.
I was 9 years old when I ordered my first diet soda. It made me feel like such an adult.
Beautiful older women went on diets, so what little girl wouldn’t want to diet with them?
Now I know better — at least most days.
Studies have shown that as many as 80 percent of women are dissatisfied with their appearance. That dissatisfaction seems to take front and center with the arrival of spring and summer shorts and swimsuits.
I’ve already heard the self-loathing of friends and acquaintances, bemoaning the pounds that have piled on since last year.
Unless you’re cute-as-a-button Renée Zellweger gaining weight to play Bridget Jones, putting on pounds isn’t fun. Well, maybe the actual process is kind of fun, but realizing the padding isn’t going away isn’t.
When you Google the phrase “weight loss,” you get more than 50 million hits. While that’s not as many hits as porn gets, the number is still pretty frightening, especially since most of the weight loss sites seem to promise that those 25 pounds it took you months, maybe years to gain, can absolutely come off in three easy weeks.
The diet industry is $40 billion strong annually, thanks to the absolute desperation people feel. The worst thing that could happen to the business is a healthy product that helped people lose weight and keep it off.
If you’re on a diet, you may want to invest in some larger clothes. That’s the news UCLA researchers report in the April issue of American Psychologist.
“You can initially lose 5 to 10 percent of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back,” said Traci Mann, UCLA associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study. “We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more. Sustained weight loss was found only in a small minority of participants, while complete weight regain was found in the majority. Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people.”
The study concluded that most people would have been better not going on a diet at all.
That doesn’t mean we’re off the hook from watching what we eat — just that eating cabbage for 30 days isn’t a long-term (or sweet-smelling) solution for maintaining a healthy weight.
Actress Kate Winslet has actually fought not to be lumped in with her stick-thin peers. When the February 2003 issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly published digitally enhanced slimming photos of Winslet, she issued a statement saying the alterations were made without her consent.
Just last month, Winslet won a libel suit against Grazia magazine after it wrongly accused her of seeing help with her weight from a Los Angeles doctor.
“I feel very strongly that ‘curves’ are natural, womanly and real,” Winslet said. “I shall continue to hope that women are able to believe in themselves for who they are inside, and not feel under such incredible pressure to be unnaturally thin. I am not a hypocrite. I have always been, and shall continue to be, honest when it comes to bodyweight issues.”
Buy that woman a non-diet soda.
Contact Käri Knutson at
kknutson@winonadailynews.com, (507) 453-3523 or 1-800-328-2182, ext. 3523.
.
Advertisement
Cuda wrote on Apr 20, 2007 8:25 PM: