Dieter Stands Firm on Flab Fight

After five months of effort and only 15 pounds of weight loss, fitness consultant Joe Dillon figured that Kae Ewing of Newport Beach was probably ready to give up on getting in shape.

“I’ll do everything I can to help my clients,” Dillon says. “But they have to be ready to let go of the weight. And some people just aren’t ready, for whatever reason. It’s very frustrating, but when it comes down to it, I can only lead the horse to water.”

Ewing, 56, has been sticking fairly close to the low-fat, high complex carbohydrate diet recommended by Dillon and Dr. James Lindberg, medical director of the UC Irvine Executive Fitness Program. But he hasn’t been so diligent about the regular aerobic exercise that Dillon recommended and Lindberg prescribed. Nor has he been eating skimpy portions of the foods allowed on the diet. As a result, the 6-foot-3 1/2-inch stockbroker has lost only 15 pounds from his initial weigh-in at 258 pounds, far short of the 232-pound goal weight recommended by Lindberg.

But last week when Dillon brought up the notion of quitting, Ewing balked. “Is there anything else we can try?” he asked.

Yes, Dillon told him. But it wouldn’t be easy. And it would take discipline, plenty of discipline.

“OK,” Ewing said. “It’s worth a try.”

Dillon dropped by Ewing’s office last Friday to give him a copy of his new diet. Ewing took one look at it and laughed.

It’s a simple plan: Fruit for breakfast, steamed vegetables (without butter or salt) for lunch, steamed vegetables again for dinner, this time with rice or a baked potato (again, no butter or salt, and don’t even think of sour cream), plus two fresh fruit between-meal snacks per day. That’s all.

“I’m not sure Joe understood why I was laughing,” Ewing says. “It’s a pretty extreme diet.”

Still, Ewing says he’s willing to try it, “at least for a few weeks.”

That may be all it takes, Dillon says.

“He’s been eating basically a maintenance diet for several months now,” Dillon says. “And that’s one reason he’s been stuck on the same plateau. But if we can get him down from that, then he can go back to the maintenance diet.”

Ewing is now in the habit of eating healthy foods, but Dillon says the problem is that “the foods he was eating are more calorically dense. The foods on the new diet will give him about half of the calories with the same amount of food. He won’t be hungry, but he should lose weight this way.”

Pasta, for example, is a perfect food because it is high in complex carbohydrates, which give sustained energy, yet low in fat. But it’s still higher in calories than steamed vegetables, Dillon says. Pasta is also extremely versatile, coming in all shapes and colors, and it can be served in myriad creative combinations. Steamed vegetables, on the other hand, are more difficult to disguise.

But there are many different kinds of vegetables, and Ewing says he likes them all, “except eggplant doesn’t turn me on all that much.”

Meanwhile, Ewing says he’s been more consistent with exercise. “For two weeks, I went for a walk every day. This past week I only went three times, but that’s still more than I was doing for awhile there. Finally I’ve gotten in the habit of just plain doing it. I walk in the door at night, and instead of turning on the TV, I go in, change my clothes, grab my weights and go right back out the door.”

But are vegetables, rice and a little fruit enough for a healthy diet?

“Actually, it’s a super-healthy diet,” Dillon says. It has lots of vitamins and minerals as well as complex carbohydrates, and enough protein for what we really need. There’s such an overemphasis on protein in our culture, but we really don’t need all that much. The average Asian eats a diet very similar to this, and they’re much healthier than we are. They have nowhere near the level of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and other health problems.”

Ewing compares learning new eating habits with the changes he’s been making in another important area of his life: his golf game. “I learned to play with the old methods, where your arms came back and you used absolutely no wrist,” he says. “Now it’s all wrist. It’s entirely different from what we did before. It’s the same with food. I can sit down at night and have a baked potato and be full. That seems crazy, when you consider that I used to have a steak, a potato, corn on the cob and a salad or something like that. It’s a big change.

“It’s frustrating, though,” he says. “I keep wondering, if I can get my golf game improved, why the heck can’t I do this diet thing? I guess I’ll just have to keep trying.”