Weight loss and diet plan for a healthy lifestyle.

Changes to improve the middle years, like those just mentioned, cannot be put into effect without a fundamental change in our attitudes and values. We need a new vision of aging, a new vision of the human potential. We need to discard destructive myths and obsolete beliefs.

Our society’s single-minded emphasis on productivity and profits has been costly: It has alienated most of us from the experience of our own possibilities, including the possibility of re-inventing ourselves and reconstructing our lives continually. Socialized to believe that there is only one way to be, one role to play, most American men in their middle years have trouble imagining or inventing new purposes and new identities when the old ones have run their course or been outgrown.

We might begin by changing our perspective on aging. Contrary to myth, growing old does not mean becoming senile, sick, or sexless. The elderly do not become less responsive to innovation and change, according to scientific studies. Nor do they suffer a loss of intelligence or creativity. But in our society the potentials for late life have been largely unexplored. We do not help the elderly age with dignity and purpose, nor do we support them in developing fully until the end.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. By changing our vision of aging we can give ourselves a gift: the gift of a more vibrant, vital lift, To this end we might look for inspiration to a unique program called SAGE, which was designed to counter negative attitudes toward aging and revitalize the later years. Using a wide variety of Western therapies and Eastern disciplines, including yoga, meditation, body awareness, breathing therapy, and massage, SAGE was launched in 1974 by California therapist Gay Luce. Having begun with a core group of twelve people aged sixty-five to ninety-five, it has since expanded in size and scope. Staff members are now conducting training workshops, as well as serving in Convalescent homes and residential care facilities.

This innovative program has produced astonishing results among the elderly: Migraine headaches have disappeared; the deaf have recovered their hearing; and those who were considered senile have regained their mental agility. “I’ve seen people in this group change their physical and mental outlook,” says Frances Burch, sixty-seven, one of the original dozen. “They’re more open and responsive, their lives are more exciting, and they have more possibilities and choices. . . . I’ve seen things go on here that are amazing— self-healing.”

Another member of the core group, Worden MacDonald, comments: “I think the most important thing to me is that I’m sixty-eight years old, and probably for the first time in my life, I’ve experienced real joy in my association with people. My father was a Presbyterian minister and quite an old fogey, an old-timer. He was a fine man, but he was against dancing, playing cards, and having fun in general. So I truly was an old man most of my life.

“I wanted to look good. I was taught, ‘What will the neighbors think?’ so I didn’t do what I wanted to do. I did what I thought people would want me to do, but I’ve gotten over that. I began having fun, enjoying myself, and feeling free to do what Mac would like to do instead of what the neighbors would like me to do. It’s a real joy and I’m grateful.”

A pioneer project in developing a new image of aging, SAGE, is demonstrating that people over sixty can transcend the expectations of our culture. It is proving that old age can involve as much growth as early childhood. It is giving us a new perspective on the rich potential of our own humanity.

We need more programs like this. We need to study not typical but optimal aging patterns in order to change our beliefs about our own future. We need as public policy to make a major commitment to research in the behavioral sciences. We need multi-disciplinary studies on the process of aging that are aimed not just toward the extension of life but also toward its enhancement. We need to know more about how to live a healthy, vigorous, productive, and meaningful old age.

We need similar studies of the middle years, studies of individuals who have lived full, creative, and evolving lives. We need to raise the level of our expectations, to enlarge our sense of possibilities. Since we are a society that until now has not only disbelieved in adult growth and change but discouraged it as well, we need to know more about what we might become—rather than what we already are.

There is a crying need in this country for basic life-cycle education. “No one tells the child that he is a unique person and has a unique range of possibilities before him,” observes Dr. Robert N. Butler. “No one prepares him to be continually growing for a lifetime.”" Learning about the life cycle should begin at an early age in the public schools, says Butler. Children should be taught about our culture’s rites of passage, and learn to anticipate their own personal future. They should be given some sense of the stages of life: what it means to make marital choices and embark on parenthood; the problems of the middle years; what old age will be like; dealing with death and supporting a grieving person; and why we have such customs as funerals.

Many primitive societies are more advanced in these matters than we are because this knowledge is passed on in symbolic ways. Having become civilized, or at least industrialized, our society has some catching up to do in the realm of human wisdom Now that we know all about how to make a good living, it is time we learned how to live.

Like the American male in his forties, we as a nation are finally coming of age—not just because we celebrated our two hundredth birthday, but also because we have lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression. We have even survived bloody civil-rights battles, political assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate.

