I think I have discovered why diet foods don’t work.
When the concept of diet food was first introduced back in the days when fat dinosaurs roamed the earth the stuff was pretty yucky. I remember a diet bread called Hollywood that basically tasted like sawdust. You would lose weight because you couldn’t eat the crap.
That’s an important point. We will come back to that.
Not so long ago there were the chips that had some kind of stuff that was supposed to make the fat in them indigestible. Except that what they really ended up doing was to turn you into the Rockateer. Sometimes when you least expected it if you know what I mean. Not to get too far into this but one of the phrases associated with these chips was anal leakage. ‘Nuff said.
So the problem with diet foods is this. If they truly are diet foods you should eat less of them, right? That certainly was true with the sawdust bread. But what good was that to the guys who were selling the bread? So now in this time of modern technology can’t the scientists who work on such things come up with low calorie, low fat, low carbohydrate foods that actually taste good?
And there you have the problem in a nutshell, so to speak.
If the stuff tastes good you’ll eat more of it, right? The food manufacturers will of course be delighted. But if you eat more of it you won’t lose any weight. Hmmm.
And so we have the paradox that is modern weight loss. If you like it, don’t eat it. If it tastes good spit it out. If it’s good for you it must therefore taste bad. Or maybe there is another solution.
I was watching the TV the other night when Al Roker the weatherman from NBC was on talking about his weight problems. Al, you may or may not know, weighed 350 pounds at one time. He had the stomach staple operation done and lost 150 pounds. But now he is gaining it back. And his solution? He has been losing weight on a program where he eats every three hours.
So the solution seems to be, eat more often. Somehow that seems like leaning forward into a punch.
I know that somewhere inside of me there is a guy the size of Mick Jagger. I also know I will never ever see him.
