Dieting

Magazines, newspapers, and online services are full of DIETING articles these days. This is because many Americans are big and fat, and no matter how hard they try (true), they keep getting bigger and fatter. I am no different. Here are some of the diets I've been on in my life, and the end results:

NO SALT diet: 1961-1962
The Army nurse at Fort Devens put all of us pregnant mothers on this one. We were allowed to gain 1.5 pounds per month or face being sent to Ward E, where we dined on bread and water until we'd lost the excess weight. I weighed 118 pounds on my wedding day, which was down a bit from my normal weight of 133 thanks to all the running around and anxiety involved in getting married and preparing to move to Massachusetts the next day, and I got pregnant approximately 3 weeks later. You really do get used to the taste of food without salt, and as required, I did not gain more than the baby's weight plus a few pounds here and there for the placenta and all that. Even so, my body was sprung and I could not get into my sister-in-law's regular clothes when it came time to leave the hospital. However, with a new baby I didn't get much sleep or time to eat, and I was soon back to 133 lbs.

Diabetic 1200 calorie/day diet: 1971
Ten years and 3 more kids later, I was weighing in at 168 pounds!! I looked like Porky Pig, and the good doctor at St. Louis Park Medical Center suggested I go on this diet. He said "You're not diabetic, but this is the most effective diet we've found here." I really did stick to it, and by the end, it was hard to eat everything on the diet every day (all those apples and glasses of skim milk!!). When I called off the diet, I weighed 138 pounds.

Atkins diabetic diet: 2006
Bob, one of my printer sales reps, stopped to visit around in the beginning of January this year, and he looked fantastic! He had lost 27 pounds since I'd seen him last, and looked years younger. I asked him what he was doing to look so good. He told me he had gone to the doctor, and the doctor told him he was officially diabetic and had to go on a strict diet to get rid of his extra weight. I weighed 184 pounds at the time, thanks to all kinds of things: lack of exercise, side effects from pills, etc. He wrote down the diet for me, and I forged ahead. The Atkins diabetic diet allows you to eat all the protein and green vegetables you want, plus ONE serving of whole grains and ONE serving of fruit/day. No milk, no cream, no juice. One glass of red wine/day. I was down to 164 pounds by the beginning of the summer, but the weight started to creep back up again even though I was still eating the same things. The day I left for Paris (November 29), I weighed 168. (I don't think I look so much like Porky Pig any more....I'm not as pink, for one thing.)

High fiber diet: December 2006 - ??
I went to CVS to refill my presciptions just before I left for France and found the price of Pravachol had tripled since I first got it a year or two ago. That was too greedy of the drug company for me, so I said no thanks. I started researching on how to lower one's cholesterol without prescription drugs, and one of the things I found in many sources was that dietary fiber and niacin can work well. So I started eating beans and rice, fresh veg and fruits (no fruit juice, though), whole grains (especially steel cut Irish/Scottish oats). I'm somewhere less than 168...maybe 166 today, although yesterday's Christmas dinner was a blowout...but I have lots more energy. I don't know what my cholesterol reading is. It used to be off the charts--like 340 or so--and the last time it was maybe 190, which did not satisfy the cardiologist at all. He said he wanted to see a total reading of 170.

My friend Cathy won't even tell me how much she weighs, and she's struggled with weight for the past two years since having major surgery.

I read somewhere online that "Hoodia works." Whatever Hoodia is.

Secrets of the Supermarket diet - January 2007
Friday I read an article called "Secrets of the Supermarket." It said that the cereal ads' claims--"lose weight," "lower cholesterol"--mean that if you eat a bowl of cereal for two of your three meals/day, you will lose weight and have lower cholesterol. I'll buy that. In fact, I bought it and tried it, and today I weight two pounds less than I did on Friday. And that's even with cheating on Whole Foods's delicious marshmallows--no fat, 12 calories, hardly any sodium. I think this works so well because it's hard to drink red wine with Cheerios.

Yinka, our secretary, and several other coworkers went on the Three Day Diet last week. Presumably, you diet and fast a bit for three days, then eat normally for four days. I can't wait to find out how they've fared with this. Somebody said they eat peanut butter for breakfast during the three days?? Oh, man....

And so it goes.....