Adventures at Midlife

Okay, I’m a sucker for any new angle on the diet-fitness-body image conundrum, particularly after spending a glorious few days helping my daughter-in-law-to-be try on wedding dresses. She looked utterly radiant, fabulous. (I looked like a middle-aged schlump, which I am, but I am not about to rain on her parade…) So anyway, I was open to any good news on the self-improvement front.

My last serious foray into the diet world was three weeks last January on the South Beach Diet, which, after all the trouble I went to measuring and cooking and subscribing to the Website, resulted in a net loss of two pounds. Two. Pounds. And, true to form, I gained back those two pounds and about ten more, along with another generous helping of guilt and disappointment. I truly believe that I have literally dieted myself into my current predicament. I stood on that scale and promised myself I would never go through this again.

One year later: TLC has been spot advertising its I Can Make You Thin series with British self-help guru Paul McKenna, who is refreshingly unremarkable-looking. Since the price of admission was only an hour of my time, time-shifted at that (I love TIVO technology), I bit. And frankly, it  surprised me.

Instead of selling any food, equipment, books or counseling like all the other programs, McKenna gets into the heads of chronic dieters (who are, not surprisingly, chronic fat people) and pushes a thin lifestyle: Eat when you’re hungry and eat what you want, but eat consciously (slowly and without distractions) and only eat until you’re full. How…revolutionary! He likened the stimulus to eat to a ten-point scale ranging from starving-to-death to ready-to-vomit, and advocated staying somewhere between 3 and 6 at all times, between merely hungry and merely satisfied. He actually went into an audience member’s home and helped her throw out all her diet dinners and diet bars, which she admitted were “nasty,” and helped her eat a plate of pasta “deliberately,” which meant she left most of the pasta ON the plate.

The whole program left me feeling so not-guilty, which is not the case when I watch all those struggling, fearful dieters on “The Biggest Loser.” (I have this uncontrollable desire to smack Allie right in her self-satisfied little face, and the poor contestants, with all their hang ups and shaky self-esteem, make me want to cry. I quit watching it.)

So I tried Mr. McKenna’s program. It, well, works. I put the fork down between bites, enjoyed what I ate and stopped when I realized I was full. My plate was still half full. “This is too easy,” I thought. “But maybe, by buying into all the diet-and-exercise advertising and advice out there, I’ve been making it too hard. Maybe, since we’re surrounded by real food all the time, it’s about learning how to live with real food. With real life.”

If the rest of what he has to say during the five-part series (I have episode two waiting for me) is as sensible, I think we may just have something here.

The only downside I can see is that, unlike The Biggest Loser contestants, who are alternately starved and worked to the point of mental and physical exhaustion before that humiliating weekly weigh-in ON NATIONAL TELEVISION, the I Can Make You Thin plan isn’t a quick fix. But, since it’s taken me 50+ years to get here, I’m not in a hurry anymore.

This entry was posted on March 24, 2008 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Diet wars, Image.