Harry and I are serenely aware that an $88 billion check is waiting out there for the person who comes up with the next blockbuster diet book that says his or her gimmick really does work and will make you lose fifty pounds in two weeks and keep it off for the rest of your life. Because there are a hundred million chubby Americans who are panting to believe it. Well, tough. It’s not true. And we’re not going to take your money.
The dreary, persistent fact is that diets don’t work: 95 percent of them fail, which is why setting weight loss as a goal is generally a bum idea. The almost certain failure can infect your whole attitude toward fitness, while the yo-yoing up and down actually makes you gain weight. So don’t diet. That’s the headline. Our advice is, basically, forget about it. But exercise six days a week and follow Harry’s Fifth Rule. Which is: Quit eating crap!
Now the small print. Will there come a time, way down the road, when you lose a pound or two on this regimen? Just for fun? Not dieting? Why yes, that could happen. You might lose forty, as a matter of fact, the way I did. There’s a pretty good chance of it, to tell you the truth. If you do, just send us the $88 billion when you have a moment. But not now, please. We won’t take it. The thing to do now is get in shape. Go back and read the first few chapters and start to exercise! Because exercise does work, whether or not you’re fat as a walrus. It is always the first step, the bit of magic that changes everything. So focus on that, quit eating crap and forget about weight loss over the next two weeks or twenty-one days or whatever. If you have a year and are game for a little effort, we can talk.
“Quit eating crap” may seem a little vague, but you’d be surprised how much you know right now. I urge you to sit down and make a list of the mountains of garbage you’re eating that you know you should quit eating altogether. I bet you get it 85 percent right before you read another word. (Hint: French fries. Almost all fast food. Processed snacks and breakfast foods with names that end in “O.” And all sugar-swamped soft drinks, like full-strength Coke and Pepsi.)
Exercising and not eating crap is not a diet, and you won’t fail at it. If you don’t lose weight, you will still be radically better off and functionally younger. If you lose weight, it’s a bonus.
Dieting is the False God of the last thirty years. And women, since they care a little more about how they look, have wasted more time and dough at its temple than men have. But the differences are minor; the whole country has been on an extraordinarily expensive and feckless binge of diets and misery for a long, long time. We have spent billions on them, too, and what did we get for our money? We gained forty pounds apiece. A handful of guys got rich and the rest of us got fat. Not a good use of our dough. Or our time. Or our hope. In fact, it was a ridiculous, shaming and debilitating waste. So maybe we should cut it out.
As you might expect of a False God, the various bibles of dieting are not very reliable or consistent. The rich protagonists who preach the True Faith cannot begin to agree on the sacred texts. I am not just talking about fad diets like the “hot dogs and ice cream” diet that ripped through parts of Colorado a few years ago. The big guns in the field are just as wild. Consider the head-on conflict between Pritikin-Ornish (low fat, low fun) and Atkins (high fat, high fun . . . until poor Dr. Atkins died and his successors-in-interest backed off a bit from the eat-steak-till-you-drop claims). These are two of the biggest in the field and one of them has to be crazy. Or at least wrong.
And now take a peek at the convolutions our own government has gone through in the last dozen years. In 1992, back in the days of carbo-loading and the war on fat (by everyone but Atkins), the USDA came out with a new, much-ballyhooed “food pyramid” that looked like the one at the top of the next page. Take a minute to check it out. . . .
Looks familiar, doesn’t it? It should. For years, it was on every box of Wheat Thins and Triscuits in the country, and not a few boxes of breakfast cereal. Yum! Cracker makers and bakers and purveyors of French fries loved it.
Trouble is, it was almost totally wrong, as almost everyone now agrees. On the latest government pyramid, white bread, pasta, white rice and potatoes went from the top of the list to the very bottom. Vegetable oils went from worst to just fine. And so on. The fact that the nation’s own experts can go through such wild swings in a dozen years does not inspire much confidence, does it? Actually, Harry and I think the government is getting warmer this time. Much warmer. And honoring the new pyramid would not be a bad idea, especially, of course, the USDA’s startling, new recommendation of serious daily exercise. But still, the nagging question persists: Does anyone out there know what he’s talking about?
