The holidays are over and you’ve put on a few pounds, haven’t you? You’re feeling a little, shall we say, bloated? No problem. You’ll get that weight off in no time. You’ve done it a million times. When it comes to dieting you could write a book. But there still may be a thing or two you don’t know.
Test your diet IQ
1. Which has fewer calories?
A. A medium-size apple.
B. A small baked potato with a pat of butter.
C. Half a brownie, eaten in a dark kitchen, while standing.
Answer: C. Although, the brownie technically has more calories than the apple or the potato, the combined effect of gravity (you’re standing) and photosynthesis (from the light of the refrigerator) actually gives the brownie a negative 459 calories, so, enjoy!
2. The best time to start an exercise regime is:
A. Just before the holidays.
B. Just after the holidays.
C. On the way home from a Sharon Stone movie.
Answer: C. If you’re over 40, see your doctor before renting “Sliver.”
3. Three glasses of water half an hour before meals, taken as an appetite-suppressant:
A. Do nothing.
B. Really work.
C. Make you an expert on the location of the washroom in every restaurant in the city.
Answer: C. Try it.
4. Once you have built up fat cells, you can never:
A. Shrink them.
B. Lose them.
C. Run for president.
Answer: Obviously not C.
5. Yo-yo dieting is:
A. Unhealthy.
B. Downright dangerous.
C. The latest West Coast craze: You eat a yo-yo for breakfast, a yo-yo for lunch, and a sensible dinner.
Answer: You’re laughing, but the answer is C. Wood is an excellent and often overlooked source of fiber.
There are things that I’ll do to be thin
And things I won’t do.
One of them is eat tofu.
Give us a week, we’ll take off the weight/Give it two years, you’ll put it back on
In a June 1993 cover story on “Diets: What Works, What Doesn’t,” Consumer Reports, which surveyed 95,000 dieters, concluded that none of the diets the magazine examined work-at least not for people who want to lose weight and keep it off.
“The great majority gain back most of that weight within two years,” the survey concluded. Why? Because the body has a “remarkable resistance to major weight change.” It is “genetically coded as surely as the shape of a nose.”
While Consumer Reports found Weight Watchers no more effective than the other diet programs, it did give it credit for encouraging slower, healthier weight loss-no more than 2 pounds a week-and not pushing its own line of food.
But now to promote the new Weight Watchers Superstart program, former anchorwoman Kathleen Sullivan has been all over the tube bragging that she has lost more than 8 pounds in two weeks while eating “all this great food.”
On an airplane
It wouldn’t be dandy
To be sandwiched between
George Wendt and John Candy.
Profile of diet-crazed person
– Browses in bakeries.
– Celebrates when Field’s announces a new flavor Frango mint.
– Restricts self to one Tic-Tac at a time.
– Discusses salary and sex life but refuses to reveal actual weight.
– Has heard people say, “I was so busy, I forgot to eat,” but doesn’t believe it.
– Calculates how much weight can be lost as soon as an invitation to a party is received.
– Has been dieting straight through, from Metracal to Optifast.
– Never buys anything at the grocery store without checking the calories and fat grams.
– Has never ordered a meal without asking for at least one item “on the side.”
– Orders a Big Mac, large fries, hot apple pie and a Diet Coke.
Diet dollars
“Dieting doesn’t work. Dieting may make overweight worse, not better. Dieting may be bad for health. Dieting may cause eating disorders-bulimia and anorexia.” (From “What You Can Change & What You Can’t” by therapist Martin E.P. Seligman, a veteran dieter who is 25 pounds overweight.)
Tribune-If dieting doesn’t work, why do so many people do it?
Seligman-The weight-loss industry is a big business with a lot of clout. It has on its payrolls prominent scientists who publish articles touting new, improved diets and exaggerating the health risks of being overweight.
Tribune-How big a big business is it?
Seligman-In 1993, it was a $40 billion industry. That’s the gross national product of a small country. Ten billion dollars goes to diet soft drinks alone.
Tribune-What part does popular culture play in the diet business?
Seligman-There’s a 20-pound discrepancy between the natural weight of the average American woman and the ideal weight of anchorwomen, actresses and models, and they’re growing farther apart. Over the past 20 years, the average woman has gained about a third of a pound a year while Miss America contestants have gotten a third of a pound thinner each year. The ideal is physiologically impossible for most women to attain.
Tribune-What is the relationship between dieting, eating disorders and depression?
Seligman-Cultures that have a thin ideal, such as ours, have twice as many depressed women as men and epidemics of bulimia and anorexia. Cultures that don’t have a thin ideal have the same number of depressed men and women and no eating disorders.
