I've mentioned in the Introduction and my bio that I spent more than twenty-five years dieting, one diet after another. One day it came to a point where I'd had enough. I was at the end of my rope. I am writing a book about that, called Take Back Your Life. Following is a short version of the first part of my story.
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"Mary, get away from that cupboard," my mother would say. "Don't you know you shouldn't eat between meals? Dinner isn't for another hour and a half."

Years later and far away in New York, as I lay contemplating my dilemma--fifty pounds of fat that had driven me to desperation and half a lifetime of dieting that had culminated in that depressing scenario--her words resounded in my head. Even her tone came ringing through, understanding of my momentary lapse but unyielding on what was a matter of principle with her.

I have spent half of my life on diets and at least as many years studying nutrition. My life studying the nutritional aspects of food was set on course early, inspired by a nutrition-minded mother who plied us with blackstrap molasses and mint-flavored cod liver oil (tasted as bad as it sounds). And, in the course of our daily activities, she also dispensed tidbits of the latest study she had read on the subject. Recently, I have spent another two years of post-graduate study in preparation for this book. And I've learned a great deal from all of these.

From that beginning, I built a body of knowledge over many years through study and experience. I came to know every vitamin, nutritional supplement and diet, and how they worked in the body. I remained a picture of health for years without needing to visit a doctor and, in those rare instances when an illness did appear, I was my own doctor. I've evolved in my understanding since then and take very few supplements now-more about that later-but it was a vital knowledge base for me on the road to understanding food.

I could never have grasped the joys of food, though, without the years I spent growing up on a farm in Central New York, where nature's food basket was within reach of my outstretched hand-the freshest home-grown vegetables; juiciest farm-raised pork; wild berries; succulent apples; prunes, pears and cherries; and gallons of milk and cream from our Guernsey cows with which we made fresh butter, custard and frozen, wild-strawberry mousse. These years were an inspiration for me later.

After I grew up, left the farm and went to live in New York City, dieting became a way of life for me. But my diets, unlike my nutrition studies, were not all successful. Over time, none of them were and I gained weight two or three times--fifteen, then twenty, and finally, fifty pounds--that I then had to lose.

Each time, I found it terribly hard to lose weight--it just wouldn't come off, even if I ate miniscule amounts. This is what medical researchers call 'insulin resistance.' That means that the more fat a person has, the harder it is to lose weight. Your body just won't burn up the food or your fat. I think of it more as your body becoming extremely efficient at it-burning up one or two ounces of food for an obese person would be the same as burning up a whole meal for someone else who wasn't fat. So, I didn't lose weight even when I exercised and ate almost nothing.

And I knew, too, from my nutrition studies, that if I stayed fat, I was facing the prospect of a premature death in a few years. Heart attacks, stroke and heart failure, certain kinds of cancer, kidney failure and full-blown diabetes kill the obese far more than slim people. I showed signs of approaching cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and all this had developed as I gained weight.

For me, the turning point came six years ago when, due to my most recent diet failure, I gained those fifty pounds. There I was, feeling depressed and looking so bad I couldn't look in a mirror, while my health was taking a dangerous downward turn that I had no chance of reversing unless I lost the weight I couldn't lose. A catch-22. I was in deep trouble with no lifejacket in sight.

I knew what I had to do: go on a diet.
Not again. Not another diet. Continual dieting is like stretching a rubber band, easing off and then restretching it. The first few times you do it, the elasticity is strong: you can wax very enthusiastic at the prospect of looking good again and you can marshal all your willpower and determination to pull off this feat with great effect, getting your looks and figure back. After nearly killing yourself, depriving yourself of food and exercising like mad, you get back in shape and look like yourself again. Voila! You, beautiful/handsome you! You look and feel great! That's the first few times.

Out of desperation, I decided to do the only thing I hadn't yet tried--I decided to trust real food again. (To be continued in next edition . . . )

© 2008 Mary M. Stock

- If you drink a diet soda with a candy bar, the calories in the candy bar are cancelled out by the diet soda.*

- Free food, like samples at the supermarket or finger food offered at meetings, doesn't have calories. When you buy food--actually pay money for it--it's a conscious decision, a commitment. That's real food. Only that food has calories. (This is the absolute best for getting bits and pieces of things that you were never meant to have while on your diet, or just while trying to stay the same weight.)

