These days, a woman’s size is much more than a number on a scale. For many of us it is deeply entrenched in issues that have as much to do with what’s in our heads as on our hips. Body size has become a sort of gauge for personal, sexual, and even intellectual worth. Women—and men, for that matter—who are constantly concerned about weight do not have an easy time of it.
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It’s understandable how a high school reunion or a poolside vacation can send you into a panic over unwanted pounds. And it’s tempting to dabble with crash diets to shed them quickly. Diets can be effective—albeit unhealthy—for a few weeks or even months.
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The first thing to go is your healthy metabolism—your calorieburning speed. Within just two days of starting a diet, your body will begin to burn calories more slowly—that is, to defend itself against impending starvation and hold on to its fat. In a research study at the University of Pennsylvania, a group of volunteers went on a punishing 420-calorie liquid diet. A month later, the researchers checked their calorie-burning speed, finding it had dropped by an average of 20 percent. That means they were burning about 500 calories fewer each day.
The second classic dieting pitfall is the binge. When a diet sends your body into survival mode, it tries desperately to hang on to the fat you have and, naturally, will try to devour every morsel of food that you lay your eyes upon. When your distant ancestors came upon a bounty of food there was no guarantee when the next would arrive, so they took advantage of the opportunity to stock up on calories. Flash forward to today. Although you may have deprived your body of calories for only days or weeks, it will tend to binge when you come upon edible gold mines. When presented with a fat- and calorie-dense plate of cookies, you are virtually powerless to stop with one. This is known as “restrained-eater phenomenon.” The easiest way to avoid this automatic binge mechanism is not to restrain yourself in the first place.
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To lose weight and keep it off, you’ll want to focus less on how much you eat and more on what you eat. For most of us, weight on our hips or thighs does not come simply from excess calories. The cause is much more specific, as researchers at a Veterans Administration home in Los Angeles graphically proved. They inserted a tiny needle into the derrieres of a group of volunteers and carefully removed samples of body fat to send to a laboratory. Chemical analysis showed that their body fat did not come from bread, pasta, or potatoes, for the most part. The fat on their bodies mirrored the fats they had been eating. So men who had had plenty of chicken or beef in their diets ended up with remnants of animal fat, almost unchanged, in their own body fat. Those who were keen on olive oil or fried foods had the remains of vegetable fats stored in their behinds. In other words, your body uses the fat you eat to build your own fat layer.
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We’ve all had mornings when we feel hungry barely an hour after breakfast. Or evenings when we’re looking through cabinets and refrigerator shelves to cure cravings that linger after dinner.
Moments like these can feel devastating to dieters. “How can I be hungry when I just ate?” they ask. It feels as though all of your thoughts revolve around food. There’s an easy answer. Hunger doesn’t only arise when your stomach is empty; it also occurs when your body isn’t properly nourished.
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Your body doesn’t long for potato chips; your taste buds do. New innovations in “fake fats” such as olestra, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1996, or in reduced-fat ice creams seemed like the answer to dieters’ prayers. All taste and hardly any calories. But they had no effect whatsoever on the epidemic of obesity. What these products really do, besides displacing healthy foods and adding unwanted chemicals, is keep your desire for fat turned up high. The more fat—or foods that taste like it—you eat all week, the more you’ll want tomorrow.
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Are you genetically programmed to desire chocolate? Are genes the cause of your Brussels sprouts aversion? Is there something in your chromosomes conspiring against your efforts to slim down? Well, yes and no. You do have built-in calorie-burning mechanisms so that if you have large quantities of fat in your diet, your body has certain methods for handling it. Generally, if you are consuming more fat than necessary, the excess easily turns to body fat. The rare individual may be fortunate enough to stay very thin no matter what he or she eats. In this case, “thin genes” probably dominate the family tree. For example, one study found that about one in every fourteen people has the gene for an unusually rapid metabolism, and it is passed from parent to child. In other families, a gene that causes a slower metabolism can make family members more susceptible to weight gain.
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Tastes are genetic to some extent. Scientists can tell a lot about your food preferences by giving you a little taste of a substance called PROP (6-n-propylthiouracil). It leaves most people with an unpleasant bitterness on their tongue, yet one in four people cannot detect it. Those who can taste it are generally more sensitive to many flavors. For example, too much sugar tastes unbearably sweet, cabbage may taste awfully bitter, and fatty foods may seem overwhelmingly . . . fatty.
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The sweet tooth all children have lingers on for some people, especially women. “Chocoholics” are easy to spot. They may want a soda, or want a slice of pizza, but they need chocolate. It’s okay.
Although sugar is one of the most common cravings women report, the occasional chocolate bar is not the cause of serious weight problems, and some forms of chocolate are modest in fat. Sweet iced tea or lemonade won’t do much harm either. But if your sugar is constantly teamed up with fat in the form of endless candy bars, cake, and ice cream, it is time to readjust your diet to include more filling, fiber-rich foods.
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