AS I PREPARED TO DEVOUR A BIG Mac at McDonald’s, I caught a glimpse of my former nutritionist rushing toward me. Quickly, I lowered my gaze and sank my teeth into the burger, hoping the overabundance of fat grams might obscure me from view. No such luck. A Nordic blonde with a heart-of-gold smile, Gay shook her finger at me. ’I thought I taught you better,1’ she winked, introducing me to her godson-her excuse for patronizing a fast-food joint.
I offered my own excuse-my pregnant wife-who sat silently beside me. “I’m eating for two now,” I told Gay. “Unfortunately, both of them are me.” Three years earlier, she had been my food coach for an article I had written for Men’s Health magazine entitled “How I Lost 30 Pounds the Right Way, and More Important, Learned How to Keep It Off.” The obvious truth was that most of the weight I had lost I had managed to find again.
Being on the cusp of husky once more, I felt like Oprah Winfrey before she met her trainer, Bob Greene. More than one-fourth of me was now body fat. If you got me hot enough, you could fry an egg on my belly and it wouldn’t stick.
Regrettably, I had been here before. For the past two decades, I had been Scarsdaled. Jenny Craiged, Pritikined, Nutri/Systemed, Baylor-fasted and Slim-Fasted. But when I worked with Gay, she cautioned me against fad diets and told me that weight loss was more about changing my lifestyle. That meant cutting the fat out of my life, doing aerobics to burn calories and lifting weights to get my metabolism off slow burn.
Although I firmly believe in the fundamental right of every American to the pizza topping of his choice, I entered the low-fat, high-carbohydrate world of pasta, beans and rice with no plans of looking back. Banished from my life were the fun foods of my youth, the burgers and fries of summer. Instead, I ate maturely, buffing up my fleshier parts and dropping six inches from my waist-for what I thought would be the rest of my life.
But after the article was finished, so was much of my incentive. Over time, my clothes began to tighten. At first, I blamed my sedentary lifestyle. I ate too fast, too much, loo often. Calories became inconsequential as long as what I was eating-potatochips, cake, icecream- was labeled light or lean or low fat. After my wife got pregnant, I made the unconscious mistake of trying to match her weight gain pound-for-pound. I struggled to keep my fat intake down, my jogging up, but still came those unwanted pounds and inches.
Then came the news that altered my nutritional consciousness: Fat was making a comeback. The Caveman Diet, the Zone Diet, the Atkins Diet-each encouraged you to put more lard in your life, beef up your proteins, lower your carbs. Everything I had learned before seemed wrong. Red meat was good, pasta bad, the egg-white omelet an unnecessary invention. Even if I were seriously thinking about losing weight, where the hell would I begin?
At McDonald’s, I seized the opportunity to confront Gay and asked her: What in the wide world of nutrition was going on? “People just took the no-fat thing too far,” she explained. “They overdosed on Snack Well’s cookies and Healthy Choice ice cream.”
She had just listed two of my major food groups.
“If the body can’t turn these processed carbohydrates into energy, they get stored in the cells as fat.”
She had wowed me with her science before. Why should I believe her now?
“Just put more fat in your diet,” she said. “It will stabilize your blood sugar and make you feel fuller longer.”
I left the conversation feeling quite confused. For years, I had felt guilty when I gobbled too much grease, pulling the skin off my chicken, the cheese off my pizza. And now, what was she telling me-that the way to firm up both my resolve and my abdomen was to eat more fat?
Two weeks later, I got a call from a TV talk show in Philadelphia. Some producer had gotten a hold of a back copy of my old Men’s Health article and wanted me to appear on his program. In two months, I would be sharing with his viewers my secrets about how I had managed to keep my weight off.
That night I ate a large rack of beef ribs for dinner. What choice did I have? I was on a diet.
Related Articles
Business
Wellness Brand Neora’s Victory May Not Be Good News for Other Multilevel Marketers. Here’s Why
The ruling was the first victory for the multilevel marketing industry against the FTC since the 1970s, but may spell trouble for other direct sales companies.
Business
Gensler’s Deeg Snyder Was a Mischievous Mascot for Mississippi State
The co-managing director’s personality and zest for fun were unleashed wearing the Bulldog costume.
Local News
A Voter’s Guide to the 2024 Bond Package
From street repairs to new parks and libraries, housing, and public safety, here's what you need to know before voting in this year's $1.25 billion bond election.