The answer, I’m afraid, is “yes” and “no.” On the “no” side, most diets are utterly unproven scientifically or medically. Not because their proponents are all dopes or charlatans, although there are certainly some of those. Or because there’s some massive conspiracy of corporate farmers, fast-food restaurants, lobbyists and rotten politicians that’s responsible, although they play a very robust part. Rather, as Harry points out, there simply is not a lot of good science on specific foods available. The real difficulty is that every bite of food you take is a hugely complex blend of thousands and thousands of chemicals that interact in millions of important ways with different parts of your body. No one has taken the deep dive into the biology and chemistry to see what happens. Indeed, no one knows if it’s possible to do so. So it’s no surprise that no one has begun to devise tests to evaluate individual foods.
Harry puts the problem in an interesting light. He talks about President Kennedy’s decision in 1961 to spend a fortune and put a man on the moon within the decade. Which we did. But, Harry says, if Abraham Lincoln had said that and spent the same amount of money, nothing would have happened. Same thing for Teddy Roosevelt. Or FDR. You cannot go to the moon with steam engines; the fundamental science has to be in place. That would be the problem today if a theoretical president decided to “solve” the national obesity problem with a breakthrough pill or diet or whatever it took. You could spend the dough, but you wouldn’t get there, because the core science does not exist.
Which is not to say that we have to sit here and eat pizza and French fries for two hundred years while the scientists beaver away. There are, for example, broad population studies suggesting that the Okinawans live so long because their diet is so rich in vegetables, fish and soy. Personally, I take greater comfort in the fact that the Mediterranean diet also gets high marks. I find it a little more accessible. Lots of yummy vegetables, olive oil, some meat and a sufficiency of red wine . . . I’m there. It may occur to you that these are mighty broad-brush evaluations, deciding that a whole country or all of southern Europe is eating “good” food. Sounds a little rough, doesn’t it? In fairness to the nutrition community, narrower, more scientific population studies are very hard to conduct. Ideally, they would involve large numbers of normal people and last for, oh, ten years, testing this and that food. Broccoli, say. Well, who in the world is going to eat broccoli for ten years and keep a record of it? And who is going to volunteer to be in the control group that has to eat rat poison with their broccoli? So it is slow work. But we know enough to set out a few rules.
Once-popular books to the contrary notwithstanding, calories do count. They are, ultimately, the only things that count. So one can say, with utter confidence, that the secret behind getting fat is eating more calories than you burn. Surprise. As far as getting fat is concerned—as opposed to getting heart attacks and cancer and whatnot—it doesn’t much matter what kind of calories they are. For obesity, 100 calories of spinach is no better and no worse than 100 calories of French fries. It’s the old gag about which is heavier, a ton of feathers or a ton of lead? Same deal here: Calories are calories.
Well, not exactly the same deal. Some foods take a certain amount of energy just to digest. Those yummy fibers, for example. All that bran. (They taste it, too, don’t they?) If you can hack it, it makes sense to eat more of those, because they fill you up and keep you filled while they work their way endlessly through your digestive system. They contain some good health stuff, too.
Start to get an idea of what an ideal level of calorie consumption should be for you. That depends on your age, the shape you’re in and the general level of your activity. It’s a sad fact that your base metabolism (the rate at which you burn calories automatically, without doing a damn thing, which is the vast majority of all the calories you burn in a day) goes down as you age. Once again, the free ride of youth is over and you have to go to work to have a good life. The falling base metabolism rate—and the sedentary habits of older people in our society—is where that gut comes from after forty. Or fifty. A normal American woman in her fifties or sixties has to get her caloric intake down to roughly 1,400 calories to lose weight. Up to, say, 2,000 a day is maintenance. Unless she gets some serious exercise. Or has a huge aerobic engine.
Want to hear something smug and annoying about me? I had my resting metabolic rate tested this spring. The way the test goes is, you lie down in a darkened room and breathe into a mask for fifteen minutes. And this clever gadget tells you your base metabolism: how many calories you burn a day before any normal activity (we all burn some 800 calories a day just walking around, putting our shoes on, gardening, and so on) and before any exercise (which in my slightly peppy case would burn up another 400 or so calories a day). They wired me up, but, alas, it didn’t work. The results were goofy. The machine was busted, the guy said, so I was told to come back two days later, to try taking the test again.
