The War to Lose Weight

Ever since cavemen ate on the run, human beings have been searching to improve their diet. Before scientific measurements were available, diets were pursued with the only tools they had—instinct, myth, and faith. In ancient Greece, Olympic athletes ate the meat of oxen for strength and the swiftest beasts in the belief they could absorb those qualities.

Several millennia later, science entered the picture in a big way in the 1890s, when chemist William Atwater broke down food into major components of carbohydrates, protein, and fat. Within a decade Russell Chittenden of Yale was able to measure caloric energy input and output accurately and the modern era of diet and nutrition was born.

But since then, the search for the winning diet has still been filled with crackpot ideas right next to sound ones, and the search for a better diet has been a religion unto itself, as individuals seeking a better body have taken all aspects to extremes. Right now, endurance athletes are witnessing a fierce debate between current wisdom on athletic diets that favors low-fat and high-carbohydrate diets versus a new challenger, the 40:30:30 diet, where you eat fat to lose fat.

Going to Extremes
The extremes are always there. As a callow college swimmer at University of California at Davis, Dave Scott once ate an eight-and-a-half-pound, 9,673 calorie “Ice Cream and Caramel Zoo” just to prove he could. Then, much like Paul being struck by lightning on the road to Damascus, or Newton being hit on the head by the falling apple, Scott found dietary religion. He eliminated all but 5% of fat from his diet at his most extreme—capped by his famous rinsing of cottage cheese—and went on to dominate the Hawaiian Ironman.

Maintaining a low of 6% body fat at his peak, Scott found a dietary and exercise Fountain of Youth, pushing the envelope of elite endurance performance well into his 40s. Pity those who could not follow in his footsteps, Jurgen Zack for example. Scott once made fun of the heavily-muscled, perennial top-finisher Zack, whose German nickname was Speck or bacon-claiming Zack and who would never win Ironman Hawaii because he needed to lose some weight. Zack who had an already low body fat of 8%, refused to simply abandon his muscular upper body and kept to his more moderate high carbohydrate diet—plus a strawberry loading regimen. Standing outside their debate is six-time Ironman champion Mark Allen, who eats more fat to burn more fat and run faster.

Early in the century, high protein meat was the pregame meal ticket, before athletes and nutritionists noticed that it was a bit hard to digest. Many runners have carbo-loaded since the 1970s, but ultrarunner Stu Mittleman, in order to run 100 or more miles at a crack, loads up on 50% or more of fat as part of his diet. Weight lifters once swilled raw eggs and raw meat and tons of high fat milkshakes before they realized that body fat levels would not come down for contests. Women endurance athletes, with their higher body fat content, have proven to have great potential in endurance events, led by Ann Trason’s overall wins in several major ultramarathons. And yet many still pursue the dangerously low 10% mark which shuts down menstruation and crucial immune system functions, and thins bones to the point of osteoporosis—all in pursuit of a magically increased power-to-weight ratio.

But even as ever-improving science lags behind the human spirit’s willingness to try something new, the diets of athletes are just part of a larger search in society for the magic diet, which has been pursued with a fervor filled with guesswork, superstition, and pseudoscience that often reveals more about our spirit and character than it does about nutrition.

With special thanks to Laura Fraser’s Losing It: False Hopes and Fat Profits in the Diet Industry, Penguin, 1998.

