The Diet Years : Sure, it’s a $35-billion industry, but you can’t call it ‘new.’ Take a trip with us through the long and storied history of calorie counting.
This is the time of year when tempers run a little testy.
After all, this is peak dieting season, when even the mathematically challenged are known to perform great feats of caloric carry-over right there in the grocery aisles, hoping desperately to slip into something a little more comfortable--or rather, something more comfortably little.
Let’s see, for one slice of apple pie you could chew--click, click, click--78 pieces of sugarless gum.
Dieting is as American as that apple pie--which now, of course, comes low-fat.
One out of four adults is doing it, according to the Calorie Control Council.
And we’re teaching our children well. A survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that more than two-thirds of high school girls in some states were trying to lose weight.
And we are spending heavily to lose. The diet business will rake in almost $35 billion this year, projects John LaRosa, president of Marketdata Enterprises in Valley Stream, N.Y., who says, “The big money in the industry is for cosmetic weight loss of 10 to 20 pounds.”
Business is booming, in part, because diets, like brakes, seem to wear out. Most of us know as we crash and burn in January that by March our resolve will be road kill.
Dieting is so ingrained, just the thought of going on one makes some people binge, says registered dietitian and clinical social worker Ellyn Satter, who explains that after 17 unsuccessful rounds, the pain of food deprivation eventually creates a conditioned response.
On a most basic level, dieting has played a certain drumbeat through the decades. Twisted as it’s become, there may be something comforting in the sheer monotony and repetitiveness of it all.
“Dieting is highly ritualistic,” says Hillel Schwartz, author of “Never Satisfied” (the Free Press, 1986), “and it’s hard to shake once you get to be a part of it. The incessant counting of calories, the counting of pounds. . . . You’re also initiated into a group with a secret code. You can start a conversation with a total stranger about the commiseration of losing weight because you’ve got a shared language.”
And so we keep doing it.
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The seeds of eating disorders go way back to the vomitories of ancient Rome and the holy anorexic saints of the Middle Ages. In neither case, however, was the goal beauty or slenderness. The Romans wanted more room to stuff down their banquets; the young saints starved themselves in the name of God.
But move ahead to the 16th century, where Schwartz finds two guys from Italy setting the dynamic of dieting in motion. The first was a nobleman by the name of Luigi Cornaro with gout and stomach problems who started consuming only 12 ounces of food and 14 ounces of drink each day. He became a new man and dashed off treatises on the benefits of dietary restriction.
The other was Santorio Santorio, a physician who fashioned a scale from a hanging chair and took to weighing himself religiously.
The first American dieters showed up in the 1830s. These food-conscious folks were followers of the Rev. Sylvester Graham, who preached a bleak regimen of whole grains, vegetables and water. Even if they were more concerned with avoiding the sinful gluttony bred by civilization than with reducing their belt lines, they surely helped stitch the seam that would wed dieting and morality together in the national psyche for years to come.
Meanwhile, according to Roberta Pollack Seid, author of “Never Too Thin” (Prentice Hall, 1989), the Romantic era ushered in a new slender heroine--the delicate damsel so ethereal she fainted, not unlike the lithe ballerina, who went on pointe for the first time to glide and flutter weightlessly.
Diets started appearing on backs of cookbooks and in popular literature. And, eventually, everyone was “banting”--that is, slimming on a menu of lean meat, dry toast, soft-boiled eggs and green vegetables, drummed up by a London undertaker named William Banting in the 1860s.
By the turn of the century, a new body image--the lean machine--was taking form in the dust swirls of Kitty Hawk. With so many innovations in technology, one’s figure was to be as efficient, economical, balanced and sleek as a Wright brothers airplane. So it was that “Fletcherizing”--or machine-style chewing became the rage.
“You have no idea how much real nutriment you can get into your system in five minutes if you are industrious with your munching and cheerful about it,” wrote the great masticator himself, Horace Fletcher, in 1913.
The first real slenderness craze roared in during the 1920s with the ever-so-fabulous cigarette-shaped flapper. Under the reign of this serpentine femme fatale appeared two dieting icons that would ultimately reduce the relationship between food and flesh to a eat-by-numbers game.
First, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters taught readers the meaning of the calorie. “You should know and also use the word ‘calorie’ as frequently, or more frequently, than you use the words ‘foot,’ ‘yard,’ ‘quart,’ ‘gallon’ and so forth,” she wrote in her popular “Diet and Health With Key to the Calorie” (the Reilly & Lee Co., 1918). “Instead of saying ‘one slice of bread’ or ‘a piece of pie,’ you will say ‘100 calories of bread,’ ‘350 calories of pie.’ ”
Second, Americans got the scale--penny scales, bathroom scales, food scales. Using such numerical devices, many tried the Hollywood 18-Day Diet--a 586-calorie-a-day regimen of grapefruit, oranges, Melba toast, green vegetables and hard-boiled eggs. The journal Hygeia called it a starvation diet and reported: “It is only in rare cases in which there is a loss of kidney function that the doctor ever prescribes a diet that is as low in proteins as the 18-day diet.” But who cared?
That was in 1931.
“Yes,” Schwartz says, “people were dieting during the Depression.”
In the wake of the Crash, two drastic reducing methods sprouted: the liquid fast, in the form of a milk diet, and amphetamines.
Yet, it wasn’t until after World War II that the “Age of Caloric Anxiety,” as Seid calls it, really began.
With hemlines hiking north and bathing suits getting itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, it’s no wonder. Also, there was TV. The ‘20s flapper stick-figure look influenced only certain pockets of society. But in the ‘50s, suddenly fashion standards went national (and became thinner) when TV airwaves started beaming svelte-bodied actors and actresses into American living rooms.
The diet of the decade was from a book called “Look Younger, Live Longer” (Farrar, Straus & Co., 1950), by Gayelord Hauser, and was the No. 1 American bestseller in 1951. Many dieters flipped right to the Pound-A-Day Reducing Diet, which started off with a breakfast of grapefruit and coffee. Lunch was two hard-boiled eggs with tomatoes and milk; dinner, two lean burger patties, half a head of lettuce, more milk and grapefruit.
For the next 25 years, dieters would hold up their willpower to starch like a cross to a vampire’s face. No bread. No potatoes. Not even pasta, which we then called noodles--and now consider the queen bee of diet foods.
Enter the ‘60s, when dieting went trippy. From the fields of flower children rose scarecrow mascots like Edie Sedgwick, an underground Warholite bulimic, and the 5-foot, 7 1/2-inch cover girl Twiggy at 91 pounds.
“It was about 1960 that what’s now a huge anti-fat industry started growing, selling products and convincing us that fat is ugly,” says Charles Roy Schroeder, author of “Fat Is Not a Four-Letter Word” (CHRONIMED Publishing, 1992).
In 1963, Coca-Cola brought out TAB, and that same year a Queens, N.Y., homemaker named Jean Nidetch gave birth to Weight Watchers. In the ‘60s, most folks did the Stillman diet (the book sold more than5.5 million copies), living mostly on protein and water.
But for the counterculture types, there were ways to reduce in altered states. Take the Drinking Man’s Diet, which let reducers forget their hunger pangs with, say, a dinner of martinis, steak, two glasses of dry wine and brandy. Then, too, there were drugs.
Then, the ‘70s grooved in, with cellulite. Before this, women didn’t necessarily think of their lower halves as jodhpur thighs or unattractive, dimpled, rippling masses of flab that resembled cottage cheese. It was a New York salon owner, Madame Nicole Ronsard, who broke the news, claiming that this fat, unlike the ordinary sort, was as resistant as a roach to being offed. The medical community laughed in her face, but cellulite stuck to the culture like epoxy.
Now even thin women flocked to Nutri/System (founded in 1971) or went on the Scarsdale Diet (SUBURBAN DIET DOCTOR MURDERED IN LOVERS’ QUARREL WITH PRIVATE SCHOOL HEADMISTRESS!).
The Atkins diet was the biggie, though. In his blockbuster book (which he’s just brought out again with “New” in the title), Dr. Robert Atkins advised dieters to run out and buy Ketostix. Why? To make sure they were peeing ketone bodies--a sign they had changed their body chemistry to burn fat faster. (It’s a strategy many health professionals today consider extreme and possibly dangerous.)
The ‘80s went hyper as Jane Fonda led hordes of aerobicizers in a frenetic dance to sweat out the flab.