America has lost its innocence. We are shedding our illusions, groping for new values, and trying to change. We are struggling to mature. Perhaps then the time has also come for us to become less heroic and more humane. Instead of demanding that men serve our institutions in the interests of economic growth, we should transform our institutions to serve men—in the interests of human growth. This would be a bold beginning.

*72\93\2*

Despite an immobilizing fear of the unknown that makes tolerating the familiar preferable to risking something new, a man’s work situation sometimes becomes so tiresome or grinding that he feels compelled to think about quitting. His distress becomes a vital force, pushing him to risk more than he might ordinarily dare. Thus long before new goals are formulated, discomfort can serve as an impetus for change.

“I looked around at my colleagues, and nobody was happy, nobody was enjoying himself,” said one forty-four-year-old man whose own desperate boredom finally drove him to quit his job with a large shoe company, and then go on to study architecture. “There was always the low-grade discontent and bitching,” he explained. “You know, ‘Jesus, I have to do this,* and ‘I have to do that.’ All those unhappy people trudging along to their offices, trudging their lives away! It’s sad but it’s true. You can see it in the way they walk—stooped shoulders, dragging feet. Beaten people. I used to be part of it. And then when I couldn’t stand it anymore I stopped being part of it. Now I feel reborn!”

To be reborn this way, propelled toward a revitalizing new commitment, a man must first permit himself to feel the anguish that invariably accompanies working at a job that he no longer likes. Because this message is often telegraphed in tricky ways, however, he must learn to interpret the signals, from his mind and body, that insistently urge him to restructure his life.

Painful physical symptoms are often the first clues. Not long ago, for example, a magazine article portrayed five midlife men who had quit their jobs for something radically different because work that was once enjoyable had now become intolerable.” Each man’s switch was unusual: A salesman from Ohio became a teacher in Alaska; a Chicago stockbroker, fascinated by ecology, earned his doctorate in marine sciences; a Wall Street insurance broker opted for managing an inn in Maine; a Dallas veterinarian chose physical labor on a department store receiving dock; and a New Orleans policeman became a painter.

The most striking note in these stories was that all these men were plagued by disturbing symptoms before deciding to make their move. The salesman found that earning thirty thousand dollars a year had given him a nervous stomach, and kept him on the road four nights a week “going like the hammers of hell.” The veterinarian became so jangled by people tracking him down on the telephone at all hours that he chose simple manual labor to avoid such tensions. The insurance broker said the commuter’s grind not only caused him to drink and smoke and eat too much, but also fanned his anger to the point where he began saying “awful things” in sales meetings—and then ripped an office phone from the wall and even punched someone before deciding to quit.

As for the policeman, his work in the homicide division was so demanding that he rarely saw his family and hadn’t had a real vacation in years. Exhausted from overwork, he finally slammed his fist into a wall, breaking two fingers, because “everything became too much.” One month later he quit and turned to painting.

Such stories illustrate that an awareness of the appalling toll taken by doing unsatisfying work is a crucial first step toward new alternatives. Whether psychic or physical, pain is generally a signal that something is wrong, that change is needed. Thus a man should pay attention to the messages of distress that his body sends. If he is consistently impatient and irritable, if his anger level has escalated dramatically, if he is eating or drinking or smoking too much, if he develops high blood pressure or an ulcer—these may be signs that his work situation has become destructive.

Sometimes the signs arc even more subtle. No obvious aches or ailments, no violent outbursts or dramatic mood changes. Instead, a man may be dispirited but not realize that something is wrong because he has trouble even admitting that he feels down.

“That’s part of the male narcissism,” says psychiatrist Bernard Hall. “We live with an idealization of what we should be as men more than women do, and we expect there isn’t anything we can’t handle. It’s a foul blow to pride, especially for the All-American guy who’s had a successful life, to be so depressed at forty-five he’s close to tears.”

In his experience, says Hall, the key problem is usually boredom at work, although most men who consult him with the mid-life blues are often out of touch with their own feelings of boredom and unhappiness. Instead they are usually drinking too much and inclined to blame something outside themselves, like company policy or the new president. A great believer in career diversity, Hall says he is struck by the fact that many men of this generation are so security-bound that they cling to a job even when it’s driving them crazy. By challenging a man on whether he really must stay in the same situation, Hall makes him consider more stimulating opportunities—a tack that often leads to productive changes.

