|
|
|
Benefits of Green Tea
Tea and Cancer Prevention Tea drinking is an ancient tradition dating back 5,000 years in China and India. Long regarded in those cultures as an aid to good health, researchers now are studying tea for possible use in the prevention and treatment...
How to Live a Low Carb Lifestyle (Instead of Just Being
We’ve all heard a great deal in the past year about the “Atkins Diet,” Low Carb Dieting,” and so on. I’m here to tell you, however, that “diets” don’t work – we need to turn our eating habits into a lifestyle. Notice the word, “habits….” As...
Weight Loss: It's Not Always What You Eat, But What You Don't Eat
On a little island half way in between Guam and the Philippines there is a rampant epidemic affecting the inhabitants. This tiny island of approximately 8,200 people is not afflicted with famine or a deadly disease as you might think when talking...
What is Real Hunger?
In order to identify hunger, you must first understand what it is. This is not as easy as it seems. Many of you may never have let yourself experience true hunger, only a feeling of discomfort. Not knowing exactly what it was, you may have been...
What Is The Atkins Diet?
The Atkins weight loss diet is based on one simple principle: Your body burns both carbohydrates and fat for calories. If you reduce the amounts of carbohydrates available, it will burn more fat and you will lose weight.
According to Atkins,...
What Prevents Alzheimer’s?
The answer is still “we don’t know,” but we’re getting closer. Alzheimer’s is not normal in the course of aging, and it’s more than “a decline in memory.” People suffering from Alzheimer’s, through progressive destruction of brain cells, lose the...
Yo Yo Dieting in Men
When a person wishes to go on a diet, they may experience the
ups and downs that come with the process of dieting. This is
when the term "yo yo dieting" comes into play. Even though a
person may lose weight after beginning a diet, they will have...
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Diet Fads: Supermarket Sheep
Eighteen or twenty years ago, I was into high protein, high fat, low carbohydrate diets, courtesy of the original Atkins Diet Revolution and, to an even greater extent, Stillman's Quick Weight Loss Diet (which I must admit I still prefer to Atkins but that's merely personal taste). At the time, every aisle was loaded with labels proclaiming Low Fat or Reduced Fat. I didn't care about fat and sought much different information. Unfortunately, low fat was "in" and I felt alone and abandoned.
With a certain sense of resentment, I tracked down the carbohydrate costs of a wide variety of food, keeping a sharp eye on ingredients, calorie levels, and nutritional values. Certain items were strangely emblazoned with banners announcing low fat: pasta sauce, potato chips, candy bars, and ice cream. I was puzzled: how could certain foods, full of fat to their very core, be low fat? How could all the fat be removed and there be anything left?
I became fascinated with certain labels. Have you ever, for example, read the labels on those flavored coffee creamers? Zero fat. Zero carbohydrates. Zero protein. Zero calories. How can anything we put in our mouths have zero calories? A negligible amount, maybe, but absolute zero? What is in that stuff? Or is it virtual food, existing only in our mind's eye as a kind of edible hologram?
Mercifully, the low fat craze died its natural death. Atkins and similar regimens took over and the low fat labels were reprinted (corporate recycling at its finest) to read Low Carb. Suddenly, everywhere you looked, there were foods recast as low carb - again with the pasta sauce, the potato chips, the candy bars, and the ice cream.
I was curious. Had the manufacturers taken out all those carbs and put the fat back in? Where did those carbs go? Are there vast dumpsites in the desert where unwanted carbs are buried - next to worn tires, plastic bags, and nuclear waste?
Once more, I wonder: what is left in those boxes, cans, and jars? Why am I paying $1.19 per ounce for something that really isn't
anything?
Then I started to figure it out (sometimes I'm a little slow). The food hadn't really changed at all, just the packaging. Food labels are like those ubiquitous Internet sales letters. They trumpet headlines that catch our interest because they are in synch with our desires and goals. Is that accidental? Of course not. Highly paid copywriters choose their headlines with great care, buying into the national "obsession o' the day", floating on the coattails of the latest fad.
Many of us are so desperate to control our weight that we buy into the promises like the unaware followers we are: bleating sheep heading for a precipice with no thought of questioning our leaders or striking out in a different direction.
The unspoken secret is that the label doesn't matter. If we want to lose weight, we don't eat pasta sauce, potato chips, candy bars, or ice cream. Period. No matter what the package says. Deep in our psyche, we know what we can eat (very little) and what we can't (a whole bunch). Allowing ourselves to be misled is only a fashionably acceptable way to fool ourselves, and we know it. We buy into the hype because we want, so badly, to believe. We want to think that we are doing the right thing, that we're really trying, that our motivation is pure.
Our weaknesses are being exploited by the packagers and the super store con men. Our ambivalence, and the overwhelming need to avoid the very real discomfort of effective dieting, invests the misguidance of food labels with an illusion of truth.
Like our dimwitted ovine cousins, we, too, are eventually fleeced.
About the Author
Virginia Bola is a licensed psychologist and an admitted diet fanatic. She specializes in therapeutic reframing and the effects of attitudes and motivation on individual goals. The author of The Wolf at the Door: An Unemployment Survival Manual, and a free ezine, The Worker's Edge, she is currently working on a psychologically-based weight control book: Diet with an Attitude. She can be reached at http://dietwithanattitude.blogspot.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
