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better, to please a mate or boyfriend, or
to compete in sports or in a job.
Everyone wants the freedom to run,
walk, swim, climb stairs, lift, puH, or
even
stand
for long periods of time
without fear of physical collapse -
freedom to enjoy life to its fullest.
To escape the mental crutch of wrong
eating habits is to know
freedom,
lib–
erty, a renewed conódence. No more
cruel jokes, no more heart flutter at the
end of a flíght of stairs, no more social
rebuffs, followed by eating or crying
jags. This freedom should be your
strong secondary motivation - second
to
life.
Life and liberty free you to pursue
right happiness. Your family, your hob·
bies, your work, and your friends be–
come your whole life - instead of your
food and your body being the center of
the universe. Thousands of success sto–
ríes have demonstrated that a new suc–
cessful life opens up when you "kick
the habit."
While kickíng the habit, you don't
have the advantage of going "cold tur–
key" like an alcoholic or drug addict.
You've got to eat to live.
T he key to
weight loss is what yo11 eat, and what
yo11 b11rn up.
The Multiple Causes of
Overweight
But complicating a person's efforts to
lose weight are sucb varíed factors as
bis background, bis job, hís eating
habits (both past and present), bis
borne environment, his heredity, and
his society.
Most overweigbt people have two
strikes against them, environmental and
hereditary. When
both
parents are over–
weight, the child's chances are 80% of
becoming overweight; if one parent is
obese, the child's chances are 40%.
If
both parents are normal, the chances of
a child being obese shrink to 10%. Most
of this inheritance is not through the
scapegoats of "heavy bones" or
"glands" or "water retention," but sim·
ply through the parents setting a wrong
example!
The "third stríke" is delivered by our
society.
We live in a sedentary world:
sitting in school as children; sitting on
jobs as parents; sitting in cars; sítting in
front of TV's and motion píctures; and
The
PLAIN TRU1H
stttmg at leisure. Even military cadets
and coal miners recline, sit, and stand
over
18
hours out of each
24.
Society also provides us with
''convenience foods" which multiply
calories, but don't
11011rish.
You've
probably never been "filled up" by a
TV dinner, but it adds hundreds of
"empty" excess calories. Our grand–
parents, living on relatively low-calorie
natural foods, and exercising as a way
of life, were able to combat both
of these "calorie conspiracies" which
affiict today's sedentary society.
If
you are overweight, resist the
temptation to
b/ame
your beredity, envi–
ronment, society, parents, grocer, or any
other quick scapegoat. It is ultimately
YOUR
fault. Nobody force-fed you.
How NOT to Lose Weight
When you know the one and only
principie for losing weight - eating
fewer calories than you consume - it is
fairly obvious why most diets and re–
ducing plans do not work.
Because of glowing reports of un–
believable losses, millions of overweight
people turn to the myriad diet "fads."
Depending on your particular weakness,
you can choose a drinking man's diet, a
high-protein diet, a high-fat diet, a high
carbohydrate diet, or even a Zen
Buddbist "spiritual diet." There is the
"Air Force diet," which the Air Force
vehemently disowns, or the "Mayo
clinic diet" which the Mayo Clinic dis–
owns. There's a diet of grapes, a diet of
grapefruits, a díet of greens, and just
about any one-food regimen short of
Luther's Diet of Worms.
Fad diets, however, don't work - in
the long run - and they can be very
dangerous to health, especially over
extended periods of time. Dr. Morton
Chenn, Chief of the Nutrition Clinic of
New York City's Health Department,
has called them a "major health
polltttant."
Unfortunately, fad diets are essen–
tially symptomatic of the problem
whicb brought the person to his present
obesity. That is, many dieters
have
never learned to eat correctly.
Fad diets
promíse a way to continue wrong eating
patterns - with supposedly different
results! Such is not the case.
Advocates of fad diets usually
do lose
November 1971
15 to 30 pounds in a matter of a month
or so. This weight loss could be main–
tained
if
the person continued to give
up the forbidden foods for the rest of
his life. But on most fad diets, those
"forbidden foods" contain necessary
nutrients he has temporarily missed -
the protein in meat, eggs, milk, and
cheese; or the carbohydrates in fruit,
bread, or milk; or the vitamins and
minerals in liver, green vegetables, or
milk.
Here is the fad dieter's dilemma -
1)
either quick weight
gain
if he goes
back to those foods, or
2)
detrimental
side effects if he doesn't. There is no way
to win. He hasn't permanently lost those
20 pounds or so. According to Dr. Jules
Hirsch, professor and senior physician
at Rockefeller University, the fat cells
which shrunk in size are
still
alive and
functioning - "sending out metabolic
signals'' to
"ó.ll
up" with the forbidden
famíly of foods, which most people do
(much of the dramatic weight loss was
just water, anyway).
The greatest crime of fad diets is that
the dieter didn't
learn
anything. He has
not learned discipline, and chances are
he will gorge bis way back to obesity
faster than ever. As a result, the "fad"
dieter is usually worse off than when he
started. His hopes are frustrated. He
begins "diet hopping" from one plan to
another. A defeatist syndrome ensues.
The ONLY Way to Lose
Weight
The only way to lose weight perma–
nently is to take in fewer calories than
yott b11rn 11p in activities.
Eacb pound
loss will require a 3500 calorie "defi.cit."
If
you are 30 pounds overweight, for
instance, you will have to manage a
100,000 calorie "defi.cit" over the next
few months.
lt's easier than you may think! In
fact,
enjoyable.
A paragraph from a well-known
nutrition textbook sums up the best
principies for doing this. "For the or–
dinary overweight individual (this is
you,
if
you are among the 99 out of 100
without a medica! problem), by far the
most
satisfactory
way to effect weight
reduction is simply to cut clown sharply
on the concentrated energy foods
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30)