THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 3, 1995 TAG: 9508020037
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: FITNESS QUEST
SOURCE: BY ROBERTA VOWELL, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 154 lines
THEY CAME packaged with saucy names, like The Steak-lover's Diet or The Stewardesses' Diet. They promised yummy-looking candy bars, shakes and caramels.
And they came with unbreakable, unspeakable rules.
Chow down on all the protein you can hold, but shun bread and pasta.
Eat only grapefruit and hard-boiled eggs, all of 'em you want. Which might not be that much.
Suck down your ersatz-choco shake for breakfast and lunch, then just try and limit yourself to a sensible dinner.
Ah, these diets - our Top 10 worst - promised everything and delivered nothing.
Basically, our experts say, drastic diets simply won't trim the inches permanently.
``These diets don't work because they are a temporary fix,'' said Babs Carlson, a registered dietitian who teaches at Old Dominion University, Tidewater Community College and Chesapeake General Hospital. ``They're based on a specific menu that everyone likes to have for a handy reference. You follow them for a week, 10 days, maybe even two weeks. Then you go back to your old eating habits.
``They're attractive because it's a quick fix. The actuality is that most of them are low-calorie. You can follow a low calorie diet for one week, and you'll see success measured by scale weight. But that's not a measurement that is really important. You need to measure, `Have I made significant changes in my life? Have I added two more servings of vegetables a day? Have I included a whole-grain cereal on my shopping list?' You need to learn how to eat.''
Unglamorous as it sounds, you've got to plan balanced meals and get off your duff to lose weight.
``It's that `E-word,' '' Carlson said. ``Exercise. You've got to put one foot in front of the other and move that body. People don't want to hear that. They say, `It's too hot. It's too cold. I don't look good in a bathing suit. I don't have the right shoes.' ''
If only we'd known then what we know now. Perhaps before we tried the Body Cleansing Apple Regimen.
They've been tried, they've been tested, and folks, they just don't work. You can argue about the order in which they appear - we've loosely ranked them by their nutritional worthlessness.
But it's hard to argue with the fact that these meal plans are pathetically lacking in food values and just plain common sense. In other words: Don't try this at home.
With no further ado, we present our Diet Hall of Doom.
1. The Magic Foods Diets. According to this theory, your body actually burns more calories trying to digest certain foods than those foods contain. The misbegotten notion holds that a celery stalk contains 6 calories, but your body uses 100 billion calories of energy to move it on through the system.
Using this logic, the more you eat, the thinner you get! This is, of course, absolutely wrong. And if it were right, longtime dieters would be bonier than Nancy Reagan, given the extreme number of celery sticks we've snacked on in lieu of Mars bars.
This notion seems to pop up in every new generation of teenage girls. Grapefruit was another rumored ``magic food,'' bringing us to No. 2 on the list:
2. The Grapefruit and Egg Diet. And not just any egg, mind you. We're talking hard-boiled eggs, three a day, plus all the grapefruit you could eat.
Yummy, right? This perennial horror left many a dieter unable to face Peter Rabbit and his Easter offerings for years afterward. Not to mention that after a day or so, the fruit-and-egg eater is just plain tapped out, physically. This diet doesn't give your body much of anything to keep the energy level up.
Which brings us to No. 3
3. The Body-Cleansing Apple Regimen. Long before the dawn of the New Age, some folks touted a mixture of spirituality and physicality. One way to cleanse the body and mind was to semi-fast, consuming only waters and juices.
The preferred local regimen was to eat only apples for several days. While it was intended to promote a higher level of consciousness, some used it to promote a lower number on the scale.
The result, one apple eater said: ``I was downright dizzy and lightheaded the second day. I thought I'd fall down. I couldn't concentrate, couldn't think.''
4. The Stuff-Your-Stomach Diets. This is a catch-all for a group of rather disgusting products designed to fill your tummy with fiber, ensuring that you wouldn't be hungry enough to eat anything of nutritional value.
