Welcome to the weekly weight loss update and sugar exposé series Road to 185! It is one of the cruelest ironies of our time that, in an effort to fight obesity in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, the stage was set for an explosion in obesity rates in this country. Fat has long been the enemy, and people have sought out remedies for it ever since our culture shifted from revering obesity as a sign of wealth and prosperity to regarding it as a sign of laziness and hedonistic gluttony. Ads from the Victorian Era offered everything from fat-eliminating soaps to “sanitized” tapeworms to be ingested as remedies, a testament to how far we are willing to go to shed pounds in the name of health and attractiveness.
Finally, it seemed like we had the magic bullet: fat is high in calories, and fat is where your body stores excess calories. Clearly, fatty foods had to be responsible for fat deposits on our body: carbs and sugars were burned for energy, so the assumption went that they were healthy sources of energy while fat was saved for later as an emergency source. So, cut out the fat, and voila, a healthy diet conducive to weight loss is born.
But what is fat, anyway? Obviously it’s a calorie-dense part of our diets, but it’s also critical in another way: taste. I’m a classically trained chef, and one of the professional chef’s mantras is “Fat is Flavor”. Fat tastes good in your mouth, it’s satisfying and adds a richness to whatever it is in. Chefs throw gobs of butter into almost everything they serve, oils are a critical part of salad dressing, and the finest (and most expensive) cuts of meat are inevitably the fattiest. Even Impossible Burgers knew this: the burger patties were designed not to be healthy (as some expected, given that was the approach with other meatless patties), but to appeal to meat lovers, and that meant plenty of coconut oil to give it a rich, fatty taste, just like the real thing.
The low-fat craze created a problem for processed food companies: cutting out the fat would appeal to consumers, but food without fat was bland and unsatisfying. It wasn’t as rich and decadent, and people would surely hate the products being tested. In some cases, like salad dressings, cutting out fat was nigh-impossible: how do you make a low-fat ranch dressing when mayonnaise (almost entirely fat whipped up with just enough egg yolk and water to solidify it) is the primary ingredient?
The solution? Sugar. Sugar is tasty, very tasty, and (as we now know) highly addictive. It was the miracle ingredient in low-fat products. It could provide the much needed flavor component, and could help in other areas (like how to make a creamy, smooth salad dressing without oils). The problem is that not only is sugar also a dense source of calories, it also did encourage fat retention when eaten.
Of course, sugar being addictive, people wanted more and more. There was also a dangerous misinterpretation of the low-fat advice: people thought that by cutting out fat they could eat more without gaining weight. Of course, overeating is still overeating. If you overeat enough of anything, you’re going to get fat at some point. Americans consumed more and more sugar, taking in more than enough carbohydrates to negate any benefits of cutting out fat. Worse still, many of the risks we assumed were tied to fat consumption turned out to be false, but in another cruel irony turned out to be true about sugar consumption. The obesity epidemic kicked off in this time period, and it hasn’t slowed down since. Each of those links leads to a different article about this trend, and they’re only the tip of the iceberg.
Of course, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the early 1970s saw a brand new product being advertised to food manufacturers the world over: High Fructose Corn Syrup. It was about to make a big entrance into the food world, and we’ll get more into that next week.
Weight Loss Update
It’s been difficult staying away from anything sweet, and this past week finally broke me, in a way. The sugar cravings have been insanely difficult to handle, and my wife bought some Atkins snack bars and peanut butter cups. I’m not happy I’ve eaten one or two, but I decided to view them as akin to nicotine patches or gum: a tool to help wean myself off something much worse. I’ve made sure not to eat them before or after a recent meal (in the hopes that the sucralose in them won’t cause my body to retain what I just ate as fat), and I’ve kept myself very limited: we only had two over the past week, and both times we split a single bar between the two of us. I’m hoping I can train my body to think of sweets as a rare treat. Ideally, I’d like to get them down to no more than once or twice a month.
If I had any doubts about sugar being addictive before, this would have destroyed them. I can’t tell you how incredibly euphoric I felt after just the first bite. Every single night since I started my diet I have craved something sweet at the end of the day, and it was brutally hard to ignore it. With one bite it all faded away, even the sensation of hunger went away with the craving. I suppose I should be proud I lasted three and a half weeks until giving in, but I’m not. The fact that I still made progress makes me feel a bit less guilty, though.
It’s unreal how much sweeter things taste now: I’m used to raspberries being tart, but I had just a couple the other day and was amazed at how sweet they were. My wife decided to have a diet Dr. Pepper, but couldn’t finish it because it felt like drinking syrup. I tried a mouthful to see for myself and was blown away: after a month of nothing but water, it was overpowering. I had thought before I might have sodas as an occasional treat once I finished losing weight; now I’m not sure I could stomach them.
I started walking around the block for exercise: starting small to make it a routine, then adding on as I go. I also discovered that I love spinach and kale salads with just oil and vinegar, which has been great not just for my health but also for my diet: a big bowl of greens has a pitifully small number of calories, but it helps fill me up so I don’t eat as much other, more calorie-dense foods.
It came in very handy on Mother’s Day when we had a socially-distanced family get together. I ate my salad first, and despite eating small portions of whatever sugar-free things were on offer, I found myself full and satisfied while eating much, much less than I normally do at these things.
If you want to support me, please donate to my Patreon: www.patreon.com/... More donations means more writing!