Off