Hall’s convictions come from personal experience. After twenty-five years of working with patients at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas, he grew restless and then became “deeply depressed.” Determined to improve matters, he explored other job possibilities for several years before shifting gears, at age fifty, to become head of the Community Mental Health Center at New York’s Roosevelt Hospital.

“It takes an awful lot of guts to pull yourself out of someplace where you’ve won your spurs, and cut out to a new situation where you’re unknown,” he acknowledges. “So I use this experience in a personal, anecdotal way with patients to let them know other guys have done it—and they can too.”

After many years of doing the same kind of work, almost all men suffer from a sense of stagnation. Not even clergymen are immune to mid-life depression, and the confusion that usually accompanies it, as Rev. Clarke Kimberly Oler, parish priest of Manhattan’s Church of the Holy Trinity, testifies:

This is the third church I’ve served, and I’m forty-six now. I’ve enjoyed my parish work very much, but in the last two or three years I have increasingly questioned where I go from here. I’m not thinking so much of leaving the ministry, but I don’t feel too turned on by the idea of just going to another parish and doing the same thing.

I’ve changed places but never changed direction. Now I’m beginning to ask questions about changing direction. I don’t know exactly where these feelings of dissatisfaction came from, but I think the fact that I’ve been here ten years now precipitated some of the questioning.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that it has something to do with my time in life. My age. I keep feeling in my head that forty-five is the big crucial time, kind of a watershed age. I have the feeling that the number of options open to me have suddenly narrowed very dramatically. Earlier in my life I felt that I could do anything I wanted, and that if after being a parish minister for a while I didn’t like it, or wasn’t good at it, or was unhappy, than I could just go into something else. But now I don’t have that sense of having all those doors open and available to me.

Anyway, about a year ago I began to feel quite depressed. Actually I didn’t even realize it at first. I just felt kind of anxious and very hyperactive, I guess. And then one of my good friends who is a psychiatrist was having dinner with us one night, and he said, “You know, you seem really depressed.” He picked up little signs. He picked up the hyperactive thing and the heaviness in my manner—like I didn’t seem to be enjoying myself and wasn’t laughing as much. And irritability— things like that.

He suggested I come in and talk to him, and we had a few sessions together, and he recommended therapy for me on the basis that I was exhibiting symptoms of clinical depression and should work it through. So T did go into therapy for six months, and T began to realize that some of my feelings and some of the depression had nothing to do with the vocational pressure, but rather with other conflicts. So I began to work on some things which were long overdue—which was really very helpful to me.

The psychiatrist pointed out that when you get depressed and you don’t have any way of dealing with your depression, one way of reacting is to get busier. And all you experience is the busyness—the sense that you’ve got to keep all these appointments, got to keep moving. The therapy allowed me to experience the depression, too. And then to be able to move with it, and live with it, and explore how to work out of it.

After working through his depression, Rev. Oler made another constructive move by seeking career counseling. This helped him take a good, hard look at himself and begin to sort out his priorities for the future, as he explains:

When you’ve been in a situation as long as I’ve been in the ministry you lose a lot of perspective on yourself—and you even begin to wonder if you’ve been a misfit all those years. And that was the kind of thing that was disturbing me at one level of my life. So another thing I did was to go to the Northeast Career Counseling Center ifl New Jersey—which is an organization set up by churches primarily to help people think through whether they are in the right vocational spot. And if they want to make a move they get a kind of profile on their own interests and abilities as a guide. The process includes some searching questionnaires and a battery of tests.

Going through that, I felt it was really the first time in my life I had any objective data on myself. And what I learned about myself was that parish work is very close to being the thing that I do best and find most satisfying. At least I knew I wasn’t in the wrong slot—and that eliminated a lot of anxiety! So I felt very much reaffirmed, and I got a lot of strength back from that. It didn’t alter the fact that I would still be facing some kind of change in the next few years, but it gave me the feeling that I could take my time a little bit more about working on it. And so I picked up a lot.

One of the ways in which I’ve changed is that I’m less interested and less patient with the administrative side of parish work—which I used to get a big kick out of. Now I want to focus down more and develop some skills more deeply. The sense of being constantly stretched out all over the map in sixteen different things is no longer attractive to me.

The big key question for me right now is to find out where to focus—and how. I think that the area I really want to concentrate on is counseling and group work. I’ve done a lot of this, but I’ve never had time to develop the skills necessary for being a better and more effective counselor. And I’m increasingly resentful of things that block me from doing this. I also enjoy teaching very much, although I have very little chance to do it here.

