Diets Posts

I give it one, two months tops before someone decides to turn this notion into a full-fledged diet book sales gimmick:

“During war time if you noticed the apples in the bowl were getting a bit wrinkly, you stewed them,” Dr Stanton said. “Today you just chuck them out.” [...]

Meat was rationed to the equivalent of 900g a week, butter to 450g a fortnight; sugar to 900g a fortnight and tea to 450g every five weeks.

Converting to U.S. measurements, that amounts to:

Meat: 1.98 pounds
Butter: 0.49 pounds
Tea: Well, that’s calorie free. No worries on that one.

While that may seem like an awful lot of butter, consider that the “war time” they’re talking about was in 1940, long before hydrogenated oils, transfats or even olive oil was used in regular cooking. That 450 grams of butter? It’s the same 30 grams or less per day that Alli users are sticking with.

As a smoker who’s also struggling to lose weight, I’d been hoping for good news from the FDA concerning Accomplia/Zimlti, which was said to help fix both problems.

Unfortunately, I’m going to have to keep waiting. The makers, Sanofi-Aventis, have withdrawn their application for FDA approval.

Formal weight-loss programs often tout the results produced by their one-on-one counseling. According to a recent meta-study, having access to a counselor might work in the short-term, but it does nothing to stop dieters from regaining weight in the long-run.

On average, weight loss programs that use group or individual counseling, or both, helped participants drop 6% of their body weight after one year, found Michael L. Dansinger, M.D., of Tufts-New England Medical Center here, and colleagues.

At three years, however, half of the weight lost was regained, and at about 5.5 years participants were back to baseline, they reported in the July 3 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

I signed up for Jenny Craig‘s “Direct” program a couple of years ago not realizing it involved weekly phone consultations with a counselor/salesperson. I’d gone thorugh their website to enroll and preferred using it to order my food, so you can imagine how surprised I was to learn that I’d receive weekly calls from the counselor even if I didn’t want to.

Did I find such conversations helpful? Heck no. It reminded me of phone calls from my mom back when I was in college. “How’s your life going, dear? And your weight?” My mother was always weight-obsessed. No doubt a psychologist would tell me that my tendency to eat while angry or stressed is somehow related.

So just as I did back in college with dear ol’ Mom, I became masterful in dodging the calls from my counselor. Laryngitis works really well for that, as does recent dental surgery or the claim that you’re at the library or traffic court. (They had my cell phone number.)

Did I lose weight? In the first couple of weeks I lost a pound per week, but I’d never been so hungry in my life. My “counselor” praised the results then encouraged me to exercise more. Clearly she didn’t realize I was too famished to have the energy for such things.

By the middle of the third week, when the dizzy spells and hunger pains continued, I decided that eating pizza and being chubby was far better than feeling tired and weak.

I’d just sat down in front of a personal-sized pizza with extra cheese when she called. Funny how they can time things like that. Throughout the entire conversation I assured her that I was doing great on the diet. Loved the food. Had exercised like crazy. Lost three more pounds.

I could practically hear her glowing with satisfaction over the phonelines. What she didn’t hear was that I was sneaking bites of pizza between those lies I’d told her. We made an appointment to talk the next week when she planned to call for my monthly food order.

I’m not sure which tasted better: that pizza, or the sweet satisfaction of changing my cell phone number the next day.

Finding it hard to take off a few pounds? It may not be what you eat after all. So says a study conducted by Zofia Zukowska of Georgetown University. In experiments involving mice, Zukowska and her associates set out to determine whether there is a causal connection between stress and weight gain.

To explore this, Zukowska and her colleagues subjected mice to chronic stress — either standing in cold water an hour a day or being caged with a more aggressive alpha mouse for 10 minutes a day — and then gave them standard feed or a high-fat, high-sugar diet similar to the junk-food fare that many people consume.

“By treating the mice the way humans are treated, which is introducing a chronic stress from which they cannot escape and introducing this abundance of food, we mimicked what happens in American society,” Zukowska said.

After two weeks, only the mice that were both stressed and fed the junk-food diet gained a significant amount of weight, accumulating about twice as much fat in their bellies as non-stressed mice that consumed the same diet.

So send the kiddies to Grandma’s, or just put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the bathroom door. Then take a long, hot soak in the tub and unwind. You’ve got nothing to lose but your worries… and maybe a few extra pounds.