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According to the Atlanta-based Calorie Control Council, 1986 was the all-time peak of dieting, with 65 million Americans--37% of the population--trying to slim down. We giggled with Richard Simmons, weighed in with Jenny Craig and got diarrhea on the Beverly Hills Diet, which had us living on pineapple and papaya for days on end.
In an eerie limbo, too, we tried to see how far we could go.
The late ‘80s was the heyday of the medically supervised VLC (very low calorie) liquid diets. “People lost a lot of weight fast,” says Frances Berg, founder of the Healthy Weight Journal and adjunct professor of the University of North Dakota School of Medicine. “All of them have gained it back now. And I know of two deaths in our own state.”
In the early ‘90s, the anti-diet movement gained momentum, with leaders forming support groups nationwide to help people stop depriving themselves and get back to their hunger signals. The backlash intensified as some people sued commercial weight-loss centers and others spoke out, calling fat a feminist issue. Others took up the cause of size acceptance.
In the midst of all this, medical experts came straight out and said it: Diets don’t work. Why? Because when you cut calories, you trick the body into starvation mode, lowering your metabolism, while increasing your appetite and obsession with food.
Nevertheless, by 1993 we were back on track. “Let there be Lite,” ushered in the new era.
Dietary fat was Public Enemy No. 1, according to the Calorie Control Council, as four out of five Americans consumed low-cal, sugar-free and/or reduced-fat food and beverages. And only last year a survey done by the Food Marketing Institute showed that concern about fat content reached a historical high: 65% of shoppers considered it important, more than four times as many as in 1987.
Yet, even as we speak, lite is getting old, to be replaced by fake fat. With olestra, phen-fen and leptin leaping off the headlines, we’ve got a whole new dieting dialect--and dialectic.
“We’ve had sugar substitutes and we didn’t become any thinner or eat any less sugar,” says Larry Linder, executive editor of the Tufts University Diet & Nutrition Letter. “Why would it be any different with fat substitutes?”
And when it comes to the fat hormone, don’t hold your breath; it’ll be years, if ever, before they can monkey around with your DNA or give you a skinny shot.
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So what have we learned?
A whopping one-third of the adult population is obese--20% above desirable body weight--according to the National Center for Health Statistics. And millions of others keep dieting and losing, like a broken record, trying to get within calling distance of a visible rib.
If dieting turns out to be a case of the “emperor’s new clothes,” perhaps we can exit the illusion by understanding how it serves to cover our deeper needs as a culture. The fear of losing self-control in the face of abundance is an obvious call--and spurts of furious dieting did occur in the fat years following World Wars I and II, echoing a concern by society at large not to go soft amid the plenty.
Perhaps, as some argue compellingly, the whole Kate Moss mystique fronts a more insidious intent--that dieting is a cunning control switch levied by a patriarchal society to keep women diminished, not to mention, distracted from more powerful pursuits.
But, if that’s the case, unfortunately men today have succumbed to the downsizing trend: According to data from the CDC, 19% of them are eating fewer calories and exercising more to lose weight.
Seid suggests that as women in the 1920s and 1960s suddenly gained new sexual freedoms, they may have grasped onto dieting as a handrail for balance--an instinctual reigning in of the animal appetites, as in, “at least I can control my eating.” She goes on to point out that those two slender-crazed periods, as well as the 1830s, were all characterized by political and social turmoil, an emphasis on youth and redefinition of women’s roles.
Today, too, we have our share of chaos as we gallop anonymously through cyberspace at record pace, knocking conventions over willy-nilly in the home stretch to the next millennium. Perhaps, dieting serves as a bridle, helping us feel like were still in the saddle; the scale and caliper standing in for other measures of self-worth that have fallen by the wayside.
“We live in a very secular society,” Seid says. “Dieting is one thing you at least can hang yourself onto. We don’t do it just to live longer and look better; it gives meaning and it gives structure.”
And so we keep doing it.
“My recommendation is that you try and find a healthy weight rather than a beauty ideal, make reasonable changes in your diet and live with what comes,” says obesity researcher Kelly Brownell, a professor of psychology at Yale University. “There’s a clear link between weight variability and poor health.
“But if there’s one thing I see in the future,” he says, “it’s diet fads.”