Interest in dieting slims down - It's about time

This doesn't even begin to tell the whole story.

When it comes to dieting, Americans put on a good show, buying millions of diet books, watching TV programs about weight loss, obsessing over celebrities and their baby weight. But in the end, that may be all it is: a show. The number of people on a diet - 26 percent of all women in the United States and 16 percent of men for the year ending February 2008 - is the lowest it's been in more than two decades, according to a soon-to-be-released survey.

Buying millions of diet books - yeah, hope springs eternal, but once you find out that the diets in those books don't do you a bit of good, you quit buying them. It just takes some people longer (or more failures) to figure out that dieting doesn't work for long-term, permanent weight loss.
Watching TV programs about WL, well, there again, hope springs eternal and all that shit. Again, after a while, you realize those TV programs are just like the books.
And who obsesses over celebrities and their "baby weight"? Is that a media-driven obsession because the media just isn't intelligent enough any more to write an article with any depth and substance to it? Much easier to write about some celebrity's weight than it is to write about just about anything else.
As far as fewer people dieting now than at any time in the recent past, maybe, just maybe, it's because people are finally figuring out that diets don't work (never have, never will). Maybe people are finally figuring out that their pants' size has absolutely nothing to do with their health. Could it be people are finally wising up to the fact that dieting slims nothing down permanently but their bank accounts? I'll bet that's royally pissing off all those diet companies and the schills who write all the diet books people aren't buying anymore.

The report, which asks 5,000 Americans to keep a daily journal for two weeks about their eating habits, also found that despite high levels of obesity nationwide, a declining percentage of people want to slim down or, for that matter, consider excess weight unattractive. In 1985, 55 percent of those surveyed "completely agreed" with the statement, "People who are not overweight look a lot more attractive." Today, only 25 percent completely agree with it.

And those 25% are the trolls who come to the FAM to harass us because they have swallowed the propaganda about dieting/health/weight.

Dieting was once practically a national pastime. In 1990, the same report found that 39 percent of women and 29 percent of men were on a diet. So, what's happened? Balzer, who's tracked Americans' eating habits since the 1980s, believes the answer is that dieting is simply too hard. "It's much easier to change your attitude," he said, than to sustain the willpower to eat less.

Dieting is simply too hard? It's easier to change your attitude than sustain the willpower to eat less? Where the fuck is he living? If willpower is all it takes to eat less (and therefore lose weight), there would be no fat people left on this planet. How much damned willpower does it take to try diet after diet after diet, only to fail and fail and fail? Could it possibly be that it's not a lack of willpower at all, asshole, but that our bodies are just not created to live on an inadequate amount of food (and most diets advocate a severely restricted amount of food to be ingested, thereby setting you up for failure when your body rebels and forces you to start eating again instead of starving).

Dr. Sasha Stiles, medical director of the Obesity Consult Center at Tufts Medical Center, offers additional reasons why dieting is on the wane: "A lot of people are saying I don't have enough money to spend on a diet, or I'm going to try surgery."

Yeah, diets aren't cheap, especially the ones who require that you purchase and eat only their food (yeah, I love eating over-processed cardboard-tasting food that costs an arm and a leg, yep yep yep). As for WLS, yeah, right, that just works so well for permanent, safe weight loss with no complications (that pisses me off so much to hear that shit pushed that all I want to do is rant, rave, and foam at the mouth).

There's another possible explanation: Fewer people are dieting because there's no exciting new diet on the scene. In 2004, the top-selling diet book in the country, "The South Beach Diet," sold 2.4 million copies, in 2007, the most popular book, "You: On a Diet," by Oprah Winfrey's health guru Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Michael Roizen, managed only 706,000 copies, this year's top selling book, "Eat This Not That!" has sold a mere 552,000 copies so far, and is more reference than diet book.

Gee, could it be that there's no exciting new diet on the scene because there are only just so many ways you can diet and all of them have published, and published, and published, and found not to work, over and over and over again? I don't care how you write it up, how you recycle it, a diet is a diet is a diet, and it's going to fail the majority of people most of the time. People may just be wising up to that fact and deciding to keep their hard-earned money in their pockets to spend on better things than diets that don't work.

With no miracle plan animating dinner-party and workplace conversations, it's the same old, same old. That gets boring, says Amy Kropke, 41, of Newton, who says she'd be "fabulous" if she could shed 20 pounds.
"I love that moment where you're like, 'This is it. This is definitely the one," she says, her voice tinged with nostalgia for the days when South Beach thrilled her. She wants to be seduced again, preferably by "something that was easy, that you could lose 10 pounds without having to do too much."

Honey, if 10 or 20 pounds is all you have to lose, what's wrong with saying fuck the diet, fuck losing the weight, I'll eat a wider variety of foods that my body actually wants/needs and I'll do whatever exercise/movement I like that helps my body keep mobile. Beats dieting, hands down, I can guarantee you that.

"Dieting is not your normal way of living," says Liliana Staiculescu, 48, an accountant from Plainville, who tried Atkins and a no-fat eating plan before cutting diets out of her life. "You have to limit what you eat and pay attention to your health."

I'm sorry, limiting what you eat is a DIET. It's not a "lifestyle change", it's not cutting diets out of your life, it's DIETING. Dieting is not paying attention to your health, it's equating thin with healthy, which is so far from the truth. Thin does not always equal healthy, just like fat does not always equal unhealthy.