So I think my next move will be in the direction of counseling—maybe working part-time as a counselor and part-time as a parish minister, with somebody else running the business end. Or maybe into a city agency, or into a school where I can do teaching as well. Right now I’m exploring the kind of training I-would need to make this sort of move.

While investigating this matter of schooling, Rev. Oler ran into two problems that often confront men who want to change direction. The first is that the rigid requirements of many colleges and universities make it hard for an older student to enroll.7 And the second is that men frequently sabotage themselves by imagining they need more formal training than they actually do.

Rev. Oler discovered that one institution he visited, where part-time enrollment had been permitted previously, now demanded three years of full-time work to obtain certification as a pastoral counselor, a change that obviously favored younger men. But he also discovered that he was inventing some difficulties. When he told several colleagues that he couldn’t make a move until he had the proper certification, they said his “need” for a piece of paper reflected his own insecurity about being qualified—but was not realistic. Given his years of experience, they advised, he should simply take a few additional courses and credits. That dialogue was a revelation, says Rev. Oler. It convinced him he didn’t need elaborate credentials, freeing him to explore more flexible alternatives.

*58\93\2*

“I feel like a drowning man with all these people clinging to my neck,” sighed one forty-six-year-old man. “My father died of a brain hemorrhage last year, and my mother has been helpless ever since. Then my ex-wife ran off to England a few months ago, leaving our three teen-age daughters with me, which doesn’t exactly thrill my present wife, since we have two small babies ourselves. And now my brother-in-law is dying of leukemia, and my sister is leaning hard on me. I feel as if I have to be a father to everybody, and the truth is I’ve never been a very good father.”

This man’s complaint is not a cry of self-pity but an accurate reflection of reality. For most men the responsibilities that come with being in the prime of life are truly staggering. This is the time when a man must father two generations, the young and the old. His children are becoming adults, and his parents are approaching death or dying. Suddenly he has to take care of everyone, but nobody is there to take care of him. Moreover, the challenge to become a father in the fullest sense comes not only from within his own family circle, but from the rest of society as well.

This sense of being overburdened, even overwhelmed, affects men in all economic groups. Alex R. is a forty-one-year-old lawyer who, despite his prosperity, feels deeply ambivalent about his accomplishments. “You know all the things I’ve always wanted to happen only started happening in the last couple of years,” he said at first, describing the heady rewards. He had just realized a childhood dream by moving his family out of the city to a twelve-acre farm, still within comfortable commuting distance. His law firm’s in come had increased dramatically, as had some of his own investments, allowing him to become involved in new areas of work. And, seeing his knowledge and experience come to fruition, he had finally acquired a strong sense of self-confidence.

After completing this sunny summary, however, Alex switched abruptly to the darker side of his life:

I don’t want you to think that everything is pie in the sky, or sweetness and light, because that’s not true. One of the things that happens to you, as your business gets more successful and you get more successful, is that you get to the point—I know I have-—where you say to yourself, “I’ve had it with responsibilities.”

You get tired of it. You arc responsible to your office, you are responsible to your wife, you are responsible to your children, you are responsible to your parents, you are responsible to your in-laws. You are responsible to everybody!

My whole life is a series of responsibilities. Especially in my profession—you’re responsible not only to your business, but to every one of your clients. And you really get to the point where you would love . . . you know, you have this little dream, wanting to go to some little island somewhere and just get rid of everything. Just let everybody worry about themselves, and you stop it.

And I think that is a real problem I have. That’s the other side of the coin: You have the power and you have the achievements—and you don’t want them.

This was a very, very difficult year for me in that, first of all, we bought the house. And moving from a 6V4-room apartment where you’ve lived for 12 years to a farm, with the renovations and everything, is very traumatic. I always wanted that house, right? Well, now I have a house—a big house. But I didn’t just buy a house. I really bought a way of life. A 12-acre farm— that’s a way of life. We have a well, right? If a pipe on the well isn’t corroded, then the electricity isn’t right, or the pond has to be dredged, or you have to feed the apple trees—or this has to be done, or that. You know, it’s never ending! Forget about financially. It is just a responsibility.

