SLOGAN FOR MIDDLE AGE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 24, 8 December 1939, Page 11

SLOGAN FOR MIDDLE AGE

By Dr.

Elizabeth

Bryson

HAT is the truth behind all the talk? What \X/ is the merit of brown bread or toasted bread? Have these any advantage over white bread in a diet designed to lessen weight? There is some truth in-all the talk, and it is obscured by a great deal of error and misunderstanding. Guiding Principles Our guiding light is this: (4) We actually need less food as we get older. We no longer need to build our’ bodies; we only need to keep them in good condition. Another is this: (2) If we are putling on weight, i.e., weight above our active healthy adult weight-above what we weighed when we were at our best, at 25 or 30-there is something wrong with our food or with our habits. Let us start out then with this slogan for those

approaching middle age. Do not allow your-_ self to become much heavier than you were at 25. I say "much" advisedly, because actually, with increasing age, bones increase in weight, in compactness, in density, and so we may allow an increase in bodily weight of about 10 to 14 pounds over our maximum young adult weight. Now, knowing what you should weigh, and finding that you are surely, slowly and steadily creeping up the seale (and becoming in the process less agile, more easily tired, middle aged in feeling as well as appearance, with a little uneasiness and indigestion occasionally), what are you to do? Don't pay too much attention to fattening foods and slimming foods: eight day diets; Hollywood diets; Hay diets, fast cures; lemon cures; and banana and milk cures. All reducing diets are based on a very simple fact, that we habitually eat too much starchy food. Starchy food means all food made with flour, and also all sugars. Now it doesn’t matter very much whether a man doing hard manual labour such as farm or road work gets an extra ration of bread and butter and cake or

not--he can work it off-it gives him energy, and he can go home to his dinner hungry and unharmed. But it does matter very much for the housewife, whose activities, although unending, are not so strenuous, or for the woman of more leisure. who has time for the social round of morning and afternoon teas. All reducing diets depend for their success on one principle, and one only-that the flour and sugar foods must be reduced, and their place taken by bulkier foods of less concentration and less energy value. These foods are the very valuable fresh vegetables and fruits. Some successful pre-sent-day diets depend for much of their success on the fact that by persuading people to eat their carbohydrate separately from their proteins, the ‘total amount of starchy food eaten is greatly reduced. Converts are advised to have only one starchy meal, and it is impossible to eat as much at one meal as was previously eaten in bits at three meals and with bits in between. Try it and see. Try to eat at one meal your whole usual daily allowance of bread, potato, pudding, porridge, jam, cakes and sweets. You will find it hard. This separation of the foods also encourages and practically ensures the use of more of the protective foods, more vegetables and salads and fruit. Thus the balance

of food is better, and the health is improved. But there is no scientific foundation for the separation of the different foods because of incompatibility. Many good foods contain both starch (carbohydrates) and protein. Reducing Rules 4. Eat less. 2. Eat less flour and sugar and more vegetables and fruit. It is as simple as a first sum in arith-metic-two plus two equals four-two plus three equals five. The result is mathematically certainas certain as your sum. There is no mystery about reducing diets. There is no magic about them. There is no difficulty about them. But there are certain pitfalls.

4. You have to be honest with yourself. Your diet sheet will not reduce your weight, no matter how conspicuously you pin it up nor how carefully you study it. You have to stick to it. 2. You must have the extra vegetables and fruit, because if you don’t, you will be hungry and you won't feel well, and a starch hungry woman easily persuades herself that she is too weak to diet strictly. 3. You must not be misled by advertisements of starch-free bread or starch reduced biscuits, You may use them if you like, but you must not add them to your allowance. For reducing purposes bread is bread: it does not matter whether it is white or brown or stale or fresh; it is bread, and the total quantity consumed must be reduced. 4. You mustn’t be sorry for yourself Don’t Yield to Temptation The woman who is a martyr because she is on a reducing diet, seldom loses weight. She is so busy being sorry for the things she can’t have that she generally yields to temptation and takes "just a little.’ She has all the agony of dieting without the reward. So there are many pitfalls, although no real difficulty,

A diet with less starch, less bread, less cakes and scones and sweets and pastries, less sugar as in sweet drinks, and stewed fruits and jam; and more vegetables, cooked and uncooked, more salads, more fresh ripe fruits-in a word-more of the Protective and less of the Non-Protective Foods, is not only a certain reducing diet, but also a much better balanced diet, a healthier diet. The Only Reducing Exercise Exercise is often advocated for reducing, and exercise is necessary and health-giving. But there is only one exercise that is really effective for reducing weight. It is a very simple one and easily learned. It consists of a slow and decided movement of the head from left to right and back

again when starchy foods are offered. The truth is that to alter your diet, to alter your settled habits in regard to food, you have to be converted. You have to believe in your change of diet. That is why so many ‘diet specialists" reap a rich harvest by moving from one place to another lecturing, persuading, selling booklets and gtving expensive private courses on foods and diets, with detailed and elaborate instructions about simple things. Their success depends on the fact that they convert the people who crowd to hear them. They make them believe in the efficlency and superiority of their particular method of tackling the diet problem. They convince them that if their method is followed glowing health will be the outcome. And sometimes the miracle happens. People who were previously wandering round, lost in a maze of food values and slimming and fattening foods, unhappy and dissatisfled, suddenly find a religion of food that they can believe in. They are converted to their special

diet, which consists always in an abundance of fruit and vegetables and a sharp reduction in starchy and sugary foods. They lose in weight and gain in well being. They walk on air; they are cured; they have a religion; they rush to convert their friends. Sometimes the contagion of enthusiasm spreads and another happy convert is made. Sometimes it doesn’t work so well. A friend of more unimaginative type is induced to try the new diet. But she hasn’t.often fallen under the spell properly; she hasn't heard the slogans and believed the promises; and after a few days she finds she is hungry and tired and she doesn't like all the trouble of getting the different vegetables and extracting the carrot juice and soaking the raisins in lemon juice; and so on and so on; and one day (when the baker calls with his nice fresh crisp loaves) she forgets and falls from grace and has a cup of tea with lots of bread and butter and feels much happier. You see the trouble is that she is not converted; she has had no change of heart in regard to food, and she effects no change in her shape. From a series of talks delivered by Dr. Bryson from Station 2YA,