GetSlimZone.com

author: Malcolm Evans

Modern dieting fashions often follow ideas that have been tried before. Dieters need to understand the history of diets.

When it comes to selling diets, it’s always “new”, always ‘revolutionary” and it is always “the diet to end all diets.”

But let’s take a close look at the history of dieting because, as that great American man of letters George Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – and those words are as true of eating behavior and obesity as they are of any other area of human history.

There is pretty much general agreement on the physiological creation of obesity. How many millions of people have starved to death down human history, no-one knows. But evolution grew to favor those who were adept at converting easy food pickings into fat stores for survival during the lean times.

And throughout much of history until only quite recent times, for the vast majority of people the major issue with food has always been getting enough of it, not unwanted fatness. Until about 200 years ago, most guidelines on diet were mainly to do with custom and culture, particularly issues of religious observance.

Prior to this time, various early Greek and later European sages, when commenting on the moral benefits of relative moderation and temperance, also noticed some of the apparent health benefits but health was rarely the major focus of their discourses.

It is said that William, the Norman Conqueror of Britain, was spurred by his failing riding abilities to attempt to lose weight. He tried drinking extra wine as a substitute for food, foreshadowing some modern dieters’ habits of attempting to suppress appetite with alcohol or cigarettes.

It was in the late 1700′s that social commentators first started noticing a rising level of obesity in Europe and the US, this being the time of new wealth creation and the fast rise of new middle classes keen to acquire and flaunt their money. Until then obesity was a rarity, a curiosity, or generally a sign of affluence, reserved for the mighty of status and mighty in bulk of the state, church, or commerce.

Some historians pinpoint the emergence of modern-style dieting to the 1829 vegetarian and wholegrain advice of New Jersey preacher Rev. Sylvester Graham. However, Graham’s advice was heavily framed in Presbyterian moralism about lustings of the flesh and it is perhaps to a slightly later figure that we better look as the Father of Modern Dieting.

William Banting was a London undertaker in late middle-age who despaired of being able ever again to bend to tie his shoe laces or even walk forwards down a flight of stairs. He then adopted a high-protein and high-fat diet, supplemented with some vegetables, as recommended to him by his doctor – and lost several stones over a period of a year or so. So enthused was Banting that he published the world’s first dieting blockbuster, his Letter on Corpulence. Banting was not so much concerned about any perceived major health risks of his obesity, more the sheer discomfort of immobility and the many minor associated ailments.

Like so many dieting books that have followed, the Letter of 1862 was flabby, overwritten, repetitive, smug and desperately deficient in any detailed scientific explanation……Banting is indeed the Founding Father of a dubious publishing tradition!

However, to be fair, Banting lost a considerable amount of weight – and kept it off (and he didn’t publicize for monetary gain). Yet his achievement is the starting point of a heated debate that has been central to the Dieting Industry’s evolution ever since.

Banting put his success down to abstaining from ‘starch and saccharine matter”. This has been seized upon by legions of low-carb diet advocates every since as seminal proof that high-protein, high fat-and low-carbohydrate dieting is the Holy Grail of weight-loss.

There is, though, a glaring problem in this contention. Whilst Banting quantifies in some detail his diet consumption, he simply generalizes about what went on beforehand. We hear of beer and pies and pastries and bread – and we can only speculate as to the quantities.

Was his weight-loss simply due to eating less overall food, or was there a magic in his particular food method? From his evidence we cannot know. And ever since this argument has raged between advocates of one diet or another diet – is there a particular effect of limited carbohydrates in raising metabolism, accelerating weight-loss and facilitating weight-control?

But does it even matter? What if all this debate about whether certain foods have certain effects is simply a sideshow which maintains an unhealthy focus on food and eating? Could it be that there are higher food and dieting truths which should take precedence? – Namely that the vast majority of people know only too well the fundamentals of healthy eating, recognizing instinctively what they need and what is merely consumerism, or just plain gross.