And then the office was extremely busy. In addition to that, my partner had an operation and was out for a couple of months during this whole period. That put another burden on me, because I had to cover for him and do his work, so it was a combination of a huge amount of pressures all coming at the same time. And then you have the responsibilities to your children. To your wife. Forget it! You really get to the point where you just want to blow your mind—get out, right? It’s terrible.

These sentiments underscore the fact that part of the midlife crisis hinges on a man’s being squeezed in a viselike grip by two generations, while other demands upon him are also multiplying.

As a group, men in their middle years shoulder more personal and social responsibilities than anyone else. They feel threatened not only because they sense the tensions from both ends of the life cycle, reminders of their own waning youth, but also because they must support both ends financially. Typically they are responsible for parents whose incomes have been cut in half while their medical needs have increased; and for children who are attending college, where costs are mounting alarmingly.

In our society there is only a “fairly narrow band” of productive people who must provide for the unproductive ones, says Dr. Robert N. Butler, the director of the National Institute on Aging, who believes that much of the resentment felt by mid-life men is due to this heavy burden: Their responsibility, both individually and collectively, for the rest of the society. “They are angry at both the young and the old, and with other groups as well,” says Butler, “because they see these groups getting ‘all the benefits’ while they, hard-pressed, pay all the bills.”

But the issue is not simply economic. This anger is especially intense among this generation of men because they feel as if they have always been in the middle, always been burdened by obligations. Taught to respect and please their parents, they were pushed prematurely toward work and duty, and thus deprived of a carefree youth of their own. Ironically, they then became the first generation of child-centered parents indoctrinated to indulge their youngsters’ every wish, sacrificing their own needs and desires along the way.

No wonder the handicapped generation feel cheated. Just when they expect to reap rewards for their sacrificial efforts, they find instead that their obligations are mounting, their sense of being pressured and put-upon increasing.

*43\93\2*

Getting into the Adult World, Twenty-two to Twenty-eight:

A young man now tries to establish an occupational direction and form more mature friendships and sexual relationships—including, perhaps, marriage. The developmental task of this period is to arrive at a preliminary definition of himself as an adult, and fashion an initial life structure based on his interests and goals. This is a time for exploration and for making tentative choices.

Many men, but not all, enter this period with a dream of their personal future. Usually related to work, this dream might revolve around winning the Nobel prize, becoming president of the company, or writing a great novel. Such a dream is considered a vitalizing force for further growth. Without it, in fact, life can be oppressive and bland. In later years the reactivation of this guiding dream, and concern with its failure, may become a key issue. Major shifts around forty are often caused by a man’s feeling that he has betrayed or compromised his dream.

An especially significant finding: The Yale group discovered that a man’s having a mentor during this period is highly correlated with his future growth—and his success. Eight to fifteen years older, this mentor may be a teacher, boss, editor, or experienced co-worker who represents a level of achievement to which the younger man aspires. He invites the younger man into his world, shows him around, and— most crucial—gives his blessing to the dream. In this way the mentor not only helps foster the younger man’s development, but also reinforces his sense of manhood.

“Generally speaking,” says McKce, “it is assumed that once a person separates from his father, and leaves home, he is independent. But that’s simply not true. What seems to be consistently overlooked is the parental function of the organization the man becomes involved with—and also the fact that, despite his newfound ‘independence,’ he starts almost immediately to seek out these semiparental mentor figures. And develops much farther, by the way, if he succeeds in finding them.”

*29\93\2*

Hard work pays off—that is the essence of the Horatio Alger myth, which strongly shaped the lives of this generation of American men. They were brought up to believe that their manhood depended on becoming a success, and that to do this they must compete ruthlessly, move up the job ladder continuously, and make more and more money. Taught to aim for the Number 1 spot, they learned that their worth was measured by how far and how fast they scrambled up the ladder of success.

The crunch comes at mid-life, when most men discover that the yardstick by which they have always been measured has been yanked from under them. Suddenly the possibilities for continual progress on the job are dramatically narrowed. Suddenly the rewards for striving seem to have evaporated. Suddenly upward mobility turns out to be a myth.

Statistics show that only a handful of highly educated men will continue to move up the ladder after forty, while the majority will merely hold onto whatever rung they have already reached. And some, usually the least educated, will start to slip down. This is the reality in America today, according to a recent study of job problems during the middle years. What this means for most men is no more pay increases or promotions after forty.1

This halt in advancement occurs partly because our bureaucratic system organizes workers in a pyramidal form. The higher up the career ladder they go, the more power struggles and fewer jobs there are—with finally just one chief at the top. Only 1 per cent of American workers scale the heights to upper-management positions; and only 5 per cent make it into middle management.

