by Barbara Berkeley, MD
This is a bad week for me. I'm on a rant. In fact I feel (for those of you who are old enough to remember) like Howard Beale, the news anchor from the movie "Network", who went crazy and started screaming, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!!"
OK, maybe I'm exaggerating. But just a little.
This week brought a double whammy. First, the USDA released its new eating guidelines. Why should this make me mad? The government suggests we cut back on sugar and eat leaner meat. Not a bad thing, right? But the problem is that the government is jerking our diets around like a clueless puppy on its first leash. For years we have been banned from eating anything with cholesterol. Now it's ok. For years, a completely fat free diet was the height of healthy eating, now it's suspect. And salt?? Who can follow anything the government says? We are completely unsure what to do about salt and we keep changing the amounts that are allowable...as if any one of us measures his salt out with a teaspoon.
And let's look at those sugar guidelines. Yes, it's good to cut back (although again no one will be measuring his or her sugar to make sure it stays at 10 tsps or less). But the amount of added sugar recommended by the USDA is significantly higher than that recommended by the American Heart Association (6 tsps/day for a woman). We must always remember that the USDA is the US Department of Agriculture, and continues to protect food producers in the United States. So, for example, a proposed guideline to eat environmentally sustainable foods never made the final cut. Limiting our diet to environmentally sustainable foods would eliminate most of the processed foods America produces, and we can't have that. And boldly stating what we should really do, which is to stop eating most packaged, processed and additive-laced foods, would completely decimate our food industry, so that is a guideline we will never see.
And what about the food group that is making us just as fat, sick and diabetic as sugars? What I call the S Foods. Starchy foods are not mentioned. Yet a huge load to our blood sugar is provided by our daily American obsession with flour, potatoes, cereal, rice, bread and baked stuff.
Riling me up further, our Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, accompanied the release of the new guidelines with this comment, "Small changes can add up to big differences." This is just the kind of wimpy pablum that leads to a population that is increasingly fat, diabetic and riddled with vascular disease. Small changes are just that. Small. And small changes are easily forgotten and reversed. Vow to drink one less soda a day and I guarantee that you'll forget that vow in a month. But vow to become a primal eater, a marathoner, or a vegetarian (lower carb of course), and your passion for the project has a much better chance of taking permanent root.
And then, to top it all off, we have the People "Half Their Size" issue. This little gem appears a couple of times a year and gets me madder than a wet hen (by the way, how did this idiom come to be? I've never noticed that my chickens care at all about parading around in the rain).
The People issue features, almost exclusively, young 20 and 30 year olds who achieve beach-body-beautiful weight losses and who have been maintaining these losses for......never. Most of them just lost their weight. They are all great experts and their diets are documented, in very small print, at the bottom of each photo. Here's Casey's maintenance diet: 5 liters of water, an 80 calorie yogurt with chopped strawberries and handful of fiber for breakfast. A handful of grapes. Lunch of a salad with turkey, pickles and tomatoes (no dressing mentioned), a handful of almonds. Dinner of chicken and steamed vegetables (nothing else???) and a handful of chocolate chips. The other diets look similar. I couldn't live on this diet and I have a long experience with weight maintenance. Could you?
People continues to perpetuate the myth that weight loss is valuable and important when all that weight loss represents is a successful period of starvation. What is valuable and important is learning how to eat in balance with your needs for a lifetime. The rare souls who have been able to accomplish this after a major weight loss are the ones who should be featured on the magazine covers and should be lauded and learned from. Unfortunately, most of these folks look like real people, not fitness models. Our obsession with youth, beauty and transformation blind us from seeing what is really important.
So I challenge People Magazine to produce a "STILL Half Their Size" issue, and to bring back those successes who have figured out how to keep weight off at five years, ten years and beyond. I would love to know how many of these people actually exist.
A couple of days ago, I had a call from a patient of mine. Awhile back, Mr. W. was heading for disaster at a weight that was greater than 100 pounds more than he should have carried. After initially rejecting the idea that he could ever become a primarian eater, he launched into a new, low carb lifestyle. He took up this new eating and activity style with great passion and determination. This week, he was contacting me to let me know that he had reached his ten year maintenance anniversary. People will not be featuring his six pack in a glamour shot. But his life has been changed, and that is worth shouting about.