Eighteen or twenty years back, I enjoyed high protein, high fat, low carbohydrate diet plans, thanks to the initial Atkins Diet Revolution and, to an even higher degree, Stillman’s Quick Weight reduction Diet Plan (which I must confess I still choose to Atkins but that’s simply personal taste). At the time, every aisle was packed with labels announcing Slim or Minimized Fat. I didn’t appreciate fat and sought much various details. Sadly, low fat was “in” and I felt alone and abandoned.With a particular sense of resentment, I tracked down the carb costs of a wide range of food, keeping a sharp eye on components, calorie levels, and dietary worths. Specific products were oddly emblazoned with banners announcing low fat: pasta sauce, potato chips, sweet bars, and ice cream. I was puzzled: how could specific foods, filled with fat to their very core, be low fat? How might all the fat be gotten rid of and there be anything left?I became interested with particular labels. Have you ever, for example, checked out the labels on those flavored coffee creamers? No fat. Absolutely no carbohydrates. No protein. No calories. How can anything we put in our mouths have no calories? A minimal quantity, maybe, however outright no? What is in that stuff? Or is it virtual food, existing just in our mind’s eye as a sort of edible hologram?Mercifully, the low fat craze died its natural death. Atkins and comparable regimens took control of and the low fat labels were reprinted(business recycling at its finest)to check out Low Carbohydrate. Suddenly, all over you looked, there were foods modified as low carbohydrate-again with the pasta sauce, the potato chips, the candy bars, and the ice cream.I was curious. Had the makers secured all those carbohydrates
and put the fat back in? Where did those carbs go? Are there large dumpsites in the desert where undesirable carbs are buried -next to used tires, plastic bags, and nuclear waste?Once more, I wonder: what is left in those boxes, cans, and containers?
Why am I paying$ 1.19 per ounce for something that really isn’t anything?Then I began to figure it out(often I’m a little slow). The food hadn’t really altered at all, simply the product packaging. Food labels resemble those common Internet sales letters. They trumpet headings that capture our interest since they remain in synch with our desires and objectives. Is that accidental? Of course not. Extremely paid copywriters choose their headlines with terrific care, buying into the nationwide “obsession o’the day”, drifting on the coattails of the latest fad.Many of us are so desperate to control our weight that we purchase into the promises like the unaware fans we are: bleating
sheep heading for a precipice without any thought of questioning our leaders or starting out in a different direction.The unmentioned trick is that the label does not matter. If we wish to reduce weight, we don’t eat pasta sauce, potato chips, candy bars, or ice cream.
Period. No matter what the plan says. Deep in our psyche, we understand what we can consume (very little)and what we can’t (an entire bunch ). Enabling ourselves to be deceived is only a fashionably appropriate way to trick ourselves, and we understand it. We purchase into the hype since we want, so severely, to think. We want to think that we are doing the right thing, that we’re really attempting, that our motivation is pure.Our weaknesses are being exploited by the packagers and the extremely store bilker. Our uncertainty, and
the frustrating need to avoid the extremely genuine pain of efficient dieting, invests the misguidance of food labels with an illusion of truth.Like our dimwitted ovine cousins, we, too , are ultimately fleeced.-Atkins Diet plan