Dieting Through History
1830s:	The Bland Diet Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham followed in the footsteps of Puritans, counseled that to deny the flesh our spirits would grow strong. Overeating was just the first stop on an express train to sickness, sexual obsession, and social chaos. Advocated bland foods such as his eponymous Graham Cracker and avoiding meat, spices and stimulants. Lost steam when adherents were seen as weak and starving.
1860s:	First Low Carb Diet English casket maker William Banting was prompted to take action when he became too fat to tie his shoes. He wrote Letter on Corpulence which advocated avoiding starch and saccharine, or sugar. He lost 45 pounds on a diet of lean meat, dry toast, soft-boiled eggs and a few drinks a day, but ended up his own customer.
1909:	Upton Sinclair’s Fasting Clubs Pioneer crusading investigative journalist and author of The Jungle, Sinclair wrote in Cosmopolitan that periodic fasting was a cure for both emaciation and obesity, one of the first of many mythical dietary oxymorons that have tantalized as much as cold fusion or Atlantis. Craze of fasting clubs resulted.
1900s:	Fruits and Vegetables Howard Carrington advocated eating a strictly fruit and vegetable diet. Carrington claimed “whole colonies” of Californians relied totally on it and that “the results are astonishing.”
1910s:	The Mega-Bite Diet/Extensive Chewing Horace Fletcher, a San Francisco art dealer, became known as “The Great Masticator” for advocating chewing each bite at least 32 times and turning the food into liquid gruel. Novelist Henry James became an enthusiast, and a Yale professor conducted tests and concluded that “fletcherizing” gave them 50 percent overall greater muscular endurance and cured them of desire to abuse alcohol.
1917:	Counting Calories Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters’ best-selling Diet and Health, with Key to the Calories, sold 2 million copies, and she said she lost 50 pounds on a diet of 1,200 calories a day.
1920s:	The Hollywood 18-Day Diet 585 calories a day, with worship of grapefruit at its core.
1940s:	Eat Fat to Get Thin Alfred Pennington studied overweight workers at Du Pont and theorized that people could metabolize fat completely but not carbohydrates, and called carbo leftovers the primary villains in excess fat production.
1952:	Diet Pills/Dexedrine In 1952, three billion 10 mg Dexedrine tablets were produced as a diet pill in the U.S. Popular for women, but long-term use was discovered to lead to heart damage, strokes, kidney failure, and psychosis.
1961:	Calories Don’t Count Dr. Herman Taller wrote in his book that a high-fat, high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet was the ticket. Taller, a Brooklyn OB-Gyn, followed in the footsteps of Banting and Pennington but was laid low in 1967 when he was accused by the FDA of fraud for claiming his safflower capsules would help reduce fat.
1963:	Weight Watchers In 1961, Jean Nidetch went to a New York City Department of Public Health obesity clinic and lost lots of weight on a diet handed out by Dr. Norman Jollife. Sensing the emotional pain behind the weight gain, she turned her diet into a women’s support group and then started marketing the overall concept. In 1964, it did $160,000; in 1970, it grossed $8 million; and in 1996, it is a multinational corporation with revenues of $1 billion, mostly product sales, and boasts 25 million grads worldwide.
1967:	Carbo Loading, or Glycogen Depletion and Supercompensation Eric Hultman and Johan Bergstrom of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden wrote the original paper which found that, if subjects vastly reduced carbohydrate consumption for three days and then supercompensated with carbs they would be stronger. Athletes who first tried this depletion phase during hard training got pretty sick when unable to maintain calorie balance. In the 1970s, Dave Costill and Mike Sherman found that just reducing carbs 40–50% during the three-day depletion cycle avoided the bad side effects and was more effective for athletes during the four-day loading phase. Danish sports nutritionist Bengt Saltin is also noted for his refinement of carbo-loading theory.