- If it says 'natural' it doesn't have calories. Like soda that's made with real fruit flavor (not artificial orange, for instance), real cane sugar(not high-fructose corn syrup)and carbonated spring water. Or those 'bars' sold in the upmarket supermarkets and specialty shops. They're made with nuts and real sugar and everything natural. So they can't have calories, can they?!

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* This gem, from Diet Jokes and Food Humor. The others are mine.

A new study shows that eating a high-fat, high-carb meal produces damaging cellular changes that are greater and longer-lasting in obese people than in normal-weight people. That means that obese people suffer more inflammation and oxidation--forms of stress in their body--than thin people. This makes hardening of the arteries, heart disease and stroke far more likely for the obese than for slim people.

So what? If you're on a high-protein, high-fat diet, it doesn't apply to you, right? Wrong. This meal was made up of a large hamburger, large cola, large French fries and large piece of apple pie. Take away the French fries and apple pie, substitute a diet cola, and you have a high-protein diet meal. The carbs may have some effect, but without them, I believe the damage done is the same. It happened to me when I was fat. Read my story about this at the top of the "Diets Don't Work" Squidoo .

Previous studies show that meals with lots of fruit and fiber, yet with still the same amount of energy (calories) in it--1800 calories, a big meal--produced NO inflammation and oxidation stress. This indicates that if you are obese you may still be able to avoid increased chances of hardening of the arteries, heart disease and stroke just by eating different types of food, including fruit.

Have you heard of the garlic diet? You don't lose much weight, but from a distance, your friends think you look thinner.
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Diet Humor and Jokes

Introduction

This space is for scientific studies and kindred other things. Ordinarily, you wouldn't find me using studies. Too many aren't worth the paper or Word page they're written on. If they aren't based on a survey questionnaire (who tells the truth on a survey? "How much do you weigh?" How tall are you?" "Write down everything you ate over the past week." Women lie about their weight, men lie about their height. We all do it. It's human. And who can remember every last thing they ate today, let alone a week ago?) Others have too few participants to make them meaningful; they're constructed badly so that their conclusions aren't justified. Or the research sponsor is a manufacturer whose product type is being tested and it just happens to finish with flying colors.

There are some studies that do carry some weight, though. Everything in this column is here because it rings true through my personal filter of twenty-five years of experience dieting [yes, hands-on experience over a long time matters, more than studies in most cases] and because I've checked out the study and found it to be a good one.

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A Comparison of Four Famous Diets.
Some researchers wanted to see how four diets we've all heard about fared on long-term weight loss. They picked four different types: WeightWatchers (low calorie), Atkins (low carb), Ornish (low fat) and the Zone (low glycemic load). Then they signed up volunteers and randomly assigned them to one of the diets.*

The first thing that happened was that 35% - 50% of them couldn't stay on the diets. They quit before losing anything. This happened even though the participants had volunteered--they wanted to do this. That's a story in itself. If your body is so taxed by the regimen you're on that it refuses to put up with it, then what good is it? Well, you might say, the people didn't have enough willpower. If it takes extraordinary willpower, very, very few people will stay on a diet. And almost all the rest, after they lose the weight, will go back to eating the way they were earlier, it seems to me. That's what happened to me and anybody I ever knew who dieted. And that's why these initial percentages are more important than you might realize. Thirty-five to fifty percent are huge numbers who couldn't stay on these diets (or any diet?).

Those in the study who did stay on their diet maintained an average loss of between 4.6 and 7.3 pounds over a year. These figures were self-reported, so you should probably shave a pound or two off those numbers. (It's human to want to look good.) In many cases, they may have lost more, but regained some--maybe more than once--and ended up with a net loss of about that much. The head of the study, a diet researcher at Tufts University, called these numbers "underwhelming." Others said it shows just how hard, or even useless, dieting is for losing weight permanently.

For me, personally, the most permanent weight loss--before my conversion to nondieting five years ago--came in my twenties. I wasn't on a diet, exactly. I did more like what I'm doing now--eating at mealtimes and controlling how much I ate. For instance, I had one or two ginger snaps for 'sweets' in a day, never more. I didn't normally eat dessert, except on holidays and special occasions. Gradually, year upon year, I registered two pounds less at the end of it than I was at the beginning. Over seven years, I lost 14 pounds, going from 122 down to 108 pounds. Now, THAT was slow-but-good weight loss. It was the biggest weight change I'd made since puberty. And it lasted for many years until, a few years after moving to New York City, I started a cycle of dieting and gaining weight.

