DIET | DETECTIVE^®

When you don’t sleep enough and wake up feeling exhausted, you are on a weight-gaining cycle. You skip breakfast in order to sleep a little longer and grab a doughnut or muffin on the way to work. For lunch you choose a cheeseburger with fries and a Coke. You really need those calories to keep you going through an afternoon of desk work, Around 4 pm your eyes begin to close but you know if you eat something sweet you won’t be caught napping on your keyboard.

For most people, it is very hard to stop eating when you have eaten enough. You clean your plates as your mothers taught even though the portion of food served for one person today would have fed your entire family when you were younger. You announce that you are full and cannot eat another bite as the dessert menu is presented and then order dessert. Tasting dish after dish at buffets and accepting uncountable numbers of appetizers during a reception or cocktail party long after any feeling of hunger has stopped is the norm. And even though hunger is long gone, you continue to munch and nibble to satisfy a need to feel better, entertain yourself, socialize, or relieve boredom.

There must be as many excuses for not following a diet as there are excuses for not exercising. Usually the excuses fall into predictable categories: no time, too boring, life gets in the way, it is more pleasurable to eat what one wants and to do any thing else except get on that treadmill.

The problem is that despite the compelling nature of the excuses, the scale fails to take them into account when measuring weight. The fact that the sale at the local department store took precedence over the gym, or the chocolate fudge cake served at an office birthday party tasted better than rice cakes, makes little difference on weigh-in day.

A few weeks ago I was staying at an inn that was near the Appalachian trail in Pennsylvania. About a dozen of us did 4-5 hour day hikes along the trail, returning to the inn for meals and sleep. The inn was also a golf resort and hosted large groups of avid golfers, mostly men, who spent the day playing 18 hours of golf. We all ate an early breakfast choosing from a large variety of foods on the  buffet tables. An observer of the food choices of the golfing and hiking groups ( me) could have told the two groups apart even if one was not wearing golf shirts and the other hiking boots. The hikers all gathered around the oatmeal, high fiber cereals, low fat yogurt and fruit side of the table. The golfers were packed together around the warming trays filled with scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon, sausage, hash brown potatoes, and butter drenched waffles.  I overheard one golfer say to another “You know, bacon is nature’s perfect food” as he helped himself to several strips.