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medpundit |
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Tuesday, July 20, 2004The writing is engaging and often witty (Zinczenko? Spiker?). Sentences such as "Commercial bread baking has followed the same path as Michael Jackson - the whiter it gets, the less wholesome it becomes" and "Like the mother-in-law who tries to tell you how to raise your kids, fructose screws up a system that was working perfectly fine without it." sprinkle the prose, making what has the potential to be a very dull subject almost interesting. Although no references are listed, many are mentioned to bolster the authors' nutritional claims, making it, unfortunately, impossible to check up on them. The basics of the diet are sound: eating frequent, small meals each day rather than three large meals (the better to keep the munchies at bay), avoiding the empty calories of alcohol, and allowing yourself one diet-free day each week. The rest of the diet is on shakier ground - relegating foods to "power" groups, each of which is supposed to give you certain health benefits - building muscles, promoting weight loss, strengthening bone, fighting cancer, etc. While certain foods certainly enjoy the reputation of doing these things, their influence is small. No one should count on any one type of food to save them from pathology. The other centerpiece of the diet is the ingestion of something called "smoothies," a blended drink of yogurt, peanut butter, whey, and whatever else you can think of to give it some sort of flavor (berries, bananas, etc.) The authors say they're delicious. I'll take their word for it. Do they work? They probably do provide a certain sense of fullness that helps the dieter stick with their regimen - kind of like a homemade Slimfast. But, of course, if a true six-pack abdomen is what you're looking for, diet alone won't do it. You need to exercise those muscles to make them firm and strong, and the Abs Diet has no shortage of exercises for strengthening and tightening those abdominal muscles. In fact, exercise is as key to the program as diet. And rightly so. The program calls for some sort of exercise daily, which is a sensible approach to losing weight and keeping it off. Will the diet give you a six pack in six weeks, as one of its opening chapters claims? Will it increase your "staying power"? Maybe. But it's highly doubtful that the regimen, or any regimen, will turn this into this. Time's touch is not a gentle one, nor one so easily reversed. UPDATE: I forgot to mention that this was cross-posted at Blog Critics, where this interesting comment was also posted: That's one thing almost all these diet books have in common: they each have a strong undercurrent of fear. That may seem like an odd thing to say, but it's there -- perhaps even in just the odd line, but that's a dead giveaway (pun intended). This is a fear of aging, and of death, and I find it totally inexplicable. It's almost a clinic morbidity, a phobic state, and it makes people pathological devotees of one diet after another. There's an exhausting sameness to these books and I'm starting to wonder about the audience. Does anyone go out and read them one after another, trying them all? Who are the Linda's and the Rosalyn's and the Marsha's who invariably fill the interstices with their "personal" experiences? I suspect they're probably entirely imaginary. What none of these books tell you is the most obvious: cut out the junk food, exercise *regularly* (and that doesn't mean violent games of squash once a week) and just make sure your diet is something you can live with. None of these fad diets can give you that -- it's impossible to live forever on high-protein-high-fat-no-carb or vice-versa. The historical evidence also doesn't support this kind of skewed eating. The point is to achieve permanent weight loss *if you have a clinical obesity condition*. Otherwise it may not be necessary, medically speaking. It's just that our society is now quickly turning body fat into a taboo, somewhere below incest and patricide. Our self-image is increasingly determined by our perception of others' perceptions of us rather than logic. Most diet and health books also don't allow for human frailty. Everyone is bound to fall off the wagon once in a while. I mean, for how long can you resist that burger, fries and coke meal? I like Zinczenko's advice to allow yourself one off-day every week. Agatston (the South Beach diet, so far the most sensible of the lot) says something similar. That is probably the one thing you can grow old with -- gracefully. You know, I've always wondered about those testimonials in diet books, too. posted by Sydney on 7/20/2004 11:24:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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