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Health & Fitness

Dying to Lose Weight

Don't buy into the diet hype—Follow mom's advice.

Why are people so gullible or illogical when it comes to dieting? At the time the Lap-Band ads first started surfacing on billboards on local freeways, I knew nothing about the product and had no objections to it. But when the ads became so ubiquitous that I would sometimes see the face of their happy model more than I saw my own family, then I became annoyed.

I started to resent her. She reminded me of the last party guest who won’t leave even though it’s two in the morning; an unwanted intrusion.  I felt like I was being brainwashed— the ads were everywhere and were impossible to ignore. Shouldn’t there be nuisance laws against over advertising? No, really! You can’t drive more than five miles on some freeway routes without seeing at least one ad, and in some places they are spaced 100 yards apart.

As I read more and more about how broken our food industry is, and started steering my family towards a healthier lifestyle, I started to resent the ads even more. The food industry takes advantage of our busy lives and our ignorance, loading our foods with harmful fillers, while the diet industry take advantage of people looking for a magical fix to their weight problems. I started to appreciate the old-fashioned wisdom of my mother who told me I could eat whatever I wanted in moderation.

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Maybe that’s the problem, our society has forgotten what words like “moderation”, “prudence”, and “thriftiness” mean, although this last one is coming back in style thanks to a slow-moving economy.

My husband had gone through the Atkins phase which drove me crazy. To me the idea of eating one type of food as a healthy way to lose weight or structure a diet seemed ludicrous. Not to mention that the weekend camping trip where he ate nothing but beef jerky, turned me off so much it was years before I could eat it again.

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I didn’t care much for Slim Fast, which never seemed to fill me up the way food did, and when I picked up a can recently and saw that it contained High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), which some claim actually makes you gain weight not to mention other reputed negatives, I put the can down and never looked back.

And as we learn more about the Lap-Band, responsible for four deaths in Southern California, while the company charges on to capture a larger piece of the market share by pushing to operate on teens, it is clear that it is a dangerous and foolhardy option.

The only diet that ever worked for me was Weight Watchers which in addition to eating “real” food included a networking and accountability aspect with their weekly weigh-ins, and daily exercise. To me it is the closest thing to what I do now: eat healthy food, watch my portions, and exercise regularly. I also have an accountability partner, doing weekly check- ins with my sister. We talk about successes and setbacks and share tips with each other.  It gives us a reason to talk every week across the miles, and has strengthened our relationship not to mention helped both of us keep our weight in check.

So whatever your weight reduction strategy remember— keep it simple, use common sense, and find a buddy.

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