Here’s the annoying part. The machine was not busted . . . it was just that my results were off the charts. Because I am an insufferable workout nut with a wonderful aerobic base. It turns out that, before I take a step, I burn twice as many calories a day as projected for my age. And the reason, Harry tells me, is twofold. First, I have added more lean muscle mass by doing weight training. And second, I have that nice aerobic base, which I put together, one day at a time, over the last five years. You know, the millions of new mitochondria and miles of new capillaries and stuff that make it possible to run and jump and play when you’re an old person like me. That base is a hound for calories, whether you’re using it or not, even when you’re sleeping. It’s like the “feed me!” plant in The Little Shop of Horrors. . . gotta eat, all day long. What a break.
Until you become such a hell-for-leather biker or whatever that you don’t need to worry, it makes sense to learn to count calories. Sounds dull and it is, but not as dull—or as hard—as you think. You don’t have to be perfect at it, after all. You just want a rough idea of how much you’re eating every day and where the excess, if any, is coming from. That’s not hard. First step is probably to get one of those little calorie counters and look up a few of the things that you eat most often. That won’t take long, because most of us eat in a surprisingly narrow band . . . same stuff, week in and week out. And you don’t have to worry much about the fruits and vegetables and fish, because they are so low-calorie that they’re almost free (if you don’t slather them with butter or sauces). So it’s mostly a matter of keeping track of the carbs, the meat and the sugars. And the booze, if you’re still drinking. As I say, you don’t have to be perfect. Just get good enough so that you have a realistic sense of how much you’re eating and so you can’t lie to yourself. If you want to stay where you are, try to get along on roughly 2,000 calories a day. If you want to lose a little, eat less. Easy? Try it.
Lying-to-yourself reaches epidemic proportions among the so-called experts. In one lovely example, a bunch of nutritionists (the very people we pay to yell at us about our disgusting habits) kept careful track of what they ate over a period of time. And they lied to themselves to the tune of some 20 percent of the total. Here is a handy, two-step process to help you get over your own damn lying. Step one: Try hard, every meal, not to lie. Step two: Add 20 percent to your total regardless.
A brief word about portion control. We are nuts in this country when it comes to portion size. Partly, as you must have read by now, it is the fault of the greedy, manipulative fast-food industry. They are able to offer “supersize” portions of fries and colas for a pittance, with little cost to themselves. Sounds like a deal, so we waddle in and gobble ’em up. Big mistake, as the movie Supersize Me! graphically illustrated. The same attitude spills over into restaurant portions in general, and finally at home. Our very plates have gotten bigger. Harry, who is such a Puritan that his advice in this area is deeply suspect, suggests that we all buy a set of salad plates for our main meals and allow ourselves only one plateful. That may not be as odd an idea as it sounds to me. Take a look at the frozen Lean Cuisine meals, which I sometimes rely on. One big secret to their low calorie count is that the portions are very small indeed. Adequate but small. Maybe we should all go there. Okay, so maybe the rule should have had two parts: Don’t eat crap. And don’t eat so much of it. And stop with the business about cleaning your plate out of respect for the starving Armenians. Do not eat like a little piggy and call it virtue.
Another important point, as Harry is about to tell you, is that some foods—especially carbs and sugars—spike short, intense cycles of renewed hunger. You feel hungrier, sooner, after a plate of French fries than after a bowl of spinach. Because almost no one can resist those hunger spikes, it makes plenty of sense to limit—not eliminate—carbs and simple sugars. Personally, when it comes to carbs, I don’t have to wait for the hunger spike. I can eat them until I drop. Eat the whole loaf of French bread and butter, before the menus are passed out. Eat the entire bucket of popcorn at the movies. The whole bowl of pasta. I am never tempted to eat spinach or codfish like that. Sadly.
But even if you have more willpower than I do, you should sharply limit your consumption of white bread, white rice, pasta, potatoes and sweets. They are at the tippety-top of the new pyramid, and they belong there. Incidentally, French fries, which I adore with all my heart, deserve their own circle in hell. They should be the flagpole on the top of the pyramid. They start as potatoes, so they’re carbs at the core. Then they’re routinely cooked in saturated fats, which makes them much, much worse. If there is evil in the universe, it is made manifest in the design of the French fry, which tastes so heavenly and is in fact the devil’s own food. The devil’s own drink, of course, is full-sugar cola.
