THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, April 20, 1995 TAG: 9504190038
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 175 lines
AN HOUR AFTER lunch my engine sputtered. My nose tilted downward. The dive began.
I was out of fuel, and I was falling, falling fast. For 10 days I'd subsisted on a diet of little or no fat, each day sucking down less than a tenth of the doctor-recommended amount of the slippery, artery-clogging goo.
Now my main tanks were empty. The reserve tanks were dry. A crash was imminent.
I wanted to scream ``Mayday,'' but I just couldn't work up the energy to do it.
Living lean, I'd figured, would leave me clear-eyed and light-footed and brimming with vim. I'd feel youthful and fit. My skin would glow. Oxygen-rich blood would tour my body without hindrance, something that didn't happen when I was chowing down on garbage, per the usual.
I'd thought for months about cutting down on fats, but two recent developments pushed me into action. First, just about every magazine in America had carried a story decrying the evils of fat. About how Americans load up on the stuff at an alarming rate. About how we've been rewarded for our fatty diets with a scandalous death toll to heart disease. About how one-third of us are obese.
They carried pictures of blood vessels that passed for sewer pipes and hearts the size of basketballs, and warned of fat poised to explode like a coronary frag grenade in eggs, cheese and tuna-salad sandwiches. ``Southern-fried,'' they said, means ``premature death.''
A healthy American relied on fats for no more than 30 percent of his daily food intake, these magazines said. Most of our diets were 35, 36, maybe 40 percent fat. A lot of the extra wound up around our middles.
This media barrage was difficult to dodge. It got me thinking.
Second, my local supermarket seemed to be carrying new, fat-free or low-fat versions of my favorite foods - stuff like hot dogs and ice cream and Kraft Singles and tortilla chips. Going fat-free no longer meant eating like a gerbil, I realized. I could do it and eat almost as badly as I normally did.
It's not as if I ate nothing but fat, but my light lunches typically featured eggrolls still glistening from the deep fryer. My attitude toward food was captured nicely by a co-worker who found me reading Corinne T. Netzer's ``Complete Book of Food Counts.''
``What's that?'' he asked.
``An amazing book,'' I replied. ``Did you know that a coconut-cream Tastykake has 22.3 grams of fat?''
``So, like, what does that mean?''
``That's a third of your daily allowance,'' I said.
``Oh,'' he smiled, giving me a thumbs-up. ``So you can have two more!''
I hatched a goal: To get by on far less than the daily 65 grams fat deemed to be a healthy part of a 2,000-calorie diet. I'd aim for zero fat. In a pinch, I'd go no higher than 10 grams a day. I'd see how I felt after a couple of weeks.
So one Saturday I filled my shopping cart with nothing but products geared to a new, lean lifestyle. I bought fat-free Coffee Mate. Kellogg's Frosted Flakes and Apple Jacks, both sugar-heavy but fat-free. Fatless refried beans. Fat-free pita bread, sourdough pretzels and three kinds of cheese.
Fresh jalapenos. Breyer's frozen yogurt. Low-fat bread and almost-no-fat flour tortillas. Skim milk. And, in some quantity, beer, which is high in carbos but lacks wicked fat. Off to a good start
Everything was fine for the first two days or so.
On Monday, March 27, I sucked down three cups of coffee for breakfast and ate two fruit cookies for lunch. Dinner was a bowl of vegetable soup, two cheese quesadillas, and some chips and salsa.
The only fat in all this was in the Baked Tostitos, which pack 1 gram a serving, and the flour tortillas, which had 1 1/2 grams apiece. For the day, my fat intake totaled 5 grams, about a quarter of 1 percent of my calories.
I went to bed feeling stuffed. Heck, this was going to be easy.
Breakfast the next morning was coffee, Frosted Flakes, skim milk. Lunch was two large piles of Rockin' Raspberry frozen yogurt, a bag of pretzels, two fruit cookies. Dinner: Turkey sandwiches on pita. For the day, 2 grams fat. The next day, my total was 6 grams. A snap.
On Day 4, I consumed 5 grams fat. But I began to feel a change. When I stood from my desk in the midafternoon, I felt weak and shaky. That night, no matter how many fat-free Fig Newtons I ate, I couldn't shake an emptiness in my gut.
The next day totaled 5 grams. In five days I'd ingested 23 grams fat, or about a third of the recommended one-day level. A couple of hours after lunch, I fell asleep at my computer. The weakness reappeared. In the evening I couldn't get excited about eating: Food had simply become fuel, minus fun.
