Beware the Diet Industrial Complex

A fellow blogger and friend put this up recently. I posted a comment but started to run on and decided to just take it on over here.

The diet industrial complex makes a gazillion dollars off making healthy people believe they're not healthy; and eventually making them not healthy. More precisely, $30 billion (with a B) a year spent by people who want to be happy on things that actually make them miserable. And fatter than they were to start off with.

Yes, I'm a diet heretic. I don't deny Americans are too fat, but I truly believe we'd be healthier if there was no such thing as Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Deal-A-Meal, Atkins, South Beach, etc. I know you can point to anecdotal success stories, but so can faith healers and snake oil salesmen. These programs make people fat.

When you fast, your metabolism crashes. Then, when you binge, your body is working double-time to store fat. Yeah, yeah, these programs all tell you not to fast, but in reality, if you're miserable, you're going to cave sooner or later.

So you set out to do whatever program, and it really doesn't matter which one. You go six days or two weeks with a full head of steam, tons of resolve. You're miserable but you think it will be worth it in the end. Then you give in when someone orders pizza for your department at work, or you sneak a couple of candy bars. You say to yourself, Self, you rocked hard for those six days, this won't sink the ship. Get back with the program now.

So you go back to the deprivation mode, your body thinks its starving and the next time you cave, you're maximizing the amount of fat your body puts on those 'problem areas.'

The worst part is, almost everyone on these diets is JUST FINE. Or they are when they first get sucked in. My friend talks about 7th grade, when she was alarmed to find she could 'pinch an inch' as they were saying Special K marketing. An inch? Few women can look like women and NOT be able to pinch that much. I doubt Hugh Hefner could have launched Playboy if he'd had Twiggy to work with instead of Marilyn. For starters, he'd have been arrested for obvious child pornography if he'd used the underdeveloped girls Calvin Klein uses today.

The old saw about insanity is that it's doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. I'm not saying I couldn't stand to lose a few, but Richard Simmons crying and holding my hand is not the answer.