Tribune-Would you still like to lose those 25 pounds?
Seligman-Oh, yes, every time I look in the mirror and see that roll. I’m as much a victim of the popular culture as everyone else.
If he yelled “Stella!” now
She’d hide behind a drape
Because if Brando tried to squeeze her
She’d be crushed like a grape.
What do these people have in common?
Brooke Shields, Kathie Lee Gifford, Frank Gifford, Tommy Lasorda, Elizabeth Ashley, Elliott Gould, Ann Jillian.
Answer: They’ve all promoted diet products.
Dieing to lose weight
In her novel “Life-Size” (Avon Books), Jennifer Shute writes about a woman with anorexia who diets down to 67 pounds. In an interview, Shute says she wrote the book because she herself had a “near anorexic episode” in her late teens and “the older I got, the more I realized that food and body image are issues for every woman in this culture.”
Shute says when the book came out, in 1992, there were 8 million people in the country with serious eating disorders and 7 million of them were women. “Studies have shown that 1 in every 5 college-age woman suffers from an eating disorder,” she says. “Clinicians are seeing it as young as 9.”
Shute is pessimistic about women making peace with their bodies. “A couple of years ago, I thought women might confront the issue as a form of oppression and would try to liberate themselves. But then the waif look reared its ugly head and we’re right back in the ’60s. It’s not that the waif look causes eating disorders, but it is a way of subtly telling women they shouldn’t take up too much space in the world.”
Good point!
SHE: “I like food better than sex.”
HE: “It depends on whom you’re having sex with.”
SHE: “No, it depends on what you’re eating.”
(from the TV movie “Jane’s House.”)
In “All in the Family”
He was lanky, she petite.
But since the show was canceled,
All Reiner and Struthers
Have done is eat-eat-eat-eat.
Hold the guacamole, please
“Diets don’t work,” says fitness guru Richard Simmons in a phone interview. “Look at the definition of diet-a temporary weight loss. That’s how they’ve been conceived and sold to the public. Of all the people who made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight, 60 percent of them are off their program. These are people who stood naked in front of the mirror, made an announcement to their family and friends, joined a gym, bought so much diet food when they open the freezer it falls out, and now, a couple of weeks later, they’re in line for a beef-and-bean burrito. It’s because they didn’t make the commitment in their heart. They’re just looking for a magic cure.”
Speaking of magic. . .
It may be here, in the form of a cream. In October, a study conducted at Harbor UCLA Medical Center was released that showed that 12 women who rubbed their thighs with cream containing aminophylline five days a week for six weeks lost an average of half an inch per thigh.
Now, similar creams are available to the public under various brand names. One is Skinny Dip, made by Neways based in Salem, Utah.
Since the test results were announced in October, sales of Skinny Dip have “skyrocketed, more than quadrupled,” says company spokesman Ron Williams. “We’ve sold tens of thousands of bottles in the last few months.” (The cost is $23.95 for a 4-ounce bottle, enough for three to five weeks, depending on the size of the thighs.)
“There’s been an incredible response, both from males and females. We get 30 to 40 success stories telephoned or faxed to us a day.”
The cream, available only through distributors, is also useful, says Williams, on “the backs of arms, double chins, and love handles.”
The match game
Can you match the diets with the foods they’re associated with?
A. The Stillman Diet
B. The Pritikin Diet
C. The Beverly Hills Diet
D. The Scarsdale Diet
E. The Fit for Life Diet
1. Pineapple.
2. Grain.
3. Water.
4. Only fruit before noon.
5. Steak every Saturday.
Answers: A-3, B-2, C-1, D-5, E-4.
If you missed them all, congratulations. You probably eat what you want and are content with your weight. If you got two or three right, you’re probably a part-time dieter. If you got four or five right, admit it, you’re out of control.
Pumping iron, for a while
The East Bank Club is jumping, according to director Betty Sacks. There are more people in the aerobics classes, more people in the pool, more people cross-training and signing up for personal trainers.
“There’s a surge right after the first of the year, every year,” says Sacks.
How long does it last?
“Usually through January and sometimes February.”
Some of the used fitness equipment that Mark Oriatti bought to stock his new Lake Zurich store, Play It Again Sports, some of the weight benches, stair-steppers, Soloflex gyms, treadmills and exercycles were “just like new. Some of it was hardly used. The owners seem to have lost interest.”
The diet-crazed person in the kitchen
– Measures their cereal.
– Has used a ruler to see what a 2 1/4-inch apple looks like.
– Has finished an entire Entenmann’s no-fat marble pound cake, hidden the box under the garbage and said “What cake?” when questioned.
