Dana and I were talking about Weight Watchers the other day and how they stopped counting calories ("a banana may be 0 points, but that's like 80 calories you're not counting or expending elsewhere"). She made a point that has kind of stuck with me- Weight Watchers is, bottom line, a business. A very successful one, at that. I don't think the program is going to sabotage me into not losing weight fast enough (HA!) to keep me buying their products, but they have to come up with different ways to market things, etc. It makes sense.
Dieting has been a business for over 150 years- every gimmicy diet I've tried comes with CD's to listen to, tapes to watch, cookbooks to utilize. Dieting is a HUGE, multimillion dollar business that continues to thrive, despite the economy and people's expanding waistlines. Everyone's waiting for the diet silver bullet- the pill that will make us skinny, the program that will make us drop weight faster than we could have imagined. I know I'm still looking-- we'll call Weight Watchers a "bronze" bullet, because while it's teaching me important food habits, it's still not letting me lose MORE weight.
MSNBC had an
article the day after this conversation with Dana called "150 years of diet fads and still no quick fix." I laughed when I saw the title because, come on, if there WAS a quick fix, why is over 66% of our population obese or overweight? But I read the article anyway- the point of the article was to be a teaser for the new US Nutritional guidelines, which should be coming out in the next week or so. People have tried EVERYTHING for the last 150 years to lose weight- including buying special soap. Not to eat, but to rub the fat away. Yeah. If only...
But the bottom (heh. I made a funny.) line is that the fad diets don't work. What works is learning and using proper nutrition and adequate exercise. And, it's not something you learn overnight or can wash away.
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