Randi Kreiss

Here’s the thing: eat less, exercise more

Posted

The bowl of New England chowder calls to me. A chill has set into my bones and I feel hungrier than usual. Belly to brain: Need more fuel. The choice at the moment is a green salad or a bowl of hot, creamy chowder. I think about the calories, but I go for the soul-satisfying soup. Today I do not want to shiver my way through spinach, kale and cold tomatoes.

As fall turns toward winter and our bodies begin craving carbs, a serious struggle begins for many people. Can we keep our summer weight and summer shape, or do we expand comfortably into baggy corduroys and sweaters?

For some of us, the weight thing is a relatively modest concern. We try to eat healthy for all the appropriate reasons. For others it is an obsession, even a disease, and a complex daily battle that galvanizes conflicting forces: body image, health issues, self-esteem and intense social and cultural pressure.

Dieting is a mega-industry. A relatively new diet, embraced by many people I know, is the blood type diet. “Really,” they say, “really, it works.” You buy a ton of stuff and create a meal plan for yourself based on various “scientific” facts. It claims efficacy because it is personalized to one’s blood type.

To me, it’s an expensive way to just eat healthy and further proof of our national craziness over weight. We don’t need meal plans and blood tests and swabs of private places to eat right.

We all know it hasn’t always been so. The fixation with super-skinny is a relatively modern phenomenon, fueled by an amalgam of pop entertainment, advertising and women’s struggle with self-image. I did discover, however, that there is a minor, but fascinating, history to fad dieting dating back to the 1500s, when Luigi Cornaro developed a diet that permitted 14 ounces of food per day and 17 ounces of wine. I suppose after a while you forget you were starving.

Among the more bizarre diets are the HCG diet, which involves taking the hormone that gives women morning sickness; the Fletcherism diet, which requires one to chew every bite 32 times; the Lord Byron diet, which only permits consumption of hard biscuits soaked in vinegar; the cigarette diet, which guarantees you’ll die skinny, and soon; and the master cleanse diet, which is too gross to describe.

Page 1 / 3