Which brings me to those things that are so awful for you that they should be banned altogether—a list that is going to vary from person to person. My personal diet guru, the wise Stephen Gullo, has great advice about how to deal with food we know is rotten for us but love: Drop it altogether. His favorite quote to me was “For those who are given to excess, abstinence is easier than moderation.”—John Drybred. Best nutrition advice I ever got. For me, as you may have guessed, that means no French fries. Maybe for you, too. And having no bread is way easier than a little bit. I have lapses, but not so many. And I know enough to feel guilty!
The science of nutrition is imperfect, and our understanding is weak—but not so weak that we do not know that the brightly lit fast-food signs are guiding us to a dark place. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in court, so why don’t you take a look at the new food pyramid, then at the McDonald’s menu, and let some things speak for themselves. (Burger King or a host of other joints would do as well.) Remember, before we begin: Calories count. Red meat, white bread, potatoes, sugar and saturated fat are bad. Okay, McDonald’s . . . what have we got under the golden glow?
I just drove over to the nearest McDonald’s, up here in the Berkshires, to see what’s cooking. Happily enough, things are better than they were a year ago, the last time I looked. There are big ads in the windows for various salads, and the pleasant guy behind the counter—at six-thirty in the morning he’s got time to talk—says that some people actually order them. Not many, but a few. But, he says, the big sellers by far are still the basics: the Big Mac, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese (and not infrequently the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese), the large fries and the large Cokes. Which makes all the sense in the world; that’s what these places have been about since the early days, and that’s what we all come for. Change may be coming to Fast Food Nation, but it’s coming slowly and the old ways are dying hard.
The fast food people know how to make food that tastes good, and they can make healthy food that tastes good if they put their minds to it. The McDonald’s Caesar Salad with Grilled Chicken, for instance, is terrific. It’s only 220 calories, too, a real bargain all around. Fruit and walnut salad, which is heavily promoted, is also pretty tasty and it’s only 310 calories (although why they candy those nuts is beyond me). Still, give the devil his due.
But let’s not kid ourselves. Most of us are not here to buy salad. We buy the Big Mac and the Quarter Pounder and the large fries and large Coke, which were promoted so hard for decades, and for that we pay a terrible, terrible price. Not in dough; this stuff would be a great buy if it weren’t for the fact that it’s killing us. The price is calories and fat and sugar, and none of us can afford it.
Take the Big Mac meal. The sandwich is 560 calories, with an appalling 30 grams of fat (half of them saturated). The fries are 520 calories, with 25 grams of fat, and the Coke is 310 calories, all of it from added sugar or corn syrup. That’s 1,390 calories—enough to see you through the entire day—and almost all of it rotten for you. Sugar, some starch and a lot of fat, much of it saturated. Not good. And if you’re a little hungry and decide to add a 32-ounce “triple thick shake” for dessert (they only come in triple thick), you can add another 1,160 calories, almost all of it sugar. Yum. Now you’re up to 2,550 calories, almost every one of them rotten for you. And all you’ve had is lunch. Keep this up—as so many Americans do—and guess what? You’re gonna get fat. Maybe a bit sick.
So what do you say about these places? They have quit pushing “supersize” portions. (So they do have some shame, after all.) But the “large” portions are not a hell of a lot smaller (the large fries are a whopping 10 percent smaller than the old super size. Thanks a lot.) And they have created some salads. Great. But you don’t go to a whorehouse for conversation and you don’t go to McDonald’s for salad. Most of us don’t, anyhow. You can get conversation in a whorehouse, but that’s not why you’re there. If you want to stop eating crap, stay out of fast-food places. Period. Recovering alcoholics should stay out of bars, even though they sell ginger ale as well as whiskey. Big fat piggies who want to change their ways should stay out of fast-food places, even though they sell salad as well as Big Macs. Isn’t that obvious? C’mon!