But this is not the sole cause for dismay. Profound social changes and rapidly shifting values have made the American marketplace a much more hazardous arena in which to compete than it was several decades ago. Corporations are much less reliable than they used to be, job security exists no more, and the rewards for working hard are not as certain as they once were.

All these changes are especially hard on a generation of men who were taught that dedication and self-denial would earn them the good things in life—or even the good life. Entering their middle years, they find the payoffs smaller and the pressures larger than expected. The myths they learned to live by and the reality they now confront seem strangely out of sync.

When a man reaches mid-life the demands on him to perform professionally, as well as administratively, arc at an all-time high. At the same time, however, the pressures are compounded by a sense of rivalry on all fronts. Younger men are nipping at his heels, competing for his job, and accentuating his anger toward today’s youth. Women are entering the labor market in greater numbers and at higher levels, especially during their forties; and blacks and other minortiy groups are also making their presence felt.

For the white middle-class male this invasion of territory he always thought was his exclusively is infuriating. To make matters worse, our culture’s premium on youth has become an increasingly ominous threat. “Age discrimination in employment may start as early as thirty-five or forty in some industries and occupations, and begins to take on major dimensions at age forty-five,”2 states the National Institute of Industrial Gerontology.

To ease this “older worker” problem a federal law against age discrimination in employment was passed in 1968. But it has been poorly enforced at both the federal and the state levels. Countless middle-aged job hunters have testified to the continuing prevalence of discriminatory hiring practices, reporting that employers generally regard these laws as a farce and ignore them completely, or else simply tell the .older applicant that he is “overqualified.”

Said one forty-six-year-old man about his humiliating job hunt: “I’ll never forget getting off the train at Grand Central Station every morning for weeks, and looking up at all those tall buildings and hating them. I knew they were filled with people who didn’t want me to call them for lunch because they didn’t know what to do with me. They thought I was too old.”

Four million American males were unemployed in 1975— and the situation is expected to worsen. For men with technical skills or professional knowledge there is a threat of occupational obsolescence.3 Within the corporate world there is the increasing trend toward early retirement, both voluntary and involuntary. Although belatedly some manpower experts, economists, and sociologists have begun to doubt the wisdom of this trend, corporations are providing continuing impetus for it. The number of companies whose pension plans now contain liberalized early retirement benefits has doubled in the past decade.

Today even chief executives are discovering that their working life span is shorter than it used to be. The turnover rate among corporate presidents is now 20 per cent a year— twice what it was in the 1960s. And although a growing number of bosses are quitting voluntarily before the traditional retirement age to begin another career in public service, or to pursue some personal interest, more than half of those who leave are being forced out.

This exodus is largely due to future shock: Chief executives are being fired faster because the accelerating pace of change in our society makes running a corporation tougher than ever, and more unpredictable. Marketing cycles change rapidly. Rules and procedures become obsolete almost as soon as they are set. And dissatisfied workers as well as aggressive consumers are clamoring for more response from top management.

All these intensified pressures make the men in charge increasingly vulnerable. But the shock waves reverberate insidiously throughout the entire corporate structure, imposing a distinctly unsettling feeling of disease on men raised to value job security above all else.

Their distress is justified: Today workers at the middlemanagement and supervisory levels are competing more intensely and being judged more harshly than ever before. Thus they are actually being “defeated” at an earlier age than ever before.

*14\93\2*

In weight loss and weight management, like so many other things in life, it’s the little things that count. I tell my overweight patients not to make sudden, huge changes in their habits. Instead, start with little ones. You don’t have to stop eating all of your favorite foods at once. Begin by eating one less cookie than you normally would. Order a sandwich without mayonnaise, for a change. Have an extra serving of vegetables. If you start to change your habits slowly, you’ll probably find that it’s not so painful at all. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, one good habit can build and become a whole host of good habits. So don’t be hard on yourself. Life is for living! Just do better than before. That, and Chitosan, will get you where you want to be.

To help you on your way, consider the following tips for successful eating:

Try not to skip meals—As I’ve mentioned before, skipping meals can set you up for overeating later on. It can also lower your metabolic rate, which translates to a faster weight gain and a harder time getting it off. So keep eating regularly—at least three meals, coupled with the requisite Chitosan for the larger ones, plus two snacks per day.