Also, perhaps it is far more the emotional and cultural factors which keep excess weight in place than the precise mechanics of exact foods, with the simple truth being that an excess of intake will result in an ongoing excess of stored fat. And, to take it forward one more step, there are apparently more and more people realizing that a dieting-lifestyle obsession can in fact be a contributor to obesity.

Whatever, the diet bandwagon was rolling and German doctor Felix Niemeyer very soon subtly altered Banting’s advice by adding in a low-fat prescription, thus sending the two strands of protein-and-fat-in-the-diet and restricted-fat-in-the-diet on their divergent paths.

By the late 19th Century, dawning health concerns over excessive overweight were being matched by high-Victorian moral prudishness. It was no longer cool to be rich and flaunt it with a paunch. It is no coincidence that the first recorded characterizations of Anorexia were drawn at this time amongst the daughters of the rich.

Around 1900, when insurance companies proclaimed a relationship between obesity and morbidity, fat and health became generally linked in the popular consciousness.

In the early part of the 20th Century, the growth of bigger government – a more all-pervasive state – led to great advances in public health in both the US and the UK. Along with many epochal advances in social welfare there came a series of general and aspirational announcements on what the ‘ideal diet” should be. As ever down to the present day, the public generally paid not a blind bit of notice to such exhortations, unsupported as they were by the excitement of any hard sell from the Diet Industry.

And hard sell there certainly was. The first quarter of the new century saw everything from thyroid extracts from dead animals, to relatively harmless (and useless) herbal extracts, through to the newly developed amphetamine drugs being promoted as obesity wonder cures.

Two key factors fueled the fast growing Diet Industry. The first was a relative abundance of food in the West; today we live in an era of global nutritional imbalance – there are roughly the same number of people who are overfed as are underfed.

The second was the glamor of Hollywood, with its perfect stars of perfect physique. To an increasing number of observers, dieting has always remained more of a slave to fashion, despite its lip-service to health issues.

Flying the flag for moderation in the 1920′s, bringing the old-style abstinence-is-close-to-godliness messages forward into a new era, was US doctor Lulu Hunt Peters. She added the new science of calorie counting to traditional self-denial, advocated lifelong restricted calories via an obsessively closely-controlled regime. For Peters it was not just overindulgence which was the sin; physical evidence of overweight was abhorrent.

In these ways best-seller Peters could be seen as being the Founding Mother of what modern weight control charity The Weight Foundation calls Lifer Dieting, referring to those who are permanently dieting and cannot envisage without catastrophizing a single day off their strict routine.

Taking stock, we are now have background on the formation of four of the major strands of the modern Dieting Industry: high-fiber/whole-food, high-protein with high fat, low-fat and, fourthly, rigid overall calorie control.

Another major tradition had already become a widespread dieting phenomenon by the time of Peters’ pious exaltations to abstinence.

William Hay came up with the idea that certain food groups of his designation should only be eaten in strictly defined pairings. Food combination diets also still recur frequently in fresh guises because it is exceptionally easy to come up with new combinations to recommend.

The second half of the 20th Century saw it all trotted again in endless variations – the high fiber F-Plan, the carnivore’s delight of first Stillman and then Atkins, low fat in numerous guises, new combinations with the Beverley Hills and simple deprivation endlessly repacked, usually with ‘celebrity” endorsement (and often with an increased emphasis on low carbs, or somehow differentiated carbs).

So, are we scraping the barrel by now for new diets? Well, the big bandwagon rolling on in to the 21st Century has been carbs with a new twist. Picking up on the Glycemic Index, developed to assist diabetics with the timed glucose-level effects of various foods, this concept has been dragged into the realm of dieting advice. But is it just a case of new words, old ideas – aren’t we back with Banting’s ‘starch and saccharine matter”?

In fact, we could go back a good deal further. The world’s oldest surviving medical document, the Ebers Papyrus from 1550 B.C. Egypt, contains a recipe for an anti-diabetic diet of wheatgerm and okra.