By the way, it is my position that grown-ups should have the legal right to eat themselves into wheelchairs if they like. But I do think that fast-food joints—which are, after all, getting rich on making you fat, miserable and sick—should have to give effective notice of what they’re doing. By putting the calorie count up there as prominently as the low, low price. But after that, it’s up to you. And your kids. It’s a free country, after all.
That last point was put forward, as if it were serious, in a wonderful message this past Fourth of July from the Center for Consumer Freedom. “Consumer freedom,” ladies . . . gotta have it. Oh, and look! The patriots behind the message turn out to be . . . why, bless my soul! . . . among others, the great Americans at Wendy’s, Coca-Cola, Tyson’s Foods and other stalwarts of the fast-food industry. And do they care. Listen to this, which I’ve cribbed from a Paul Krugman oped piece in The New York Times, July 4, 2005: “‘Too few Americans,’ says the CCF, ‘remember that the Founding Fathers, authors of modern liberty, greatly enjoyed their food and drink.’ . . . Now it seems that food liberty—just one of the many areas of personal choice fought for by the original American patriots—is constantly under attack.”
Don’t you just love it? The Founding Fathers fought for “food liberty,” God bless ’em. I am a slightly serious student of the American Revolution, but I don’t remember that aspect of the conflict. I do know that one of my heroes, the Boston bookseller and artillery general Henry Knox, was awfully fat. And that he died from getting a chicken bone stuck in his throat after the war. But I don’t remember much talk of fighting the British—or even the evil Hessians—for the right to pig out. Maybe I missed something.
No, I didn’t. The fact is that there is simply nothing these folks won’t say or do to make a buck. I don’t mean to be a fussbudget, but promoting “food liberty” as part of the nasty fight to keep fast food in the nation’s schools strikes me as disgusting. Incidentally, Coke has lately wrapped itself in the cloak of decency with a tiny ad campaign (using Lance Armstrong) to promote exercise. And they scrupulously do not mention Coke in their ads for exercise, because they don’t want to taint that noble effort with commercialism. Right.
Okay, back to the main business at hand. You get several shots at not eating crap: in the food market, when you buy things; in your home, when you decide what to cook; and at the table, when you decide what and how much to put in your greedy mowzer. At each of those stages, try to think just a little bit about what’s good for you and what’s rotten. And try to act like a grown-up.
You also get three choices with restaurants. One, you do not have to go to places that specialize in food that’s horrible for you. Two, in the restaurant, you can order things that are good for you (and ask the waiter to take the bread away, immediately). Three, once the damn stuff is on your plate, you don’t actually have to eat it all. Three strikes, ladies. Think about each one.
In addition, you should take grateful advantage of food labeling. Lord knows how it happened, in this militantly capitalistic/laissez-faire nation, but labeling is required by law, and it’s pretty good. The type is small, but the information is huge. Learn to look at the label. Learn not to eat much with saturated fat in it. And try to stay away completely from the real killers, the trans fats. (The reference is to “partially hydrogenated oils” of one kind or another on the label.) And stay away from foods with lots of calories. Or lots of carbs. Easy-peasy. Eventually, looking at labels becomes kind of fun. You are often surprised to find really tasty stuff that is superlight on calories. You are even more often stunned to see how many calories and carbs some of your oldest and best-loved friends have been packing all these years. I pick up a box of pasta from time to time to see if it’s still true that this pleasant little package contains, say, a thousand calories. I used to empty those packages into my tummy and thought I was doing myself a favor. Not so. Read the label!
Anyhow, cruise the shelves and look for food that tastes good, that’s made of good stuff and that doesn’t have a million calories. It’s a scavenger hunt. Be super careful to check the portion size that goes with the calorie number on the label. They are little cheats. On a can of soup, for instance, you’ll find that a “portion” contains only 110 calories. But then you discover that the little can allegedly holds seventeen servings. It’s not lying, exactly. It’s just deeply misleading.
We are deeply wired to eat; you’re not going to change that. But we can substitute good stuff for crummy stuff. . . fill our tummies with things that taste okay and don’t make us fat or sick. We have all reached a certain age, and change does not get easier. But it isn’t impossible, either. When I got on this kick, I’d been eating crap, happily, eagerly, compulsively, for sixty years. Most of my life, I had gotten away with it. Starting at about fifty, my luck ran out, and I went from 155 pounds to 207. Not nice. Then I met Harry, got into the Sacred Rules, and over time my weight drifted down to about 170, which was a joy. I’m about 180 now, which I can live with.