1967:	The Stillman Diet Dr. Irwin Stillman wrote Dr. Stillman’s Quick Weight Loss Diet. Basically, this was an exhortation for guiltless carnivores, and pushed lean meat, poultry, eggs and low-fat cheese. The theory was that proteins took more energy to digest and thus you could eat as much as you wanted and promised weight loss of 7–15 pounds the first week and 5 pounds a week thereafter. The problem: Without carbs, excess protein triggered ketosis, resulting in bad breath, constipation, nausea, and weakness. He died of a heart attack in 1975, but not before 20 million followed his protein regimen.
1966–70:	The Atkins Diet Dr. Robert Atkins, a cardiologist who wrote in Vogue, advocated protein and meat and plenty of fats. Atkins implored dieters to add a small amount of carbs only if “test sticks” showed presence of ketones in urine. Atkins thought ketones were an appetite suppressant. Problems: elevated cholesterol, strained kidneys, denied vitamins, minerals, and fibers of fruit and vegetables.
1978:	The Complete Scarsdale Diet Dr. Herman Tarnower’s highly regimented diet demanded dieter give up alcohol, butter, oil, and subsist on 700 calories a day of high protein. Snacks? Carrots and celery only. His rigid ideas and lack of co-credit on his book drove lover Jean Harris to blow him away. Now that is the ultimate diet! Lead!
1979:	Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise Dr. Nathan Pritikin set up his longevity center in Santa Barbara and posited that lots of walking and a very low-fat diet could reverse cardiovascular diseases. John Travolta and Barbra Streisand signed up and millions followed.
1980:	Dr. Kromer’s No Breakfast Diet Self-explanatory.
1981:	The Beverly Hills Diet Judy Mazel at age 30 said she heard voices telling her to pull off an L.A. freeway to get some cashews. At the health food store she went to, she came to discover, believe, and espouse theories of food combining, holding that enzymes produced by combinations of tropical fruits such as papayas and mangos would create total digestion. And if all that fruit meant “loose bowel movements”? Mazel said “Hooray!” A critic said it was a manual on how to binge and purge—with natural laxatives.
1981:	The Cambridge Diet Jack Feather and his wife Elaine sold handheld electric contraptions purported to increase bust size. When indicted on 13 counts of mail fraud and forced to pay $1.1 million in fines, they changed directions and put out an extremely low-calorie liquid protein concoction as the basis for a multilevel marketing enterprise that enticed three million to try it. Thirty people died of heart attacks before the FDA stopped them.
1982:	The Breatharian Diet The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner published an interview with a charming eccentric young man with a Jamaican hairstyle and the build of a distance runner who claimed his diet consisted entirely of consuming the minerals in Los Angeles’ smog-filled air. Inevitably, the Breatharian Diet turned out to be hot air. A curious reporter followed him out of the building and observed him walking into a 7-Eleven and buying Ring-Dings.
1983:	Jenny Craig If dieters sign up, they are urged to eat Jenny Craig—prepared foods—primarily until they can’t stand it much longer. No salt, caffeine, tea, or alcohol. Large gross sales helped by yo-yo dieting failures who keep coming come back for more.
Mid-1980s:	Carbo Ingestion During Competition and the Glycogen Window Ed Coyle and John Ivy of the University of Texas in Austin wrote seminal research papers on the efficiency of eating carbohydrates during competition and the urgency of replacing glycogen within a two-hour window of strenuous workout. This led to the Lippin Squeezy, GU ReLode, and carbo-replacement drink business boom.
1987:	Weedkiller Dr. Nicholas Bachynsky, a Texas doctor, injected dinitrophenol, a poison weedkiller, as Mitcal for up to $1,000 a treatment of 14,000 patients with a business totaling $10 million before the state medical board stopped him.
1980s:	Ephedrine Herbalife and others prescribe this amphetamine-like chemical derived from the Chinese herb ma huang that acts as a stimulant, especially when combined with caffeine. In low doses, ephedrine speeds up the body and causes restlessness, nervousness and insomnia. In larger doses, it can cause strokes in people with high blood pressure. Because they are herbal supplements and classified as foods and not drugs, the FDA has little power to regulate them.
