Editor's
letter
Wendy Nissen, editor
I
was alarmed to read the other morning that women's magazines
are being blamed for the unhealthy state of New Zealanders because
we print "fad junk diets". Well! I excalimed over my
cup of tea. My pile of clippings on the bed had a swift addition
and I was off to the office to do battle with the National Heart
Foundation's Dr Boyd Swinburn - the perpetrator of these comments.
If there's one thing I'm strict on as an editor it's not running
diets.
When
I got to work, I discovered that in our story on page 8 Dr Swinburn
gives the Weekly due credit for not running fad diets, so all
was well again, You'll enjoy his comments and also those of Linda
Omichinski on page 20 who encourages women to make friends with
their food.
The
reason I don't like diets is because of a deep-seated resentment
for having spent my adolescence in the seventies - the diet decade.
From my earliest memory, my mother was on a diet and at high
school all my friends were on diets. All around me people were
turning orange from eating too many carrots! Yet somehow it became
acceptable as part of our culture. Don't like yourself? Then
diet.
I
was unusally skinny as a teen but amazingly still felt the peer
pressure to go on diets. Out went my naturally healthy eating
habits and in came cravings which had never bothered me before.
In those days we were all fuelled by the diets in magazines.
It will take years for women to get over diets because health
is still not a top priority - yet body shape is. I'm still constantly
astounded to find myself standing next to slim professional women
who make a huge fuss about not eating or drinking because they
are "trying to lose some weight". These women are tiny
and I wonder what kind of message they give the women who work
for them.
The
real message we should be giving each other is high self-esteem.
Learning to live with our bodies and enjoy them. Imagine if we
all woke up one morning and looked in the mirror and liked what
we saw. As women, we should probably spend more time encouraging
each other to get some exercise than go on a diet. And also tell
each other how beautiful we look. We don't do enough of that.
Next time someone near you looks fabulous, tell them, it really
doesn't hurt.
Make
food your friend
Forget
bread, liquid and vege diets - the way of the future is to flag
the fads
by Karen Henger
Fad
diets make people fatter believes Canadian dietician Linda Omichinski.
Her conviction is so strong, she's made it a life-time passion
to tell others why. She's currently in New Zealand to speak at
a forum on healthy living.
Linda
used to put people on diets herself - some as young as six. :"At
first, I thought I was doing these people some good because they
would say to me, "This diet is great, it's much better than
my last one." "They would lose the weight and go off
the diet, only to put more weight back on. They were ashamed
to talk to me in the grocery store because they thought they
had failed."
Linda defines a diet as any form of restrictive eating —
so as soon as a person comes off a diet they binge on the food
they've denied themselves. She says 95 percent of dieters end
up heavier than they originally were and believes, in most cases,
obese people become obese because they succumbed to fad diets
in the first place.
In
1987, Linda began a lone crusade to fight the diet syndrome."I
realised diets set people up for failure and it's not the person
that fails, it's the diet that fails them. That puts their self-esteem
on a roller coaster. They measure their worth by a number on
the scales."
Ten
years on in her mission, she says she has faced a lot of hostility.
"Yes, I was definitely on my own at first. I think other
dieticians saw me as a threat. The diet industry is a great money-making
industry.."
Linda
has developed a number of programmes for adults and teens to
break the diet cycle and improve self-esteem, and has written
a book, You Count, Calories Don't. She believes her theories
are slowly catching on internationally but there are still a
lot of disbelievers.
She
has one answer for them. "Slim doesn't necessarily mean
healthy. You can be healthy at any size. Some people are simply
not meant to be thin.."
Ironically,
Linda has never been on a diet herself. She became a dietician
because she wanted to help people like her mum who had struggled
with her weight. "I grew up in a family where I was taught
to accept myself the way I am." Linda was never forced to
eat her veges, or told she could not have a biscuit because it
would make her fat. She says her upbringing meant she was never
introduced to restrictive or secretive eating - the makings of
diets. She has never had a weight problem.
Linda
lives and breathes what she preaches. She eats when she's hungry,
not when she's stressed or upset because the clock says it's
lunchtime. She stops eating when she is full, and she enjoys
food. She says the secret to achieving this is understanding
your body. "Most dieters don't even know what they like
because they've been told what to eat all of their lives."
Linda
blames the United States' high obesity rate on Americans' obsession
with weight loss, and says New Zealand is heading in the same
direction. She says health authorities can help by promoting
food and eating in a positive way but, in the end, it's up to
the individual.