Coming up in the next edition: Why my body didn't lose more--in fact, couldn't tolerate more of a loss--the whole story.
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* The study, by Michael Dansinger et al., was called "Comparison of the Atkins, Ornish, Weight Watchers, and Zone Diets for Weight Loss and Heart Disease Risk Reduction: A Randomized Trial," and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) 1/5/2005, Vol. 293 Issue 1, p43-53.

**Spake, Amanda. "Stop Dieting!" U. S. News & World Report. 40.2 (2006): 60-2, 65-6. An article that discussed this study and others.

Diet books and diet supplements, foods and paraphernalia bring in more than $40 billion a year in America. That's a lot of moolah. Who started this diet book craze? It was all of us Americans, of course. We bought the first such book, and the millions that came after it. But the one who authored the first book was Dr. Robert Atkins, the cardiologist-turned-diet guru. There must have been other diet books before his, but nothing on the huge order of the Atkins books. There would be fifteen Atkins diet books before he finished.

In 1972, Dr. Atkins published The Diet Revolution, and a new world was born. It took America by storm. He told people they could eat lots of high-fat (53% of the day's diet), high-protein food. Atkins claimed that so long as they largely stayed away from carbohydrates, dieters could lose weight and still have good health, with no heart or circulation problems. This went against everything other doctors and researchers preached, but Atkins swore that he lived that way and was none the worse for it. According to him, his heart was in great condition and his arteries were clean--no plaque or cholesterol (fat) deposits. And of course, he stayed thin, he said.

How the Diet Works On Your Body. What was so appealing about this diet, from the dieter's viewpoint, was the taste of the fat and both the taste and filling quality of the protein. My mouth watered when I even smelled a broiling porterhouse steak! I was hooked. And I became totally convinced, too, that carbohydrates were my downfall. Just like he said. At the time, the evidence appeared to be in every mouthful of carbohydrates I ate. Those were the days. I look back now and wonder how I could have thought that way.

So, (1) I could lose weight and not be hungry doing it. This was probably the most important part of the Atkins diet for me and, I imagine, everybody else who used, or uses, his diet. (2) At the same time, the weight came off. It definitely worked, in the short term, although depression often set in. I just gritted my teeth and put up with that.

Personal Appearance Changes Caused by the Diet This diet isn't kind to people over 40. I noticed that many dieters, especially those over 40, got vertical folds in their facial skin. One news anchor at the broadcast network where I worked went on Atkins and lost weight, but the vertical folds in his facial skin weren't attractive. It aged him. So, too, with Dr. Atkins.

Atkins's book came out just before the obesity crisis began in the 70s, putting him in perfect position, with his growing influence over Americans' eating habits, to bring weight to bear (no pun intended) on the nation's growing fat problem. Yes, his diet was that popular. At its peak in 2003 - 2004, 30 million people were following the Atkins diet. From 1980 through 2003, obesity in America went from 13% to 33%--over a 250% increase. All the time, Atkins was writing and selling his books, with absolutely no effect on the obesity rate, except that it was going up at an unprecedented clip.

How much of that was due to Atkins's diet isn't known. But, with 30 million adherents, the diet surely could have brought the country's obesity down if it had brought about permanent weight loss. It didn't. Over and over, people regained the weight they'd lost and started again.

In the 1990s, I became one of those adherents, an Atkins-diet believer. I felt so successful when I lost weight on the diet. But then I regained that weight and more. I could have gotten off this merry-go-round a lot sooner than I did, but I never saw the connection between the two things. That was a critical mistake.

Each time, I considered the diet a success. The weight stayed off for a year, two, or even three. But there would come a time, always, when my body refused to continue with the Atkins regimen of almost no vegetables, bread and such. That's when I found myself gorging on carbohydrates, especially sweet rolls and desserts, in addition to the high-calorie foods allowed on the diet. The first time, I gained about 15 pounds, then 30 pounds, and later, 60 pounds. It wasn't a matter of choice. It seemed at the time that it was, but I can see now how compelling my body's needs were. When I faced the prospect of a third diet--this time to lose 60 pounds--I could no longer bring myself to go back on the diet. I'd burned out. It was then that I began a new way of life--one of nondieting.