A 1986 entry into the world of fad diets, the Rotation Diet argues, correctly, that diets with severe calorie limitations fail
because of the innate starvation response. When we restrict our intake, according to this diet’s author, our bodies respond by slowing everything down (dropping the basal metabolic rate). A low-calorie diet will knock off pounds, but it will also slow the metabolism, and it will take less food than ever to make us fat again.

The diet’s author suggests that the only way to avoid this starvation response is to rotate through a dietary cycle, with each cycle supplying a different amount of calories. Thus, a woman on the Rotation Diet would consume 600 calories a day for the first 3 days, 900 per day for the next 4 days, then 1,200 per day for a week. A man would eat 1,200 per day for the first 3 days, 1,500 per day for 4 days, and 1,800 per day for a week. The entire cycle is repeated once, then the dieter stops dieting completely for a week, a month, or as long as he or she feels is proper. After this vacation from dieting, the dieter repeats the entire process (2 cycles and stop) until the desired weight is reached.

This 3-stage, twice-repeated, on-and-off is supposed to prevent the starvation response while motivating you to succeed. You will allegedly look forward to every new dietary cycle with eager anticipation. Like most fad diets, this one is based on science of suspicious origins. The on-and-off cycles sound like they will encourage bingeing or other poor eating habits as the dieter hurries to eat whatever she likes before going on the diet again. What does the dieter learn about lifelong healthful eating habits from a plan such as this? Nothing much. You’re much better off adopting a consistent eating plan that fits comfortably into your life and sticking with it.

*148\29\2*

Back in 1969, an overweight man named Frank came to my office to see me, demanding that I give him those special shots.

“What shots?” I asked.

“The diet shots,” Frank replied. “The ones that make you lose weight. You gave them to my friend and they were great! I want to lose 50 pounds in 2 months because if I don’t I’ll lose my job as an airline pilot. And then I’ll also be healthier, because I’ll be thinner.”

I told Frank that I hadn’t given anyone diet shots and didn’t know what he was referring to, but this tall, obese man was insistent. “I want those special shots. I have to lose weight.” After careful questioning, I discovered that he was talking about HCG shots, the diet rage of the day. HCG stands for horse chorionic gonadotrophin, a substance made from the urine of pregnant mares.

I understood why he was so desperate to slim down, so I acceded to his demands for the special shots. I gave him instructions on low-fat eating and told him to come to my office every morning for a shot.

So every morning Frank came in and my nurse gave him a special shot that consisted of ½ cc of water. She also weighed him, and acting on my instructions, scolded him. It didn’t matter what he weighed, how much he had gained or lost, she scolded him and told him to eat more vegetables and whole grains and less fatty corned beef, ice cream, and candy.

You know what? My special shot diet worked! Frank lost weight. Obviously it wasn’t because of the injections, but because Frank believed that they would help. His belief gave him the motivation to stick with the simple dietary instructions I gave him (and the admonishments of my nurse), and he lost weight. As I recall, he lost 50 pounds in 12 weeks and was able to keep his job. Unfortunately, when the special shots were discontinued he gained it all back.

Frank’s story illustrates the final three points of the Fat Blocker Program. He had unreasonable expectations, he confused being very thin with being healthy, and he was desperate to try the latest weight-loss fad.

Like so many of us, Frank had unrealistic goals. He wanted to look like a dashing, handsome, slim, young, leading-man type, even though his natural build was on the round side, making him closer to the chubby, best-friend type. Frank would have to starve himself in order to get down to a weight that made him look anything like a leading man. And even then he wouldn’t succeed, because he would become gaunt and emaciated, not handsome and fit. Of course, I understood Frank’s desire. As a teenager and young man I wanted huge muscles, but could never seem to develop them, no matter how hard I tried. I finally had to accept the fact that I was just not the body-builder type, and was better off developing an appreciation for the mind and body that nature had granted me.

Frank also believed that if he were thin he would automatically be healthy. Would that it were so! As pointed out earlier, low poundage does not necessarily equal good health. Achieving ideal body weight is desirable since there is a positive correlation between health and slimness, but rapidly losing lots of weight or keeping your weight unnaturally low by eating a nutritionally unbalanced diet can work against your health rather
than for it. Certainly, keeping your weight low by using highly potent prescription drugs is a terrible thing to do to yourself.

