I’m stepping onto a slippery slope here by admitting that I’ve been on a diet, more or less, for the last 39 years. That’s more than 14,000 days of thinking about food, the number on the scale and my ever-changing dress size.
There’s just no other way to look at it, despite Weight Watcher’s dictum that their program is a lifestyle rather than a diet, and that diets don’t work.
I’ve been ruminating a lot on this lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that my lifestyle HAS included being on a continual diet, if you define a diet as limiting the types and quantities of food you eat. For instance, I long ago gave up Rocky Road ice cream, my go-to comfort food of yore. I also can’t remember the last time I had a fast-food hamburger and fries.
I could go on and on–I eat my chicken grilled, never fried. I don’t buy candy bars, Cheetos or any other ersatz food from vending machines and I never cook any food that has heavy cream listed in the top five ingredients (that eliminates potatoes gratin and chicken tetrazzini to name but two).
Sounds like a diet to me. Take a look at this recipe card from the early 1970′s Weight Watchers plan, which is when I first joined the program. (About that curious table setting, the web site where I found this photo carries the caption, “Share this meal with the ashes of a loved one.”) Because I was a loyal Weight Watcher, I actually ate chicken livers once a week per their strict instructions. Was it a restrictive diet? Do you even have to ask?
Nowadays Weight Watchers says that you can eat anything you want as long as you count your points. At the risk of throwing many of you off your balance beams, I don’t think that’s realistic. There are more than 40,000 foods in the average supermarket, most of them processed, and giving ourselves permission to select from all of them is asking for disaster. The more processed foods that are introduced (10,00 per year according to food industry statistics), the heavier we get. Not even a landslide of 100-calorie packs and low-fat snack foods have stopped the overall fattening of our country. The painful truth is, we simply cannot eat that crap and maintain a healthy weight.
I believe that Weight Watchers will continue to be the world’s leading purveyor of sensible, low-cost weight loss advice, but my guess is that they will soon have to address the disproportionate percentage of processed foods in the American diet as well as its destructive impact on our collective waistlines.
In the meantime, I’m going to plug along on my never-ending diet of whole-grain breakfast, salad lunch and vegetable-laden dinner, with sensible fruity snacks thrown in as needed. Read it and weep: dieting works.
But do you still wanna eat the fast food or processed food? Does that compulsion go away? I guess I know it has for me for periods of times but it’s a constant battle once I go off the wagon so to speak, to get back on track and eat what makes me feel good. Does it still feel like a diet, I guess is my question?