That sixth day, I awoke feeling lethargic. I crawled out of bed, wolfed down two bowls of Apple Jacks, ate an Egg Beaters omelet, drank half a pot of coffee and still felt out of sorts. A Coke helped for a while, but soon I was crashing again.
What I didn't know was that for all the talk of fat's dangers, it's a necessary ingredient for energy.
``If you eat vegetables or fruits, it's going to keep your engine going for about an hour, and then it's gone. It's outta there,'' said Babs Carlson, a registered dietitian and assistant professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk.
``If you eat starches, it's going to keep you going for two hours. Fat, on the other hand, is going to last four or five, because it's metabolized much more slowly.
``You have a fireplace. You throw some newspaper in there. That's like sugar. Kindling, that's like starch. Fat is like that great big oak log: It finally ignites after all the newspaper and the kindling is gone, and it just keeps going.''
That explained why I found myself gradually increasing the amount of sugar I ate, just to keep going. By Day 6, I was eating fistfuls of the stuff, and lurching between rushes and crashes. Without fat, my fire was built of twigs and pine needles.
On the seventh day, I felt like doing nothing but resting. I made a towering heap of huevos rancheros from Egg Beaters, ate three fat-free hot dogs on pita, and a pottle of refried beans and cheese. Total for the day: 1 1/2 grams fat. For the week: 35 1/2. I still felt weak.
During the afternoon, I noticed that a small cut on my finger, obtained on Day 6, had barely scabbed over. Normally I'm a rapid healer, such cuts vanishing practically overnight. Carlson had an explanation for this, too.
``Fats are a nutrient,'' she said. ``Your skin cells get sloughed off in three days. You have to replenish those cells. If you don't have the building blocks, that process is going to slow. The nutrient deficiency manifests itself.''
Similar cells line your digestive system, Carlson said, and ``it's those cells that are absorbing all the nutrients you're eating.'' In other words, go without fats, and your body can't take advantage of proteins and vitamins. Go without fats, and you go without everything.
Over 10 days I ate 51 grams fat.
I didn't get leaner: My drive to stay alert prompted me to pound down so much sugar that I gained 2 pounds. I didn't feel light on my feet: I was dragging so badly that I could barely stand on them. And I certainly didn't impress my friends, most of whom found it incredibly boring that all I talked about a week into my regimen was food.
One particularly weary friend tormented me with e-mailed poetry:
Cookies, burgers and melted cheese
When I get hungry, I eat these. Some useful learnings
But the experiment wasn't without usefulness. It reminded me that I'm as much a slave to fads and as unrealistic in my health goals as the next guy.
We Americans are big on all-or-nothing propositions. When we take up a hobby, we tend to throw ourselves into it. It's a fine trait when we're at war.
But our obsessiveness does us no favors where food is concerned. Instead of adopting a style of eating that we can live with every day, we adopt regimens that would break even the most self-disciplined health nut. We eschew moderation. We want results, and moderation doesn't bring them quickly enough.
Then, when a few days or weeks of self-denial haven't brought us sculpted Soloflex perfection, we get discouraged, blow off the regimen and eat worse than we did in the first place.
It makes so much more sense to be comfortable with what we eat. To allow ourselves indulgences from time to time. To give ourselves a few breaks.
Craving a candy bar? Then eat one. Balance it by eating a bit leaner the following day. Want to lower your fat intake? Then do it, but be reasonable. Use skim milk and lower-fat cheeses and ice creams. Cut back on the potato chips and the mayo.
If you can keep your fat intake to 3 grams for every 100 calories, you're doing OK, particularly if none of those grams is saturated fat - the kind that's solid at room temperature, and the particularly nasty sort once it's in your blood.
Whether you plan to reduce your fat intake, eat more fruits, veggies and beans. The fiber in them will escort fat from your system. Without them, you can go fat-free and not lose flab.
Simple rules, these. Easy to remember, and not tough to live by.
My decision to live without fat was how a typical American might try to get ``healthy'' these days. And it was arguably just as dangerous, if done long-term, as lunching on buckets of greasy french fries every day.
Yes, fat can be dangerous. It can cause heart disease. It can cause strokes. It can make blimps of us. But we need it, in moderation.
And consider that when we say that one in three Americans is obese, what we're also saying is that two in three are not. ILLUSTRATION: JANET SHAUGHNESSY/Staff
[Color Illustrations]
by CNB