The Ancient and Repetitive Art of Losing Weight
By A.M.B. Apalisok Said to stretch back more than a thousand years, losing weight is a sporadic fad because there were periods when it was hip to be fat. Paintings by old masters show women veering on the fat by today’s standards. Doesn’t Mona Lisa look well fed?
In the 1600s, diets to trim the body saw print. A Scottish doctor recommended milk. Two centuries later, the poet Byron poured vinegar on his meals and shed off 64 lbs from his heft.
Today the US, home to the most number of obese people on earth, is the latecomer to diet fad advocacy. It once viewed fat as fashionable symbols of success up to the late 1800s. The exclusive Connecticut Fat Men’s Club spelled achievement. Its very name kept out the trim and slim, the failures.
But standards change. By the late 19th century, when food became abundant and corsets went out of fashion, dislike for obesity surfaced. The Fat Men’s Club thinned out and saw its demise.
By then, milk diets once prescribed for indigestion and weight gain became standard for weight loss. More doctors stepped in. Dr. Sylvester Graham advocated a diet of yeast-free brown bread, vegetables, water, and Graham crackers, which exist until today. Dr. Harvey Kellogg advocated vegetarianism, slow chewing, calorie counting, and toasted flakes, which also exist until today.
Throughout the years, various diet plans pop, become fads for a time, until other plans out-fad them. The low-carbohydrates diet was a fad in London in the 1860s. It kept resurfacing in the last two centuries with different names.
Today it is called the Atkins’ Diet. First published in 1992, it proved very popular. Then came the South Beach Diet, a diet plan that straddles the low-carb, high-protein of Atkins and the low-fat, high-carb of nutritionists.
Do diet plans work? Experts say the answer lies in the dieters themselves. Any diet plan works as long as the dieter can stick to it. Sustaining the weight loss is most important because chances are it’s bound to be regained. The yo-yo syndrome, it’s called.
Any diet that limits calories is apt to reduce a person’s weight. Another reality is that any diet that limits a person’s choices can make him lose weight because he’s bound to eat less. (Consider a diet limited to lechon for a month, and you’re bound to eat less.)
The low-carb, high-protein diet, like Atkins, works because protein satisfies. And it’s not true that protein isn’t converted into fat. Eating much protein leads to water loss, and thus less weight. Waste from protein digestion is flushed out as urine.
Have I tried dieting? I did. From the usual 42 kilos I shot up to 48 in a couple of years. Gone was the husband’s joke on where the food I ate goes. It finally showed, helped by age and a sedentary lifestyle.
More than aesthetics, being lighter means lesser lower back pains for me. I went Atkins. The caveat was that one gets dizzy in the first few days, until the system gets used to very low carbohydrates. How true. I was vertiginous. (Bad for working women; you might fall on the sidewalk.) I lost a kilo in the first month and lost four more in the succeeding months.
Did I yo-yo? Certainly. I missed rice. Then a doctor here says I’m too underweight, I need 10 more kilos in my frame. Horrors! Don’t bone size and cellulites count? I love food, so I mustn’t have anorexia that strikes young Caucasian women anyway. Or maybe I needed convincing that the body mass index standard isn’t Western.
French women are considered the slimmest in Europe. They eat more slowly with smaller food portions than Americans, watch TV less, eat 50 percent less after bingeing, and walk more.
This here Filipina isn’t much of a TV watcher to begin with. I’ve decided to eat 20 percent less of my usual intake, favor red unpolished rice, and walk as much as I can. At the end of the day, it’s genes, lifestyle, and habits that determine one’s heft. Diet fads are just that––fads that come and go.
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