Kidding our way through the fat of the land

DAVID SILVA

It was the low-carb nachos and beer that did it.

I had been fruitlessly searching the wine aisle of my favorite

specialty store for a particular brand of red wine when I finally

realized the label had been removed from the shelves. In its place

were row after row of low-carb nacho tortilla chips and low-carb

lager beer. I’m still not sure if it was the loss of my favorite wine

or the thought of some glutton trying to snack and booze his way to

fitness that made me snap, but suddenly I had had enough.

“Oh, give me a break,” I said to my girlfriend, Sharon. “When you

think of all the work that has to go into ‘de-carbohydrating’ vats of

beer, wouldn’t it be easier to simply not drink a few six-packs?”

“Oh, no,” Sharon replied. “It’s a lot easier to take the carbs out

of the beer.”

Right here is where I should have shrugged resignedly and moved on

to the canned foods aisle. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t let go of

the fact that the low-carb craze was starting to affect my quality of

life directly.

“Do you realize that in the half-hour we’ve been here, we’ve seen

low-carb pizza, low-carb French fries, low-carb waffles and low-carb

chocolate-chocolate-chip brownies?” I exclaimed. “For God’s sake,

they even have low-carb chili verde burritos! I’m sorry, but if you

want to lose weight, maybe you should stop eating so many burritos!”

Sharon just smiled, knowing that anything she said would just add

more fuel to the fire. And to her credit, she politely resisted the

urge to point out the obvious, which was that I was clearly a man who

had a hard time passing up a good burrito.

I knew that I was oversimplifying the seductive power of junk food

to the point of absurdity. But this was something that had been

building.

Over the past two or three years, I’d watched with growing dismay

as the low-carbohydrate craze swept the country. It seemed that every

time I turned around, another shelf of precious store space was

switching over to foods I wouldn’t touch if I were snowbound in the

Sierra.

And then the restaurants starting getting into it. Suddenly,

everywhere were so-called “sensible” menu items sporting piles of

charbroiled meat rolled in leafy vegetables and marketed as

Atkins-friendly. I saw this as less a trend toward sensible eating

than as the onset of a kind of mass psychosis. It was as if the

entire nation had suddenly decided that the best way to battle the

bulge was through smoke and mirrors. Instead of eating less, millions

of Americans had chosen to try to buffalo their bodies into shedding

those unwanted pounds. No, that’s not food we’re eating. It’s just --

fuel. Burn, baby, burn!

But the problem, I’m convinced, is that the human body is much

smarter than that. It knows that lump of spongy tissue sitting on its

shoulders isn’t the sharpest organ on the donor list. Natural

selection has conditioned the body to constantly find ways around the

bad ideas that regularly come down the pipe, which is how it manages

to keep us from continually grabbing hold of hot stoves or holding

our breath until we die. The body is smarter than the brain. It has

to be, or the brain would Atkins or Scarsdale or Deal-A-Meal the

species into extinction.

And that’s why, as the variety of low-carb menu items grows more

and more plentiful, America continues to get larger and larger and

stores such as Lane Bryant get richer and richer. One man’s meat is

another’s fortune.

The body knows a bad idea when it’s afflicted by one, and it’s

really good at getting the brain’s attention. If common sense can’t

get the head to figure out for itself that an all-T-bone diet might

not be the best way to go, then perhaps a repugnant dose of chronic

bad breath might bring it around. Nothing like a little social

ostracizing to counter the benefits of a slim physique. If that

doesn’t work, how about turning up the olfactory senses to 10 to make

the smell of a nice cheese manicotti too tempting to resist? And if

none of these work as wake-up calls, there’s always the standbys --

kidney and heart disease.

So far, the only crash diets that ever worked for me were the

times I’ve come down with the flu or really bad food poisoning. Just

a few weeks ago, I lost more than seven pounds in four days after

eating a bad hamburger at a local restaurant. But that’s a diet I

wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

Of course, this is just me, and I could be completely wrong. No

one will ever mistake me for an expert on nutrition. But I’m

convinced the only lasting way to get the body to do what you want it

do is by giving the body what it wants. And after all the junk foods

and low-fat foods and no-carb foods are said and done, what the body

really wants is a balanced diet. Meat, dairy products, grains, fruits

and vegetables in sensible portions. And maybe a little more time

outside taking walks and a little less time in front of the tube

taking notes on the latest diet craze.

Again, this is just my opinion. And I ask you not to hold it

against me that I don’t practice what I preach.

A week before my meltdown in the wine aisle, I was forced to wait

in line at an In-N-Out for 10 minutes longer than I should have while

the guy in front of me argued with the cashier over the carbohydrate

content of a hamburger patty wrapped in a lettuce leaf. The man was

apparently infuriated by the fact the cook had used three leaves

instead of two.

Trust me when I say that it was everything I could do not to tap

the guy on the shoulder and say: “Look, buddy, you can wrap that

burger in romaine all you want. Eventually your body’s going to

figure out it’s not a head of lettuce. Now why don’t you go and get

some professional help and let me order my lunch.”

* DAVID SILVA is a Times Community News editor. Reach him at (909)

484-7019, or by e-mail at david.silva@latimes.com.