One such product came in a flat, brown disc. Dropped in a glass of water, it fizzed and bubbled and created a citrus-flavored, fiber-filled beverage.
``This product tastes best in VERY cold water,'' the instructions chirped. Perhaps glacier water would have numbed the taste buds to a point where it would have been palatable, but ordinary ice water sure didn't do the job. It left a slimy, plastic-like coating in the mouth, along with nasty fibrous things that squeaked between the teeth.
Beyond the aesthetic problems, this product (and related stomach-sating pills) ignores the whole notion that humans eat for reasons beyond hunger. That we might nosh because we are celebrating, grieving, sharing or just for the joy of tasting a sliver of amaretto cheesecake.
5. The Suede Diet. This one actually was named after a certain cereal.
The plan was to mix a quarter-cup of it with a container of yogurt for breakfast and lunch each day, followed by that mythical sensible dinner.
The chief drawback is that rigidly substituting a single food for two meals a day does not help you learn about making wise choices, and limits the variety of nutrients you consume.
Drawback No. 2 was, as one user reports, ``it felt like suede on your tongue. That's the only way I can describe it.'' Thus, our nickname.
6. The Fun 'n' Phony Foods Diets. Chocolate shakes. Candy bars. Caramels. They whisper to the weight-conscious, ``Come nibble . . . ''
No wonder the diet versions of all this luscious stuff keep selling. New brand names crop up every 10 years or so, like the chocolate diet wafer bars of the '60s (with the unforgettable theme song: ``It's the diet lunch/that you can crunch/out loooouuuud!'').
The trouble is you learn zip about eating. Plus, it's tough to stick to that recommended sensible dinner when all you've had for breakfast and lunch are a couple of pretend-chocolate shakes that don't taste nearly as good as they look on the package.
7. The Two Weeks to Size 8 Diets. Every month, the flashier, youth-oriented women's magazines would trumpet another one. The Tijuana Diet, The Avocado Diet (``Stuff a half an avocado with shrimp salad for lunch! Stuff a half avocado with chicken salad for dinner!'' Stuff 324 calories and a whopping 31 grams of fat down a day!), The Stewardess Diet (``Lose 3 pounds between L.A. and New York!'').
They featured catchy names, strict eating plans and a two-week maximum. Sure, you'd usually drop a couple of pounds. But it invariably crept back on.
8. The Steak-lovers' Diet. Or, the eat-protein-till-you-feel-like-a-log diet.
The idea was to limit carbohydrate grams while stocking up on protein. A suggested snack: fried pigskins.
This diet, popular in the mid-70s, runs counter to everything we now hold true about eating healthy: Concentrate on carbohydrates, grains and vegetables, and limit protein and fat.
Besides being nutritionally unsound, it also was so limiting that it led dieters to fantasize over the most mundane foods. ``After three days,'' one woman said, ``I was actually craving a bun to eat with my hamburger.''
9. The Famous Doctors' Diet. Slightly less grueling than No. 8, this was the two-week bootcamp of the food world. ``Do not make substitutions,'' the book warned. Which left you with an endless, grim round of broiled chicken, broiled hamburger patties, broiled lamb chops and little half-cup servings of butterless, steamed veggies.
Plus, the diet doc recommended that you whip up a loaf of fiber-and-protein packed bread, which you'd toast and eat with those spartan meals. To top off the indignities, the bread recipe never seemed to rise.
It did take off the pounds, but they almost always crept back when we started eating real food and bread that had actual flavor.
10. The Snacker's Diet. Eat five times a day. But isn't this partly how we all got into such lousy shape? MEMO: The Virginian-Pilot's Fitness Quest is a six-month project to inspire
our readers to adopt a healthier lifestyle. To join Fitness Quest or
share your story, call Infoline at 640-5555 and then press BFIT (2348).
ILLUSTRATION: JANET SHAUGHNESSY/Staff
by CNB