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Eighteen or twenty years ago, I was into high protein, high fat, low
carbohydrate diets, courtesy of the original Atkins Diet Revolution and, to
an even greater extent, Stillman's Quick Weight Loss Diet (which I must
admit I still prefer to Atkins but that's merely personal taste). At the
time, every aisle was loaded with labels proclaiming Low Fat or Reduced Fat.
I didn't care about fat and sought much different information.
Unfortunately, low fat was "in" and I felt alone and abandoned.
With a certain sense of resentment, I tracked down the carbohydrate costs
of a wide variety of food, keeping a sharp eye on ingredients, calorie
levels, and nutritional values. Certain items were strangely emblazoned with
banners announcing low fat: pasta sauce, potato chips, candy bars, and ice
cream. I was puzzled: how could certain foods, full of fat to their very
core, be low fat? How could all the fat be removed and there be anything
left?
I became fascinated with certain labels. Have you ever, for example, read
the labels on those flavored coffee creamers? Zero fat. Zero carbohydrates.
Zero protein. Zero calories. How can anything we put in our mouths have zero
calories? A negligible amount, maybe, but absolute zero? What is in that
stuff? Or is it virtual food, existing only in our mind's eye as a kind of
edible hologram?
Mercifully, the low fat craze died its natural death. Atkins and similar
regimens took over and the low fat labels were reprinted (corporate
recycling at its finest) to read Low Carb. Suddenly, everywhere you looked,
there were foods recast as low carb - again with the pasta sauce, the potato
chips, the candy bars, and the ice cream.
I was curious. Had the manufacturers taken out all those carbs and put
the fat back in? Where did those carbs go? Are there vast dumpsites in the
desert where unwanted carbs are buried - next to worn tires, plastic bags,
and nuclear waste?
Once more, I wonder: what is left in those boxes, cans, and jars? Why am
I paying $1.19 per ounce for something that really isn't anything?
Then I started to figure it out (sometimes I'm a little slow). The food
hadn't really changed at all, just the packaging. Food labels are like those
ubiquitous Internet sales letters. They trumpet headlines that catch our
interest because they are in synch with our desires and goals. Is that
accidental? Of course not. Highly paid copywriters choose their headlines
with great care, buying into the national "obsession o' the day", floating
on the coattails of the latest fad.
Many of us are so desperate to control our weight that we buy into the
promises like the unaware followers we are: bleating sheep heading for a
precipice with no thought of questioning our leaders or striking out in a
different direction.
The unspoken secret is that the label doesn't matter. If we want to lose
weight, we don't eat pasta sauce, potato chips, candy bars, or ice cream.
Period. No matter what the package says. Deep in our psyche, we know what we
can eat (very little) and what we can't (a whole bunch). Allowing ourselves
to be misled is only a fashionably acceptable way to fool ourselves, and we
know it. We buy into the hype because we want, so badly, to believe. We want
to think that we are doing the right thing, that we're really trying, that
our motivation is pure.
Our weaknesses are being exploited by the packagers and the super store
con men. Our ambivalence, and the overwhelming need to avoid the very real
discomfort of effective dieting, invests the misguidance of food labels with
an illusion of truth.
Like our dimwitted ovine cousins, we, too, are eventually fleeced.
Virginia Bola is a licensed psychologist and an admitted diet fanatic.
She specializes in therapeutic reframing and the effects of attitudes and
motivation on individual goals. The author of The Wolf at the Door: An
Unemployment Survival Manual, and a free ezine, The Worker's Edge, she is
currently working on a psychologically-based weight control book: Diet with
an Attitude. She can be reached at
http://dietwithanattitude.blogspot.com
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/
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