It’s got a long history, this dieting business. There are grains of truth here and there but it’s not a particularly proud history when it comes to lasting weight control.

Certain diets will make people lose weight. Consistently consuming less energy than you expend will definitely result in weight loss. Diets just happen to be notoriously hopeless at achieving the one thing that really matters – moving away from a poor or obsessive relationship with food, to a good and relaxed relationship. Mind-shifts do not happen in the stomach.

Weightfoundation.com
The Weight Foundation secretary Malcolm Evans is the author of this article. Article Source:
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author: Michael Bens

There are many diet plans out there today, and the striking thing about a lot of them is how complex they are. Gone are the days of just counting calories. Today’s diet plans come complete with a theory, a philosophy, a comprehensive diet plan, and exercise plan, and, more than likely, products that you can buy. In a way, that’s a good thing — it means that the theories behind these diets have been well thought out, and that the diets themselves are likely to promote good health as well as weight loss.

On the other hand, there are some pitfalls to having and trying to follow a complex diet plan — namely, it’s complicated and can be hard to follow! How many of us really have time to learn a complex new way of eating?

If you have to lose fifty or a hundred pounds, and your weight is severely affecting your health and well-being, you might be able to justify the time and expense. If it’s a matter of wanting to lose five, ten or twenty pounds, however, how likely are you to subscribe fully to a whole new way of eating? Not very likely, is the answer!

Just say no to white foods…

So here, then, is a quick, easy solution to your weight loss needs, if you are in need of a “quick’ fix that doesn’t require too much thought. Just stop eating white foods. It’s as simple as that. If it’s white, don’t eat it.

Of course, there is one notable exception you may want to make: Milk. Milk is white, and, especially if you’re a woman, pregnant, or still growing, it may be detrimental to give up milk even for a short time. So let’s modify that advice a little: no white foods that are solid. Or even, if you like, no white starches.

That’s what it really comes down to. If you do away with all the white starches — white pasta, white rice, potatoes — and replace them with whole grain choices, over time, you are almost guaranteed to lose weight. This isn’t like the Atkins plan, that asks you to give up most carbohydrates. You can still eat brown rice, for example, and whole wheat bread and pasta. The white starches are refined, and they have the highest glycemic index. That means that they might cause insulin deficiency over time — they can even lead you to develop diabetes in the long term. In the short term, these white starches cause you to pack on the pounds — especially around your belly, which is the worst possible place to carry excess weight in terms of heart health.

If you want to go a little further with this plan, and lose weight a little more quickly, try giving up another category of white foods — fats that are solid at room temperature. This means no butter or margarine (technically, butter is white, not yellow — dairy companies dye it yellow to make it more appealing!) and no cheese (most cheese is white — and giving up white cheese doesn’t mean you should bulk up on cheddar!). Cutting out these high fat foods — particularly if they happen to be an “issue’ for you — will let you lose weight a lot faster.

The “Good” White Foods

Of course, there are some white foods that are actually good for weight loss. Consider lean white chicken breast, for example, or white fish such as cod or halibut, or even egg white (the leanest part of the egg)! There is nothing much to be gained by avoiding those foods, and over the long term, you probably shouldn’t. The point of the “no white foods’ diet, though, is to give you a simple formula that you can apply anywhere. In a restaurant or at a special event — no problem — eat what you want, as long as it isn’t white! There are no points to count up, no rules (except that one) to remember.

And here’s the hidden benefit — if you’re not eating any white foods, it leaves more room for “colorful’ foods that aren’t white — vegetables, for example, particularly yellow, orange and dark green ones. These are much healthier for your heart and, indeed, your whole body than their white equivalent, potatoes and starch. Not all white foods deserve to be avoided, but the benefits of this simple and effective approach can be great nonetheless.

Authored by Michael Bens. For more great information on weight loss, diets, nutrition, and living a great healthy life style visit Gabae Weight Loss This Nutrition article is provided by Articleteller – The Free Article Directory http://www.articleteller.com