Along the way, I learned some interesting things from Harry and on my own. The most striking example: I have always hated fish. Hated it. Ate it, under protest, twice a year. I kept being told, however, how great it was for you and what a key it was to weight loss and weight control. With reluctance bordering on horror, I tried it again. Never mind the details, but I now eat fish five nights a week. And I do it for pleasure. And those rye crisp crackers that are made out of cardboard and twigs and taste horrible? I now eat them like peanuts. Love ’em. And I never eat the popular crackers that were the beloved staples of my youth and middle age. You can retrain your palate. Takes time, but it can be done.
Okay, time for a little shift in emphasis. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea, after all, if you lost twenty pounds or whatever it would take to get back to your true weight. No rush. And no diet. It will just take care of itself, because once you start exercising seriously, you’ll see yourself differently and you’ll start to feel a little odd being overweight. You probably feel a little odd now, but that’s not what I mean. Once you get in shape and get into the business of working out, it will start to seem, oh, inappropriate to be overweight. I don’t know quite how, but it just happens. Then, whether gradually or in a plunge, your weight starts to drop. You really could lose twenty pounds. Without going nuts and without going on a diet.
A good trick is to have the right picture of yourself in your head. Exercise makes that much easier. Working out, you automatically have the picture of your young self in your head. It feels natural to get rid of the excess that just doesn’t belong there . . . like putting down a package you’ve been carrying for too long. Like putting down that enticing box of white rice.
Incidentally, whole societies, whole countries, find obesity so profoundly at odds with the picture they have of themselves that it just doesn’t happen. Not because of different genes or even different food, but because it’s just out of the question. Think of how many fat Japanese people you know. Or those Frenchwomen we’ve been hearing so much about, come to that. In their countries, it isn’t done. Make obesity your taboo. Draw a picture in your head—of you on that bike or in the hills or on the boat—so strong and sharp and clear that being a big fat girl is just out of the question. Sound a little mystical? Farfetched? Try it. Once you’ve become younger, sometime next year, you’ll want to look it, too. And you may.
Few of us are going to lose weight directly by exercising, because it takes far too much exercise to burn off significant fat. Olympic endurance athletes burn 4,000 to 6,000 calories a day, but they’re working out like maniacs four, five and six hours a day, every day. You’re not going to do that. You’ll actively burn off a lot more calories than a sedentary woman, but not enough for major weight loss. But, as you will remember from the tiresome story of my wonderful metabolism, you get an amazing lift from having stronger muscles and a bigger aerobic base, even when you’re not working out. Build the sucker and it does become a “FEED ME” monster. Once you get in shape, you’re constantly burning much more energy. And remember, some 60 percent of all the calories you burn are those “maintenance” calories. Harry says—and it is certainly my experience—that you can increase your basal metabolism by 50 percent with rigorous exercise. That is huge.
The other way exercise works, of course, is that it really helps your self-image. Take a look around the gym. You’ll see a few fat people, and it’s entirely possible to pursue a heavy exercise regimen when you’re very heavy yourself. I’ve done it. But it’s not common. Look around a yoga class and you’ll see what I mean. Maybe they’re all self-selected and they looked like that the day they walked in, but I doubt it. I think that, like me, like a lot of people I talk to in gyms around the country, they just lost the weight somehow once they got in shape . . . once they got that new picture in their heads. I remember sitting on my bike in spinning class those first months. The rooms are always mirrored, as you know, and I could not take my eyes off myself. I found myself staring, hypnotically, obsessively, at the folds around my gut. I didn’t want to lug the flab around, now that I was doing all this vigorous stuff.
But again, we’re talking about being younger—and thinner—next year. And the year after that. We’re talking about a fundamentally different lifestyle, and it will take a while to kick in. That’s all right; you’re going to live a long time. So exercise hard and get interested in life. Thin will take care of itself. And, did I mention . . . Don’t Eat Crap!