What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [89]
How do I feel now? Stuffed, certainly. But fat, ugly, unhealthy, and ashamed as well.
I have been watching my weight and restricting my intake—except for an occasional binge like this—since I was twenty. I weighed about 175 pounds then, maybe 15 pounds over my official “ideal” weight (“big-boned and barrel-chested,” I told myself). I weigh 199 pounds now, thirty years later, about 25 pounds over the “ideal.” “I’ve had a sedentary adulthood: writing, doing research, seeing patients, teaching,” I tell myself, “and I only started exercising—a half-mile swim every day—last year.” I have tried about a dozen regimes—fasting, the “Beverly Hills Diet,” no carbohydrates, Metrecal for lunch, 1,200 calories a day, low fat, no lunch, no starches, skipping every other dinner. I lost 10 or 15 pounds on each in about a month.
I lied: I had to quit the Beverly Hills thing—all the pineapple and watermelon I could eat—because I got such bad diarrhea. The pounds always came back, though, and I have gained a net of about a pound a year—inexorably.
This is the most consistent failure in my life. It’s also a failure I can’t just put out of mind, like the failure to get rid of my slice at golf. There are too many reminders, every time I look in the mirror and every time I look at a tempting dish. In thirty years of dieting, this is what I’ve been trying to achieve:
I want to be more attractive. I hate this two-inch spare tire.
I want to stay healthy. My father had a stroke at just my age.
I want to feel zestier. I am often tired and irritable.
I want to feel that I am in control, not that I’m a grown man defeated by a carrot cake.
Pretty sound reasons. I think I should keep at it. Okay, no dinner tonight, only coffee (with saccharin) tomorrow morning, no dessert for the rest of the week.
Not so fast. I have spent the last few years reading the scientific literature, not the parade of best-selling diet books or the flood of women’s magazine articles on the latest way to slim down. The scientific findings look clear to me, but there is not yet a consensus. I am going to go out on a limb in this chapter, because I see so many signs all pointing in one direction. What I have concluded will, I believe, soon be the consensus of the scientists. The conclusions surprise me. They will probably surprise you, too, and they may change your life.
Here is what the picture looks like to me:1
Dieting doesn’t work.
Dieting may make overweight worse, not better.
Dieting may be bad for health.
Dieting may cause eating disorders—bulimia and anorexia.
Are You Overweight?
Here is an “ideal weight” chart. Are you above the “ideal” weight for your sex, height, and age? If so, you are “overweight.” What does this really mean? “Ideal” weight is arrived at simply. Four million people, now dead, who were insured by the major life-insurance companies of America were once weighed and had their height measured. At what weight on average do people of a given height turn out to live longest? That weight is called “ideal,” or “desirable.” Anything wrong with that?
You bet. The real use of the table, and the reason your doctor takes it seriously, is that an “ideal” weight implies that, on average, if you slim down to yours, you will live longer. This is the crucial claim. Lighter people indeed live longer, on average, than heavier people, but how much longer is hotly debated.
1983 METROPOLITAN LIFE INSURANCE HEIGHT AND WEIGHT TABLES2
But the crucial