1990s:	Weight Loss Surgery Radical surgery of stomach stapling and gastric bypasses and placement of gastric balloons are meant for the morbidly obese and are now done on 25,000 patients a year for $20,000 a pop. Up to 22% have serious complications. Less radical liposuction, the surgical removal of fat from abdomen, thighs and other vanity-piercing locations is now a huge business for plastic surgeons.
1992:	Coach Me’s Chinese Women’s World Record-Breaking Worm-Fungus Diet! Chinese women’s track coach Ma Junren astounded the world when his team of women distance runners led by Wang Junxia’s 29:31.78 10,000 meters and 8:06.11 3,000 meters and Qu Yunxia’s 3:50.46 1500 meters broke world records by amazing margins. Coach Ma imputed his success to a diet of worms. No, not the 1521 Diet of Worms, an epochal European governmental conclave. Rather, a diet that included an ancient Chinese Mandarin herbal ingredient, dong chong xia cao, a worm found in the plateaus of Western China that dies in the summer and a fungus grows on it. Farmers gather these one-to-two inch long critters that look like dried earthworms with a little tail that is the fungus attached to the carcass. Coach Ma put them in soup. One Chinese medicine expert said it affected the endocrine system which affects hormones and may have a steroid-like effect. The Chinese said simply, “It gives you power.” Don Catlin, the USOC’s top drug tester, could find no banned substances. Of course, Ma also had his pick of China’s huge gene pool and uncomplaining peasant stock, and trained his women by running them 175 miles a week, at 7,000 feet altitude. Although Wang and Qu were never busted, the program was suspect because many Chinese swimmers and other athletes failed a record number of drug tests.
1991:	40:30:30 a.k.a. The Zone Dr. Barry Sears’s study focused on negative effects of high-carbohydrate diets. Main points asserted too many high-glycemic index carbohydrates led to high blood sugar, the release of high amounts of insulin, stopping release of human growth hormone necessary for rebuilding muscles, thus negating hormonal effect of exercise. Killer overdoses of carbs elevated insulin and triggered “bad ecanosoids,” hyperinsulemia, hypoglycernia and suppressed immune system. Advocated consumption of “good” monosaturated fats like olive oil. Distant relative and descendant of Banting and Pennington’s high-fat diet. Many criticize Sears’ lack of hard data, test methods and questionable sources, plus his relationship to a sports bar company. But many respected sports nutritionists see its focus on hormonal aspects of diet and performance and retreat from carbohydrate worship to a more balanced regimen as beneficial avenue of study. Sports coach Phil Maffetone also touted the 40:30:30 diet combined with endurance training at lower heart rates and had spectacular results with six-time Ironman champion Mark Allen and with Olympic distance specialist Mike Pigg.
1991:	Phen/fen University of Rochester pharmacologist Michael Weintraub conducted a study that showed that a combination of two appetite suppressants—fenfluramine, which suppresses the appetite but makes you drowsy, and phentermine, a amphetamine-like substance which counteracts the drowsiness—were more effective than diet and exercise alone. The drugs are supposed to increase serotonin which shuts down the craving for food. Since then, one million Americans are on the drug and sales are $100 million a year. Others charge bad side effects such as elevated heart rates which have led to 30 deaths.
1993:	Miracle Thigh Cream George Brai, director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at LSU, endorsed this product on the basis of a study (12 women given topical application on their thighs in a greenish cosmetic cream some observers called “frog snot” containing an asthma drug, aminophyllin for six weeks and lost an average of 1 cm on the affected thigh).
1993:	Life Choice: Eat More, Weigh Less Dr. Dean Ornish followed in the oxymoron category weighed in with a more spiritual content, plus the more carbs the merrier, and fat as evil incarnate—or at least any more than 10% of your diet. His Life Choice Diet purported to heal emotion, pain through meditation, and high fiber. Ornish reacted to proffered olive oil as Dracula cringing from cross and garlic.
1993:	The Fat Blocker Diet Dr. Arnold Fox, M.D. touted Chitosan, the all-natural nitrogenous polysaccharides which are taken from the exoskeleton of the shellfish. Supposedly it soaks up fat like a sponge, then smoothly biodegraded. Possible problems: Resulting shortage of fat.