The Atkins Diet empire phenomenon was ending about the same time, coincidentally, but in a very unorthodox way. One day in April 2003, with his diet at the peak of its popularity, Dr. Atkins fell on the sidewalk outside his office in New York and died after spending some time in a coma. There were many who guessed his fall had been caused by a heart attack. No one could know for sure, because his wife would not authorize an autopsy.

At his death, the medical examiner's statement said he weighed 258 pounds, which would make him obese, and had a history of heart disease. His wife hotly contested the obesity, saying much of the extra weight was due to water retention from organ failure. Later, she acknowledged what he never would during his lifetime: he had plaque buildup in his arteries and veins. Both of these conditions are associated with high-fat diets and heart attacks.

Dr. Atkins's diet empire was bringing in $100 million a year when he died. It was made up of everything from diet books to foods and supplements and even ocean cruises. In July 2005, Atkins Nutritionals, the company that oversaw it all, filed for bankruptcy. In the shockingly short time of two years, it had gone from the top to the depths. But Dr. Atkins's legacy is secure: he is credited with starting the low-carbohydrate craze, which lives on with a diminished, but significant influence. From what I have seen, as a sales ploy, it helps the manufacturers' bottom lines considerably, but does nothing for our bottoms.

"Inside me lives a skinny woman crying to get out. But I can usually shut her up with cookies..."*

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* From dietjokes.co.uk

A lot of people (and drug companies)were hailing Rimonabant as the Holy Grail of diet drugs. Sanofi-Avantis, its maker, praised it to Wall Street as a "$5 billion blockbuster drug."* Dieters who had heard about it were chomping at the bit to get their hands on it. It was touted as the only diet pill that actually works, that cuts the appetite so much, the diet can go on and on with no desire for food. It is available on the Internet and in Europe now. It is marketed in Europe as Acomplia. It was scheduled to come on the U.S. market sometime in 2007.

Comes the rude awakening: A new study has just come out showing that those taking Rimonabant are two-and-a-half times more likely to stop taking the drug because of depression and three times more likely to stop the drug because of anxiety than people taking a harmless pill in the study. These were people who weren't normally depressed, anxious or suicidal. The FDA concluded it had increased risks of suicide and its advisory panel has recommended not approving it yet. It has told Sanofi it may be approvable down the road.

Rimonabant is a drug that began development as an anti-smoking drug until they noticed the new nonsmokers also lost a lot of weight from just not wanting to eat. (The fact that it was rejected as an anti-smoking drug by the FDA and therefore had no other sales market might also have had something to do with it.)

The real kicker, to me, is that, with all the risks, the diet drugs--there are three prescription drugs in the U.S.--show only modest weight loss anyway, about 11 pounds over a year. What they don't say is that the weight doesn't stay off, as it doesn't with any severely calorie-cutting diet.

There have been a lot of athlete deaths due to using amphetamines (which are used both for energy and dieting) and other such drugs. Just do a Google search on "amphetamines athlete death" and see how many come up.

The worst thing they do is to perpetuate the myth that you can lose weight quickly and permanently with them. If this lens is about anything, it's to telescope my experiences into a shortened learning curve (no pun intended) for all of you dieters. Take advantage of my 25 years of hands-on experience: diet pills don't work. They all seem to work, at first--for a week or two. But bad reactions come on within a week or two, if not before, and you are forced to stop. How do I know? I tried them myself, over and over and over again. This went on for several years, with me trying all types. Finally, I was absolutely forced, by bad physical and mental reactions, along with a stalemate in my overweight situation, to give up on them. I didn't go easily.

So, while Rimonabant looked super-good at first--people tolerated the drug for a year or more at a time--the trouble is coming out in the wash.

A medical school dean in the UK said, referring to the Rimonabant study: "Selling anti-obesity drugs over the counter [in the U.S., one version will be OTC when approved] will perpetuate the myth that obesity can be fixed simply by popping a pill and could further undermine the efforts to promote healthy living, which is the ONLY long-term escape from obesity" [capital letters mine].**

I couldn't have said it better.

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* Weightloss, Dr."Class-Action Lawsuit Filed Against Sanofi Over Zimulti." in Zimultiblog. Dec. 2, 2007. See Zimultiblog.com

** Most info here is taken from an article by Steven Reinberg on HealthDay.com "Diet Drug Rimonabant Tied to Depression, Anxiety," Nov. 15, 2007. See it at HealthDay