Slim Hopes : Bizarre Diets, Silly Widgets--Anything to Shed Holiday Heft
After having to face a holiday season laden with fruitcake, Christmas cookies, sugary frosting, rum punch, Rice Krispies squares, sticky mulled wine, cinnamon buns, fudge brownies, Gummi Bears, lollipops, heavy gravy, honey-roasted cashews, caramel-coated popcorn balls and chocolate-covered everything, Diane Humrich could easily have been forgiven for embracing any bit of quick and easy dieting advice that came her way.
The miracle weight-loss tip she got, however, was something less than scientific. She was told to hug a few trees.
Several years ago, Humrich said, at a dimly remembered dieting seminar, the speaker suggested that “if you felt like eating, you should go out and hug trees, get back to nature, become more involved in life. The way it was expressed was rather funny to a person who would rather eat than hug trees.”
She decided to give the idea a pass.
Humrich, who lives in Costa Mesa, finally found a strategy that worked--she said she has lost 93 pounds on the Weight Watchers program--but for millions of weight-conscious holiday party hoppers, the final weeks of each year painfully illustrate the basic yin and yang of conspicuous holiday consumption: Indulge in December, bulge in January.
So, in an often-frantic effort to carve off the external manifestation of a 1-month buildup of internal yummies, legions of festive feeders become diet Ninjas when the New Year arrives.
There is more than a little madness in some of the dieters’ methods, however. Often, those in search of the perfect, speedy, simple, magical diet that will miraculously melt away the evil holiday pounds embark on regimens that are odd at best.
Kathleen Roberto, a county spokeswoman for Weight Watchers, said those who enroll in the program have often embarked previously on such quirky regimens as:
Suspending themselves upside down to “displace their fat.”
“The Astrologer’s Diet,” which promoted different foods for each sign of the zodiac.
Dressing in a suit filled with crushed ice, supposedly to increase the wearer’s metabolic rate.
“The 120-Year Diet” and “The Philosopher’s Diet” (or “How to Lose Weight and Change the World”).
Wearing a headband that is supposed to promote negative thoughts about food.
Using a fork that lights up “when too much food is placed on it.”
Supposedly flaying off the fat with a device known as the Mea Culpa Flagellator. According to Roberto, the mail-order device is supposed to “reduce cellulite in 3 minutes a day,” but she said she didn’t know how the flagellator worked.
All these schemes have one thing in common, county diet professionals said: They don’t work. At least they don’t work permanently, and therein lies the great holiday dieting paradox, an apparent inverse relationship between hard work and weight loss. The more frantic your efforts to lose holiday weight, the slimmer the chance is that you’ll actually do it.
Eating tofu because you were born under the sign of Pisces or clunking around in a jumpsuit filled with crushed ice may help you knock off a couple of quick pounds. But, the diet pros said, because dieters locked into such regimens are often miserable in the process--and learn no new, more healthful eating behaviors--they are almost certain to gain back the weight quickly.
The formula that works? Eat less, eat right, exercise. And do it all the time.
“The worst thing people can do,” said Vince Brantley, operations manager of the California Coast Club, a health club in Irvine, “is to do something inconsistently, to try this for a little while and then try that for a little while. The body needs to know what you’re going to do to it.
“I tell people to eat like they were pregnant. Pregnant women generally feel pretty good because they eat properly--four or five small meals throughout the day, which makes their metabolism work all day long. If people would just stay with that and a good exercise routine, they’d see results.”
Still, such a disarmingly simple solution isn’t nearly as attractive to many Christmas party animals as, say, the lose-10-pounds-in-3-days diet that Pamela Daniels of Orange once tried. Daniels, who is enrolled now in a weight-control program at Diet Center in Orange, said the quickie diet she tried during a previous holiday season involved “eating beets every day, and I hate beets. I had to force myself. And you also have to eat steak every day at dinner. It was supposed to be a combination of chemicals that made you lose. I lost a couple of pounds, but I gained them right back in 3 days.”
Nancy Langton of Santa Ana, another Diet Center client, said that during one holiday season she began a “miracle soup” diet that was guaranteed to melt pounds off like magic. The soup, she said, was a basic vegetable soup, “but you had to eat it all day long. It was torture.”
A fair measure of fanaticism can develop, Humrich said: “After the holidays, it’s just massive exercise and high hopes. I’ve gotten into running and aerobics and free weights, all at the same time, nothing in moderation. And by the 15th of January, it hurts so much and you’re so sore that you stop, and that’s the end of it.”
Both Humrich and Daniels said they had used clothing as an incentive--buying dresses one or more sizes too small and vowing to shrink into them.
“You wouldn’t believe all the new clothes I have in the closet with the tags still on them,” Daniels said.
And still the medicine-show diets abound, some of them dreamed up on the spot by would-be dieters with a talent for rationalization.
“One year,” said Marsha Zoller of Whittier, a Weight Watchers member, “I eliminated eating everything at the office except candy. It kept me from gaining weight, but I hid the candy in the drawer of my desk and went into the bathroom to eat it.”
She also said she drank so-called weight-loss tea during the holidays, “but I just ended up eating all the stuff I wanted to eat anyway and drinking the tea afterward.”
Zoller may have been indulging her own hunger, but Weight Watchers’ Roberto said such home-grown schemes take food out of the mouths of the professional diet groups.
“Our biggest competition,” she said, “isn’t other diet organizations. It’s people who do crazy things on their own.”
Among the most common ill-advised plans, she said, are “one-food” diets--”bananas all day one day, hot dogs all day the next, that sort of thing”--and the “drinking man’s diet,” which involves much drinking but little eating.
“It’s no wonder you lose weight temporarily on that one,” she said. “You get completely dehydrated.”
One diet, Roberto said, involves no food at all: “You just talk a lot. If you’re talking, supposedly you won’t feel like eating.”
Then there are those who eat and talk--or used to, anyway. Specifically, Oprah Winfrey, who claims she now wears a Size 10 in Calvin Klein jeans.
When the syndicated talk show hostess recently devoted a 1-hour program to an explanation of how she turned from large to lithe, telephones began to ring at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center. The hospital’s Health Resource Center offers the Optifast program, the same liquid-protein plan Winfrey followed.
“We got in the neighborhood of 400 to 500 calls that first week after the Oprah show,” said Sheri Normann, director of the hospital’s Optifast program. “And a lot of people are ready to start the diet after the new year.”
The diet, she said, allows nothing but the liquid-protein drink for the first 16 weeks; then participants are weaned back to food in the next 10 weeks. A 9-month “maintenance” program follows that. Counseling in stress management, nutrition, exercise and related subjects is included throughout the program, as is supervision by doctors.
Normann acknowledged that the program has been the target of critics who say the regimen lowers the body’s metabolic rate and does not teach participants good, lasting eating habits.
She said studies have shown that the metabolic rate is not affected adversely and that participants are trained in proper eating habits during the 10 weeks when they return to solid food.
Still, other diet professionals prefer a more traditional approach. “I think Oprah did it the wrong way,” said Brantley of Irvine’s California Coast Club. “We have a little bet here as to how fast she’ll put it back on.”
“Really, the No. 1 problem is that a lot of people think they need to starve themselves to get thin,” said Jennifer Williams, manager of the Jenny Craig Weight Loss Centre in Orange. “But you have to eat to get thin. Otherwise, you’re fainting and starving and bitching and crabbing, and there’s no need for that.”