Fat Land

I recently received a book from a good friend called Fat Land - How American's Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser (should I be offended?). It is basically an editorial of the sequence of events that have lead to our nations rapidly expanding waistline. I wanted to share an portion of the book that I found particularly interesting.

In this section Crister is talking about the evolution of fad diets. For the most part they were rather predictable with calories in having to be less than calories out. That is until the Atkins Diet Revolution, followed by the Zone, then Protein Power, etc. etc. These string of fad diets had a particular impact on the American diet mentality. Crister explains below:

"The point, of course, is not that the publishing industry...was publishing pure schlock (although most of it was). There had been legitimate scientific debate about such things... The point is what the new diets did not say. For completely missing from the new genre was one increasingly strange and distant concept: self-control.

The very notion of self-control was anathema to the new generation of diet books. A diet - even a weight loss diet - was no longer about limits to one's gratification. Instead, the subtext was one of scientific entitlement. After all, if one had worked so hard to get so far in one's career, well, how could self-control really be an issue? To even suggest such was to make fat a moral issue - and how appropriate was that? No, it was all a matter of using nutritional science to "trick" the body into doing what it should be doing anyway."

As a nutritionist, I know that being overweight isn't as simple as Critser makes it sound. Most of the time it is lifestyle and sometimes it is medical, however, it always involves change. Change is work, it involves self control, and is not always convenient. If it was, we wouldn't be in this situation. What I can promise you is that the feeling that you get from eating clean, exercising, and feeling good in your own skin is far far better than any short term junk food gratification.