Ex Diaeta

Since it's the end of my usual 5-month Blog hibernation cycle, I seem to be having the urge to write again.

A lot has happened between the "IDD" post and the Sheehan post. One of the most significant (by no means the most significant, but that's another story) has been my effort to get a weak, flabby, hypertensive, anxious body into reasonable shape. I don't say "back" into reasonable shape because I've really never been there. Except for a brief (meaning one semester) period of improved fitness required by a PE class in college, and a two-year period in Cameroon where Barb and I both alternated between being fit enough to function and being too sick to function, my body's been obstinate. Somehow I was never able to convince it to get itself in shape. I offered it everything - cookies, ice cream, cake, chips, popcorn - to try to get it to see my point, but it refused.

It took a combination of steadily rising blood pressure and mounting levels of anxiety to convince me to take control. Like many Americans, I have over the last several years had torrid affairs with flashy diets that have breezed through the media, luring us with promises of quick success. Sugar Busters, Atkins, The Zone, The South Beach Diet, The Abs Diet - they all gave results, with varying degrees of success, but every single time I reached that level of success, some holiday would roll around and I'd end up feeling like I had to be rolled around. Over the course of just a few days, my weight would shoot up five or six pounds. my energy level would plummet, and I'd find myself back on the sofa eating a whole bag of Doritos or two or three bowls of ice cream.

Finally, I started to notice something. All these diets relied on just one or two threads of science, then built the rest of the diet around them. Sugar Busters told me to eschew processed sugar and focus on foods with a low glycemic index. Atkins told me that carbs should be limited and introduced me to ketosis. The Zone said that I should keep my diet within a narrow window of macronutrient percentages. South Beach was sort of a rationalization of all three of the others. The Abs Diet introduced the concept of raising metabolism through aerobics and strength training, combining exercise with portion control. It seemed as though everyone was focusing on a specific piece of a bigger picture. Why?

Here's today's lesson, folks. It's as clear a picture as I've ever seen of the damaging role marketing can play in our society. Marketing has nothing to do with objectivity. Marketing experts and many entrepreneurs analyze culture, seeking to exploit weaknesses as opportunities to profit. The profitability formula for a diet exploits three primary cultural weaknesses: (1) We like to indulge ourselves with little concern about the cost; (2) We are obsessed with how we look; (3) We have short attention spans and very little self-discipline.

Applying this formula to diet results in a plan with these three corresponding characteristics: (1) Limit specific foods or food types, but keep the plan simple and offer acceptable (and expensive) alternatives that you have branded as "approved"; (2) Promise (and bombard the consumer with pictures of) dramatic results; (3) promise those results in three months or less. (In fairness, most of the diets I tried or looked at discussed long-term maintenance, but usually only as an appendix or a short section at the end of the book.)

So now, armed with that understanding, I could see why our society's obsession with diets has landed us here in 2005 with the highest percentages of overweight and obese children and adults in history. We look at diets the same way we look at auto tune-ups and repairs: not as fundamental paradigm shifts but as maintenance events. The problem is that our culture does not support good health (the existence of certain entities who have the gall to refer to themselves as "Health Maintenance Organizations" notwithstanding). Moving from passivity to self-discipline is the primary requirement, and, as is the case with so many things in modern American society, as long as we depend on external entities (HMO's, doctors, diet hawkers, employers) to lead us by the hand, we'll always end up at their destination, not ours. Good health is a long-term commitment, not a periodic repair job.

After nosing around on the web for a while, I did find a plan that has been almost universally praised by the few unbiased sources I was able to locate. Lest you begin to think I'm going to point you to some altruistic non-profit or government sponsored agency, let me be clear. This plan is being marketed as well, but by its author, who has self-published. He is accepting your money for an e-book just as Dr. Atkins accepted your money for all his books. The difference is that, once you download the book, you'll find no additional marketing gimmicks: no supplements, no magazine subscriptions, no online weight loss software. Just several hundred pages of really good information that presents diet and nutrition holistically. You get the whole story, not just bits and pieces.

This has gotten too long already, but I'll give you a link in a minute and say more in later posts. Let me close with my before and after stats. They say all that needs to be said, except that this really has been a lifestyle change for me that I know I can maintain, not just a diet pit-stop along a road that is slowly spiraling downward.

	Start	End of 12th Week
Weight:	201	185.4
Resting Heart Rate:	78	56
Blood Pressure:	145/92	132/80
Percent Body Fat:	22.2	9.5
Lean Body Mass:	156.4	169.5
Basal Metabolic Rate:	1905	1995

In other words, I lost a net of 15.6 pounds, but actual fat lost was 26.2 pounds, because I gained 13 pounds of muscle at the same time. Best of all, I know how to adjust my diet to a maintenance mode when I reach the results I want.

The catch? It's not easy. It's hard. It takes a lot of work and determination, and the results are gradual (one to two pounds per week - sometimes less). I guarantee you'll never see a flashy ad program that says "Lose as much as TWO POUNDS in TWO WEEKS!" or "Exercise only ONE HOUR SIX DAYS A WEEK and see GRADUAL RESULTS!!" Like most things that are worth paying attention to, you have to make an effort, therefore it is marketing anathema.

Here's the site.