San Francisco
Laura Fraser was 5 when she started dieting, 13 when she visited a hypnotherapist to control her eating and 17 when she became bulimic.
Throughout the years she joined weight-loss programs - “I went to Weight Watchers instead of Girl Scouts”- tried fad diets, fasted and popped diet pills. Like many women, she’s also counted calories and fat grams, and weighed and measured her food.
At 5-foot-6 and weighing 175 pounds tops, Fraser was never chronically obese, but, like many Americans, she was obsessed with obtaining a body of fashion model proportions.
She believes it all did her more harm than good.
Rather than help us lose weight, commercial weight-loss programs, diet gurus and obesity doctors have only contributed to our weight obsession and our obesity. Fraser says in her newly published, “Losing It: America’s Obsession with Weight and the Industry that Feeds on It” (Penguin USA, $24.95).
One would never guess that Americans spend between $34 billion and $50 billion a year on diets (about the gross national product of Ireland or roughly $500 a year per dieter), because we aren’t getting any skinnier. We’re just getting poorer, Fraser says.
That’s because diets only serve to wreak havoc on our bodies, briefly dropping them down to sizes which are much smaller than nature intended them to be. When, after dieting, our body metabolism acts like a thermostat and fattens us back up to our original weight, we blame ourselves for failing, says Fraser.
Our anger has been misdirected.
During the past century there have been countless hucksters who have taught us (and sold us on) the many methods to our weight-loss madness.
After World War I, they persuaded more than 100,000 of us to try dintrophenol after it was reported that people who came in contact with the substance during the war lost weight. The chemical is actually an insecticide, Fraser says, “considered toxic to all higher forms of life.” And even though the Food and Drug Administration ultimately banned the poison as a weight-loss remedy, a Texas obesity doctor was caught selling dinitrophenol to his patients - at 1,000 per treatment - in 1987.
Some things never change.
Our never-ending desire to whittle our waistlines has led to countless premature deaths over the last 10 decades. As recently as last year, diet potions like herbal ephedrine and dieter’s teas were found to responsible for a rash of illnesses, some of them fatal. But we still keep searching for that magic pill, cream or solution that we hope will make us thin forever.
People are just desperate to lose weight and they’re gullible, says Fraser, who has not dieted in the last 10 years, nor gained any weight during that time, either.
The San Francisco writer spent more than two years researching and writing her expose of the diet industry, analyzing the medical literature, interviewing obesity researchers and questioning diet gurus from Richard Simmons to Susan Powter.
She found society has such and intense fear of fat that even the most well-intentioned physicians regularly encourage patients to try unsuccessful weight-loss methods - believing it is better for overweight patients to try to lose weight than not try at all.
Many people in the diet industry really believe they’re trying to help you, she says, but other, more cynical doctors are clearly in it for the money. For the most part, people aren’t going to die following Richard Simmons’ advice. But they could easily die taking some of the drugs diet doctors prescribe.
Such assertions, Fraser believes, are likely to make her book unpopular with the weight-loss industry and dieters alike.
People want to read about how they can lose weight, not how they can’t, says the vegetarian, while eating a grilled vegetable sandwich at a San Francisco cafe.
But losing weight wasn’t always such a preoccupation in Western culture, she says.
Up until the turn of the century, robust physiques were considered ideal. A layer of fat was a sign that you could afford to eat well, and women propped up their plump figures in corsets to accentuate their curves.
But more emaciated frames came into vogue in the 1920’s, and selling weight loss became a booming business. Women, in essence, were given what Fraser calls a restrictive inner corset - a skinny societal image of body beauty to adhere to. It has bound the lifestyles of women much more than Victorian garb ever did.
Being preoccupied with weight really keeps women from realizing their full potential and power, and it’s a very effective means of oppression because women collude with it, Fraser says. I think weight is the last biggest issue of the feminist movement and one the movement has largely ignored.
Women spend too much time counting calories and fat grams, logging their daily dietary intake and worrying when they eat the bad foods, she says.
Fraser believes women would be better off devoting such energy to other aspects of their lives, eating what they want when they want without having to feel shame. As small children, without giving eating a second thought, we tend to consume the right amount of calories our bodies need. As dieting adults, we just need to unlearn how we’ve been conditioned to eat according to someone else’s eating plan.
I think the most important thing people can do is stop dieting and get a feel for when they’re really hungry and when they’re really full, exercise, exercise, exercise and accept that not everyone’s a size 6, Fraser says. The truth is that weight isn’t a very good measure of your health. (Fraser herself no longer owns a bathroom scale and is an avid exerciser, riding her bike, swimming, or taking dance lessons nearly every day.)
Fraser emphasizes that she is not advocating obesity, encouraging Americans to eat poorly, or lead a sedentary lifestyle.
I’m just telling people it’s OK not to diet, which is a different message.
I say it’s important to get a lot of exercise and to eat healthy. After that, let your weight take care of itself.
Fraser, a contributing editor at San Francisco’s Health magazine and a daughter of a Colorado physician, says it took her decades to realize the secret of being happy with one’s body lies not in starving it to emulate another’s figure but in learning to love it just the way it is.
It is a law of nature that humans come in all colors, sizes and shapes, Fraser says.