You may as well know: I’m the kind of person who sees the logic in washing down a hot fudge sundae with a diet cola. As I reason it, that’s indulging but not overdoing. I start with this because this is where I’ve ended up after a lifetime of “dieting.”
Every red-blooded American woman knows the drill. Dieting is part of our normal life cycles.
As teenagers we were inspired by images in slick magazines of slender, gorgeous models with 2 percent body fat. Lettuce became a basic food group.
As young mothers, fighting the leftovers of pregnancies, we were always struggling to get “back into shape.”
You’d think, if life were fair, that chasing after kids and taking care of a house and job would do it. But it doesn’t work that way.
As midlifers, we try to stay a size behind the middle-age spread. We fight the battle of the bulges like the seasoned warriors we are.
Gradually, we slip into a more mature mode that will last the rest of our lifetimes-with an emphasis on health.
Along the way, we learned a basic disgust with two types of people: Those with great metabolisms and those with great willpower. We learned, too, about the worst kind of gender discrimination: Men can lose weight faster and easier.
Throughout our life stages, however, we tried it all. Fad diets. Programmed diets. From grapefruit to starvation. From Pritikin to Scarsdale. From rabbit food to liquid.
From groups to hypnotism. We went with the flow. Sweatin’ to the Oldies. Aerobics and dancercize. Jogging and working out. We’ve counted it all: Calories, fat, carbohydrates, cholestrol, pounds and ounces.
I have a lot of experience in this-and a lot of company. If I totaled up the pounds I’ve shed over the span of my life, I probably could document that I’ve lost my whole self three or four times, 5 to 10 pounds at a time.
So, here’s the good news from the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination, Inc.: Don’t diet. Diets don’t work. They’re expensive and boring and not necessarily healthy.
They don’t make you beautiful or sexy.
They can turn to compulsion, make you afraid of food and rob you of energy. That’s what the council says because they want you to like yourself just as you are and because they know what the rest of us have had to discover: Diets don’t work.
In fact, more and more research suggests that dieting actually can make a person gain weight in the long run instead of losing it because dieting disturbs the metabolism. Yo-yo dieting really confuses it.
The conventional wisdom is that the “stop dieting” movement is growing as we all look for a healthy lifestyle for the long term.
We’ll be emphasizing eating to live rather than living to eat. We have a new food pyramid that stresses fruits, vegetables and grains, and we know a lot more about the kind of exercise that’s good for us.
Brown University researchers have come up with an exercise program that they say amounts to basic health-care reform. It’s called walking.
They say that if sedentary adults walked for exercise, the improvements in coronary heart disease costs alone would save billions of dollars a year.
There’s a new twist for those who think they aren’t losing weight fast enough with their present exercise program. If you are walking or running, try doing it backwards, says a Texas researcher. He calls it retro running and says you burn more calories that way.
There’s a catch (in addition to that coordination problem): The more you do it the more your body gets used to going in reverse, and the less it benefits. The trick is to retro only every now and then.
Let’s all get with a sensible exercise program and try to eat smarter to live longer.
Let’s indulge ourselves occasionally so we won’t be tempted to overdo.
Let’s start right now-by walking backwards to the nearest Soda Shop where we’ll have a small hot fudge sundae and a diet cola.
