Many Americans greet the approach of the holidays with about as much cheer as they’d greet the approach of a Mack Truck on an icy highway: Oh my gosh! Look out! Somebody save me! Noooooooo!
These are the Americans on diets. They can see disaster ahead, but feel helpless to avoid it. How can they? They’ve forgotten how to eat-and how to stop eating-like normal people. Their diets have screwed up their instincts, their self-esteem, you name it. Feeling miserable, fat and confused, they grab a cup of coffee, Sweet ‘n’ Low . . . and half a pumpkin pie.
That’s hardly an exaggeration. Though 65 million Americans are dieting at any given moment, the average reveler will gain 5 to 7 pounds over the holidays. From Thanksgiving on, almost everyone feels like a turkey.
This has not escaped the notice of just about every individual concerned with the nation’s mental and physical health. Faced with a tidal wave of self-hatred and cellulite, feminists, scientists and dieters themselves are realizing that weight-loss diets make no sense, any time of year. Listen closely and you can hear a growing roar: It’s time to dump your diet.
“Diets are not the answer to getting through the holidays without gaining weight,” says nutritionist Holly McCord, “because they don’t work.” As an editor at Prevention magazine, McCord has come to believe that diets “actually make the problem worse, because you’re depriving yourself, and eventually your willpower is going to give in. If you come home from a Christmas party and all you’ve had were celery and club soda, you could end up eating a pint of ice cream as your reward.”
Sound familiar? It must. Lately, even diet die-hards have been forced to face the boomerang inherent in all self-deprivation. Addressing an international conference on weight control, diet inventor Marian Apfelbaum admitted, “In the last 25 years, there has been no progress in treatment for obesity.” In fact, while his own protein-based regimen produced “short-term results (that) were good,” in the long run “it only provoked more obesity.”
“Almost everyone who goes on a weight-reduction diet quits and regains the lost weight,” contends Timothy White in the University of California’s Wellness Guide to Lifelong Fitness (Rebus, $29.95). Worse, he writes, when the dreaded pounds return, they come back flabbier than before. “Going on and off diets constantly over a period of time can make you progressively weaker and, in terms of your fat-to-muscle ratio, `fatter.’ “
What’s a body to do?
Well, it’s not up to the body alone, actually. Those in the field seem to agree that the poundage problem must be addressed on two fronts: Mind and mouth. The mind must figure out why it feels so obsessed with food. We’ll get to that. Meantime, the mouth must be retrained to ignore the mind.
Yes, the mouth must listen to its real master, the stomach. Until America became a nation of waif wanna-bes, that wasn’t hard. People ate when they were hungry and stopped when they were full. Amazingly, that’s a skill we must relearn, says Carol Bloom, co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute in Manhattan. “Since we’ve become a diet culture, we don’t know how to feed ourselves.”
The body is built for self-preservation, so most diets are doomed. Even when the body isn’t busy storing calories, it’s asking for decent treatment: Reward me, I’ve been good. No wonder everyone sneaks snacks. We’re hard-wired for it!
“If you’re not choosing something fun to eat at least 25 percent of the time, you’re expecting an unreasonable food life,” says Georgia Witkin, an assistant professor of psychiatry at New York’s Mt. Sinai Medical Center. Witkin says that self-deprivation is an unnatural state and thus almost impossible to sustain.
Most dieters will heartily agree. Bodies weren’t built to choose martyrdom-hence the preservation of the species.
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If weight-loss diets go against our very fiber-and they seem to-why do we keep trying them? This brings us back to the mind.
Our minds are brilliant. They take in information and come up with solutions. In late 20th Century America, the information they take in consists of glamorous, emaciated images-mostly female-and the obvious solution is to diet.
Too bad it doesn’t work. The only rational alternative to dieting involves a mind/mouth overhaul. The mind must consciously reject the idea that only thin is good. Meantime, the mouth must retrain itself to listen to the stomach. As psychologist Bloom says, “We must reclaim our hunger.”
Eat when you want to, stop when you’re full and get a little exercise. The shape that results is perfect for you, if not Calvin Klein. Skinny or plump, give thanks for your body this holiday season-and treat it to a nice meal.