In the spring of 1960, I discovered I weighed more than my boyfriend. On a shopping trip to downtown Champaign around the same time, I learned I would need to go up a dress size, to a 15. So I did what any sensible college girl in love would do--I went on a diet.
Although dieting wasn’t as common then (I didn’t see any anorexics until about 1963), I had dabbled in dieting--usually giving up candy, donuts and desserts. This time I was serious. No second helpings (we ate family style in the dorm), no snacks, no desserts, no ice cream, no bread, no potatoes, no milk as a drink.
We had two sets of twins in the dorm--in both cases, one was heavier than the other by 10 pounds or so. I watched them. The heavier twin always ate faster and left the table early. So I slowed down my eating and played with my food like the thin twins. I don’t think I’d ever seen a calorie counter then, but I estimate now that I cut my daily calories by half.
How had I put on 25 pounds in three years when we didn’t have fast food companies to blame and I never watched TV advertising (the dorms didn‘t have a TV and neither did my parents)? Pizza was growing in popularity, but I‘d tried it once and didn‘t like it. I didn’t drink pop and had never had a beer, the drink of choice for most college kids. Although there were pop machines (bottles) in the dorms, there were no snack machines in the library, the dorm, or the classroom buildings to make eating on the run as convenient as today.
However, I drank milk like kids today drink pop. It is nutritious, but added to a full plate (or two), it added about 200 calories to each meal. Our dorm had a great cook--and seconds were always available. Because I had worked the lunch counter at two different drug stores, I was an avid consumer of ice cream. One sandwich usually wasn’t enough for a lunch. I would buy a candy bar--usually with nuts--each time I passed a drug store. Anyway, to make a fat story thin, by September 1960 I had lost 25 pounds using my plan and was back to a size 9.
Therefore, when I read about the money being made with low-carb or low-fat diets, I sometimes think I should have marketed my “no-no” diet--i.e., just say no to those foods, quantities and eating habits making you fat. For each person it is different, and in each stage of life it is different. I have no problem with ice cream or candy today, but will willingly fight you for the last cracker with cheddar cheese. So I was interested to read a recent evaluation of low-carb diets.
At a recent conference on obesity (February 2004), the session "Special Diets in Weight Management: Do They Work?" examined key concepts of the Atkins diet, South Beach diet, and Mediterranean diet. According to Lisa Sanders, MD, Yale University, an estimated 40 million Americans have tried a low-carbohydrate diet, and 10-20 million are currently on a low-carb diet. Medscape Public Health and Prevention, Vol. 2 (1), 2004.
“Rigorous, long-term studies of low-carb diets have been published only recently, noted Dr. Sanders. . . [She] summarized the findings with respect to claims of the Atkins diet. In the 6-month studies, the low-carb dieters lost more weight than the low-fat dieters; however, at 1 year, weight lost was the same because the low-carb dieters had regained the weight they lost in the early part of the diet. In the 6-month studies, the low-carb dieters were able to limit their caloric intake to the same level as those on a low-calorie diet. The dropout rates were the same for participants in the low-carb and low-fat diet groups.”
Another speaker at this conference said, “Obesity is the plight of a species that lives in a world for which it is poorly adapted, not the fault of the individual.” According to him, our bodies are pre-programmed to conserve fat in preparation for famine, but we live in a country that raises 3800 calories a day for every man, woman and child.
Don’t you hate to see Americans being set up to have the government take charge of our eating habits, either through regulating the restaurant industry or taxing our calories? But that‘s what I read in obesity warnings. I’m no smarter, strong-willed, or more clever than the next person, and unless a person has an endocrine system not working or an affliction that prevents exercising, there is no reason to be eating those 3800 calories just because someone is producing and selling them.
