Word: dieting
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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...
...Cathy DeThorne, a research director at the Leo Burnett advertising agency, ran a series of focus-group studies for the Beef Industry Council that suggest that when it comes to food, people show an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion. A woman believed she was eating a low-fat diet because she was pouring the fat off her pork chops. Others forsook meat for healthy salads, and then drowned those salads in dressings that contained more fat than the meat they gave...