Word: dieting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fenfluramine, which may boost serotonin levels, improved an obese person's chances of losing weight. Of the 120 people in the study, those who took the drugs achieved an average 16% weight loss over eight months, compared with a 5% loss for those who had to depend on diet and exercise alone. By the end of the trail, nearly all participatnts had added back some of the lost weight, but those who were part of the drug-treatment group had regianed fewer poiunds. More research is needed to identify possible side effects...
While they were happening, the '80s seemed so darned healthy. Joggers and bicyclists clogged the pathways. Exercise spas threw open their glass doors and mirrored chambers. Folks didn't just watch their weight, they also enrolled in diet movements, diet 12-step programs and diet franchises complete with celebrity TV endorsements and calorically correct prepackaged snacks, meals and desserts. Even the Christmas turkey seemed somehow leaner...
...could this happen? How could the health movement, which seemed to be chugging along so energetically, have backfired? There is no shortage of theories. Weight-loss tycoon Jenny Craig blames the news media. "They pushed one diet, then the other," she says. "Now they broadcast that diets don't work." Exercise guru Richard Simmons fingers TV advertising. "It's crazy," he says. "The ads say 'eat, eat, eat!' but show a girl who's so thin she clearly never eats." Julia Child, TV's French chef (no caloric slouch herself), cites sedentary life-styles. "Maybe they're not doing enough...
Nutritionists say it really boils down to this: despite all the fuss about diet and fitness, Americans in the '80s ate too much and exercised too little. In thermodynamic terms, they took in more calories than they burned, and they stored the excess...
...that is so, and why it finally hit home in the middle of what everybody thought was a fitness craze, is harder to explain. It's a complex story, experts say, one that pits a lucrative diet industry against an even bigger and more aggressive packaged-food industry. It pits a handful of exercise machines against a century of labor-saving devices. It pits a frenetic workaday pace against the understandable temptation to put one's feet up at the end of the day, turn on the tube and just veg out. It may even turn out that the best...