STEPHANIE SALTER: Take a load off, Fanny — and put the load right on me

By Stephanie Salter
The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE February 16, 2008 08:54 pm

— I’ve gained and lost the same 10 pounds so many times over and over again, my cellulite must have deja vu.
— from a Lilly Tomlin comedy sketch

A coffee cake sits overnight, with only a few pieces missing the next morning. An open box of chocolate-covered cherries remains for close to two days. An order sheet for candies and snack foods being sold by the school-age child of a colleague attracts only two signatures.
This is an office that, ordinarily, performs an amazing vanishing trick on anything that is edible, free and set upon the breakroom table: Now you see it, now you see … crumbs.
So, even if I didn’t know exactly what was going on around here, I’d know something strange was happening by the lack of locust-like activity. And it’s the same in every department in the building and in buildings and businesses all over the nation.
Thanks to the runaway TV hit “The Biggest Loser,” people are dieting, not one or a pair at a time, but en masse. Our Tribune-Star version began Jan. 14 and will last until April 7. The person who loses the most weight — by percentage based on an initial weigh-in total —wins $100. The next two biggest losers win $50 and $25, plus their new silhouette.
This group effort has transformed our local corporate culture. (Nothing like a little competition, and money, to get red-blooded Americans to kick into gear.)
Observing the exercise from the outside, for a change (more on that in a minute), has dredged up all kinds of memories and some thoughts about our society’s complex, contradictory relationship to food and its obsessed-upon and frequently despised sibling, weight.
Every society has a complex relationship to food, even those for which there is never enough to eat. But it is primarily Western, developed nations — with the United States leading the pack — in which weight is such a, um, huge factor.
Europe may have minimum weight standards for runway models, but we have clinically obese fourth-graders sitting next to classmates who already are diet veterans at age 10. We have thousands of resort spas and “fat farms,” proudly advertising their multi-day path to weight loss and a better lifestyle. And we have scores (or hundreds) of in-patient facilities, discreetly offering multilevel medical and psychological treatment programs for anorectics and bulimics.
Diet books? Motivational CDs and DVDs? Commercial weight-loss programs and all their available accouterments?
Estimates of U.S. spending on weight-loss stuff are all over the scale, ranging from $40 billion per year to $100 billion. After all, who do you know who hasn’t been on a diet?
Stillman, Atkins, Pritikin, Dr. Andrew Weill or Dr. Phil. The gurus run the gamut. Philosophical approaches cover an equally wide range, from the recently reissued classic, “The Drinking Man’s Diet,” to the universally personal, “You: On A Diet.”
Weight-loss plans are geographically diverse, too. From South Beach to Beverly Hills, U.S. cities and regions are identified with formulas. My most dramatic results came with one of the city-name diets, the Scarsdale, which I went on a couple of years after its author, Dr. Herman Tarnower, was gunned down by a rejected ladyfriend.
I chose Scarsdale because one of its menus, The Gourmet, allowed you to have about 1⁄2 cup of wine with a meal each day. But wine — and coffee, chocolate, anything caffeinated, spicy, deep-fried or dense (like a medium-rare ribeye) — are on the Avoid Or Cut Back list for me these days.
It’s not forever, thank heavens, just until the doc and I wrestle my upper G.I. tract back into a civilized state. Minus all those staffs of life, however, I don’t need the Biggest Loser or any other diet to drop a few pounds.
Which reminds me of one of the most effective weight-loss programs people can encounter: The divorce/break-up diet. Female or male, almost anyone who’s been through a hideous split will tell you they’ve never gotten so skinny so fast as when the experience began with a broken heart.
Yet even the divorce/break-up diet rarely produces lasting results. As millions of people suspect — and medical research increasingly supports — our weight problems, or lack of them, may lie deep in our DNA. Researchers at Columbia University estimate that 30 to 40 genes are involved in human body weight.
Worse, a study published in 2006 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that most people who lose weight on a specific program or diet regain about one-third of the weight in the very next year. Within three to five years, almost everyone is back where she or he started.
In times past, copious weight signaled prosperity and entitlement in men, fertility and desirability in females. Derogatory references to the lean filled literature, usually equating them with humorlessness, bad tempers or criminal intentions. (Name one character in books or movies who is described as both “jolly” and “skinny.”)
But the past century changed all that, especially in post-WWII America, when our unofficial motto became, “You can never be too rich or too thin.”
That quote has been attributed to a variety of people, most of them very rich and very thin, including Wallis Simpson (once the Duchess of Windsor) and New York socialite Babe Paley. According to Ralph Keyes’ “The Quote Verifier,” it probably came from writer Truman Capote, who hung around a lot of rich and thin folks — Paley among them — and “could have fed her the line.”
The problem is, in a land of super-sized plenty, the idea that you can never be too thin produces what shrinks call “cognitive dissonance.” Or as Suzy Orbach, author of “Fat is a Feminist Issue,” once put it, “All this abundance, linked to a culture of slimness, makes people go crazy around food.”
At least the winners of the Biggest Loser contest will have some money to show for their efforts. And a hundred bucks will buy a lot of coffee cake — to share.
Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.