Death By Supermarket by Nancy Deville

Author:Nancy Deville [Deville, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60832-150-6
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
Published: 2011-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

PART SEVEN

Dieting Always Fails

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Malnutrition of Low-Calorie Dieting

IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY SISYPHUS was a heartless king of Corinth condemned for eternity to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down just before he reached the top. Sisyphus’ plight is analogous to dieting. Because every time you diet, you fail and must diet again. The main problem with diet books, programs, systems, products, and factory-made diet foods is that the focus is on losing weight through starvation (dieting). But no matter how hard you try to reach a weight-loss goal by starvation, you will end up failing. Although the weight-loss-by-starvation failure rate is high—we’ve rolled that same boulder up the hill many times—like Sisyphus, we get up and do it again… even though 95 percent of diets fail237 and the vast majority of dieters understand that low-calorie dieting doesn’t produce results. The truth is that dieting is a modern aberration that perpetuates malnutrition.

Current conventional wisdom points at the volume of food people consume as the reason people are overweight and sick. If only we had better portion control. In 1960, a serving of McDonald’s fries contained 200 calories; in the early 2000s, a super-sized portion contained 610 calories. Then Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary Super Size Me, which brought worldwide attention to the deleterious effects of eating an exclusive diet of McDonald’s, shamed McDonald’s into phasing out their super-size products. Has it made a difference in our collective weight? Not really. Today diet experts urge people to eat less fast food, fewer fries, and smaller portions of factory foods. Even Dr. Phil said in his book The Ultimate Weight Solution, “Another way to decrease your exposure to foods you buy for your kids is to purchase these foods in smaller packages. Rather than get a jumbo sack of chips that you’re likely to scarf down in one sitting, why not buy smaller, single-serving sizes? With this approach, you’ve got automatic portion control.”238

Are we really to believe that Americans could reduce body fat and maintain a healthy weight by simply, as Dr. Phil suggests, eating smaller bags of chips?

Low-calorie dieting has been around the longest, and it makes sense intuitively. Most physicians firmly believe in the calorie in/calorie out theory. We are told that you must restrict 3,600 calories, or 515 calories per day to lose one pound per week. Despite recent low fat and low carb tangents, Americans will always return to counting calories. That’s why The South Beach Diet, which is billed as a low carb diet but is really a low calorie diet, has sold 22 million copies to date.

One hundred years ago, a hardworking man ate 6,000 to 6,500 calories and a hardworking woman ate 4,000 to 4,500 calories per day. Today an average woman needs 2,000 to 2,500 calories and an average man needs 2,500 to 2,800 calories. On the first day of the South Beach Diet, by my calculation, you’re allowed 1,167 calories, which is 800 to 1,333

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