Though I despise the culture of celebrity obsession, I found this story from the Orlando Sentinel to be of interest (well, most of it) because it raises in a public and visceral way the question at the heart of the weight-loss "debate."
To wit: If Oprah Winfrey, with all her money and personal chef and personal trainer, can't keep the weight off, who can?
According to the story,
Oprah, by her own admission, has tried everything.She tried the Atkins diet, she tried diet pills. She tried the Scarsdale diet, the banana, hot dog and egg diet. She tried a 1,000 calorie a day diet. She tried Weight Watchers, Diet Work Shop and Diet Center. She tried Nutri-System.
Yep, and still her weight goes up and down.
The story quotes a dietitian who says, "The longer you do this over the years and get into this classic yo-yo dieting syndrome, the more likely you are to end up with metabolic chaos." Thank you, thank you. It's nice to see the truth in print occasionally.
The reporter goes on to say
But the key to losing weight permanently, experts say, is to figure out why you overeat. Do you eat junk food when you're depressed? When you're stressed out from work? When you break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend? To figure out what triggers your overeating, keep a journal.
(For the record, Oprah has kept a journal for years -- and opined publicly about how you need to understand how emotions play into your eating habits. It's not clear how much it has helped.)
Maybe that's because fat people are no different from thin people when it comes to emotional eating. Show me a thin person who never takes comfort from a plate of warm mac and cheese or a slice of chocolate cake, and I'll show you someone who's lying--to themselves or to you.
Emotional eating is no different from emotional sex, emotional TV watching, emotional long-talks-with-a-friend. They're all part of life.
There's a difference between emotional eating and binge eating. I know, because I've done both. It's been about 10 years since I binge-ate, and in that time my weight has come down maybe 25 or 30 pounds. But I'd still be considered obese by the BMI charts.
It would have been nice if the reporter followed up on the ideas she raised--that very few people can lose a lot of weight and keep it off, that dieting is part of the reason. It would have been nice if the word genetics was mentioned anywhere in the story.
But it's a start. Of sorts.