Free Fat land : how Americans became the fattest people in the world by Greg Crister Page B

can eat more frequently, eat a greater quantity of food, and still lose weight and keep it off!"
    By 1995, however, Atkinism was back again, this time retooled by HarperCollins and Barry Sears. Reacting to the growing obesity statistics despite the early 1990s consensus that it was fat and not carbs that was the villain, Sears went back to a low-carb basic: "Basta with pasta!" he proclaimed. And forget about exercising too. If one only mixed the right foods, why, "you can burn more fat watching TV than by exercising," he idiotically promised. That same year Bantam introduced Michael and Mary Dan Eades and their notion of "Protein Power," in which one could "eat all the foods you love — steaks, bacon and burgers, cheese and eggs."

    WHO LET THE CALORIES IN
    The point, of course, is not that the publishing industry and its new ancillary industries in the diet supplement and video sectors were publishing pure schlock (although most of it was). There had been legitimate scientific debate about such things as ther-mogenesis, fat metabolism, and the metabolic effects of various foods since the mid-nineteenth century, when French scientists like Claude Bernard first discovered the glycogenic (glucose-making) function of the human liver. The point is what the new diets did not say. For completely missing from the new genre was one increasingly strange and distant concept: self-control.
    The very notion of self-control was anathema to the new generation of diet books. A diet — even a weight loss diet — was no longer about limits to one's gratification. Instead, the subtext was one of scientific entitlement. After all, if one had worked so hard to get so far in one's career, well, how could self-control really be an issue? To even suggest such was to make fat a moral issue — and how appropriate was that? No, it was all a matter of using nutritional science to "trick" the body into doing what it should be doing anyway.
    The new boundary-free notions about consumption weren't purely the provenance of diet books. In the South and in the Midwest, where conservative Christians had long valued such notions as self-control and personal responsibility, something was amiss as well — namely, a certain sin known as gluttony, which had somehow gotten a good name.
    To be fair, it had never had a very bad one — at least not in the United States and not in most Protestant denominations. The seven deadly sins — those were largely Catholic notions, wrapped up as they were with papist ideas of sin and church-administered sacraments. (It says something that one of the most foreign-seeming things in the recent hit movie Chocolat was the obsession of the little French town's pious Catholic elder with the sin of gluttony.)
    Yet the sin of overconsumption was something that had preoccupied a number of American clerics over the years. The early

    FAT LAND
    nineteenth century's Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister and the inventor of the graham cracker, had regularly attacked overeating as the source of moral turpitude. As Graham saw it, overeating was a form of overstimulation, which could lead to no end of sinful behaviors.
    Later anti-gluttons took a more pragmatic tack. In the 1950s, Charles Shedd, another Presbyterian, wrote a book entitled Pray Your Weight Away. Its message was simple: God did not make man to be fat. "When God first dreamed you into creation," Shedd wrote, "there weren't one hundred pounds of excess avoirdupois hanging around your belt." By being fat one was cutting oneself off from the joy that Christ had died to confer on us all. Shedd thus proposed a series of prayer-based activities designed to right the imbalance. There were mealtime affirmations like "Today my body belongs to God. Today I live for him. Today I eat with him." There was faith-based physical exercise. One involved fifteen minutes of karate kicks, executed while reciting the third chapter of Proverbs; another required one to time one's sits-ups to the