And finally, Frank was willing to try any fad weight-loss program or diet that came along as long as it took off the pounds. What he didn’t know was this: Practically every single diet he’d ever heard about would work—but only for a little while. They’ll all knock the pounds off (and some will do so quickly) but they all also suffer from one big flaw—like my special shot diet, they’re temporary fixes. You lose the weight, then you put it right back on. And many times, you put more back on than you lost in the first place. The only way I have ever heard of to safely, permanently, and reliably lose weight while building better health is to use my Fat Blocker Program (in context with the lifelong, sensible, doable eating and exercise program outlined in this book). It will work for almost everyone; fad diets will work for almost no one.

To prove my point, let’s take a closer look at some of these popular fad diets, as well as certain weight-loss products and surgeries to see why they all fail in the long run—and why some of them are downright dangerous.

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It’s really hard not to taste the foods we cook. Sometimes, in fact, it’s absolutely necessary. How else will we know if the seasoning is right, if the noodles are done, or the food is hot enough? But some cooks eat enough while standing over the pot to make up a whole meal! If this is your problem, try one of these strategies:

♦ Have a small snack (a piece of fruit or some cut-up vegetables) before you begin to cook so

you won’t be overly hungry.

♦ Never taste from the cooking spoon. (It’s unsanitary, anyway!) Instead, take a sample from

the pot with the cooking spoon and pour it into a small teaspoon. Taste from the teaspoon.

This extra step may be enough trouble to make you stop and think before you taste.

Eating because it’s there-You’ve probably heard the old joke about a guy who went on a diet. He explained, “It’s a seafood diet. I see food, I eat it!” To some extent, we’re all on the see-food diet; we’re programmed to be stimulated by the sight of food. That’s one of the things that kept us alive back in prehistoric times. Unfortunately, in this day and age we see food all the time. We’re bombarded with visual stimuli that encourage us to eat when we don’t need to, or even want to. Here are a few tips to help you cope with the visual cues:

♦ In addition to keeping your Chitosan bag with you at all times, put some low-calorie

munchies and healthy snacks such as carrot sticks and fresh fruit in the front of your

refrigerator.

♦ Use a small plate rather than a large one so that your portions will look big but won’t be

big. (I realize that this may seem hokey, but it works for two reasons: It really does make the

food you’re about to eat look more satisfying, and remember what you believe is half of what

is; and in addition, just the slightly unusual act of choosing a smaller plate will remind you

not to eat more than you want.)

♦ Serve food from the stove top, rather than in large bowls on the table (family style). That

way you won’t see the extra food while you’re eating. It also takes more effort to get up from

the table to get another serving.

♦ Bring healthy snacks (your Chitosan bag) to work and set them on your desk. After eating

these healthy foods, you won’t be so tempted to gobble high-calorie snacks.

♦ Only eat in certain designated rooms at home, for example, the kitchen and the dining

room. That way you reduce the number of places at home that you associate with eating.

After a while, eating will not be directly on your mind as you sit down in the den to watch

television.

♦ Keep high-calorie foods out of sight and out of mind.

♦ Better yet, bring only healthful, low-calorie food into the house. If you don’t buy fried pork

rinds or triple-chocolate tortes in the first place, they won’t be there to tempt you.

♦ Make main dishes in advance and freeze them in individual portions. Or, keep on hand a

supply of some of the excellent new, calorie-controlled frozen meals. Either way, you’ll have

the right meal size available when you come home hungry. Just pop it into the microwave!

But remember, don’t make the portions too small. If you are not satisfied with your single-

serve portion, you’ll probably just grab a second one. And if you’re like me, you’ll certainly

polish it off entirely. Instead of a portion of maybe a third more than your prepared meal
(which would have satisfied you nicely), you have now tricked yourself into eating twice as

much as you started out to consume.

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For the best results, you should do some form of exercise at least 4 times per week. It needn’t be too strenuous, or take up too much of your day. And even on your off days, it helps if you do something physical. The important thing is to keep moving.

At the start, if you haven’t been doing any exercise, you will find that 4 times a week is simply too much. Don’t push it. Work out once or twice a week. Skip a day or 2 if you find the whole thing too tedious, and then go back to it a day or 2 later, rested and with renewed enthusiasm. It’s not so bad if you miss a little exercise because you’re taking the Chitosan and losing weight.

The fact is that as time passes and you continue to lose weight (or keep it down) without your normal, terrible—and doomed—dieting efforts, you’ll find your energy level creeping up. Very gradually, you’ll find that exercise is a little easier, a little more fun. You’ll do more.