WILLIAMSVILLE — If our national obesity problem costs us big bucks, it has also spurred the multi-million-dollar diet industry.
I know; I've paid in to any number of weight-loss schemes. Sometimes, when I've been desperate, I've even been suckered into trying a Quick Fix.
Quick fixes abound, and I've tried most: the Scarsdale diet, the South Beach diet, the low-fat diet, the low-carb diet, the low-glycemic diet, the grapefruit diet, the protein diet, the dog-food diet. Okay, not the dog-food diet.
The premise of all these diets is the promise of being able to eat unlimited amounts of a limited variety of food. These diets promote the fantasy that it's possible to eat your way to weight loss.
In my experience, this idea is more appealing than effective - and I have a lot of experience.
I love food: I love everything about it except storing it on my waist as fat. I love growing it, cooking it, sharing it, eating it, and over-eating it.
Like millions of others, I've turned to food in attempts to cure loneliness, boredom, frustration, and self-loathing, to name a few of the emotional triggers that set off a cascade of calorie overload.
It is perhaps the emotional aspects of food that make overeating and being overweight so comforting - and losing extra pounds so difficult. It doesn't help that our culture of abundance and ease promotes super-sized portions and drive-thru convenience. What's a person to do?
Eating more has become part of the American Way of Life. I know I'm not alone in both loving food and loving a bargain: If a little is good, more will be better, and super-sized is best. I hardly needed the film Super Size Me to explain the appeal of getting more for less, and I don't even eat fast food!
But that never stopped me from sampling a dozen different noodle dishes at a community potluck, followed by an assortment of butter-laden desserts.
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Over the last century, portion sizes and the American waistline have increased at about the same pace.
For the first half of the twentieth century, Coca-Cola's signature single-serving glass bottle held 6.5 ounces, and a quart bottle was considered “family size”; by mid-century, a single serving filled a 12-ounce can. These days, plastic bottles sold in the “grab and go” hold 20 ounces - or more.
This portion inflation has occurred for nearly every processed food. Before the Quarter Pounder, a standard burger contained three ounces of meat; now, even four ounces seems quaint.
In just the last 20 years, bagels have grown from three inches to five. When I was a kid, juice was served in petite, four-ounce glasses, not a 16-ounce gulp. I remember when people quenched thirst with water - from fountains.
Perhaps one of the reasons we've come to rely on oversized, pre-packaged foods is so that we can eat in the car. Who walks anywhere anymore? For goodness sakes: many of us who exercise even drive to the gym!
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Like my cohort of middle-aged baby boomers, my metabolism is slower than my fork; my caloric needs plummeted before my eating habits changed. Worse, I work all day at a desk, so if I don't get any exercise, I don't need much fuel. My love of food is perhaps the best motivator I've ever found for exercising: after I work out, I can eat a little bit more.
Even so, knowing all about diet and exercise never stopped me from avoiding the scale on the way to the ice cream shop - until confronted with the deleterious effects of being overweight.
That's when I read Linda Spangle's 100 Days of Weight Loss: The Secret to Being Successful on Any Diet Plan. This book has helped me stop feeling bad about eating and about being overweight and helped me reframe my relationship with food from an adversarial one to a practical one.
In one lesson a day, Spangle offers 100 meditative exercises that helped me relearn what it means to be satisfied, relearn portion control, identify situations where I'm likely to overeat (and how to avoid them), and - most important - how to recover quickly after overindulging.
Working through the book has helped me understand better why I turn to food for emotional nourishment, and it has helped me find more appropriate ways to fill those emotional needs without potato chips.
I'm a foodie, and I eat good food; I was just eating too much of it, which is why it's the lesson from Day 17 that has really stuck. When you fill your car with gas, you don't keep pumping after the tank is full, spilling the fuel on the ground. So why would you do that with your body?
My body probably did once have the biological equivalent of a fuel gauge, as well as one of those nifty gizmos that shuts off the gas pump when the tank's full. But my innate fuel gauge doesn't work very well anymore; I'd learned to ignore that warning on the pump handle, “Do not overfill.”
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In order to relearn how to use food as fuel rather than comfort, I've had to figure out how much fuel I'm taking on.
I started counting calories, that basic unit of energy. With the convenience of myfitnesspal.com, a free app on my smart phone, it doesn't even matter that I'm arithmetically challenged. All I have to do is punch in what I eat and the program does the math. It also calculates calories earned for exercise.
But in order to know how many calories to count, I had to know the volume of food on my plate, so I started measuring my portions.
I'm not kidding. I even have a scale on my kitchen counter, and I've been learning just how skinny a one-ounce slice of cheese is. I've counted the number of almonds in an ounce – and then put half of them back when I totaled up the caloric cost.
It's been an education, for sure. And I'm learning both how little I actually need to eat - and how to derive real pleasure from good food.
I'm now working my way through 100 Days for the third time; I continue to track my calories as I address the thorny issues of emotional overeating and portion control. I eat everything and I eat well – in moderation.
My new mantra is Eat Less, Exercise More. It's ELEMentary.