Very recently, I’ve been starting to feel… alone. Not alone alone, but alone among strangers.Way back in 2003 when I started doing Atkins, I was one of the Johnny-come-latelies, but I was being welcomed into what had the feel of a community. Outsiders watched us with interest, asked us questions, laughed, told us we were crazy and that we were going to ruin our health. When some of us lost a noticeable amount of weight, those of us who kept living the plan and kept the weight off were not paid as much attention as those who didn’t. Those who didn’t had plenty of reasons why the diet “failed” but the reasons were rarely that they themselves hadn’t enough discipline or understanding of the science behind it. The outsiders accepted them back into the high-carb fold and sneered, “See, Atkins doesn’t work!” As the low carb bubble went bust and the media turned its laser beam on the “dangers” and “failure” of low carb living, those outsiders wagged fingers at us and snickered, “We told you so!”
That was several years ago of course. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only one left where I work who’s doing low carb. At least I don’t hear anyone else talking about it. Someone will see me heating up an omelet or some bacon and eggs in the micro, and they’ll comment how good it smells, and sometimes I’ll mention I do low carb, but that doesn’t seem to generate any interest anymore. I may have well said I bought a new PDA, which also garners the same reaction.
I’ve made mention recently that I’m reading Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories; I started Part 3 last night. Oddly, the more I read it, the more I feel different and isolated. All these people around me, all these eaters of cookies and pies and bagels and cakes and bread and potatoes, all of them are dying. They walk around like zombies, like I did years ago, oblivious to the deleterious effect on their health of all that carbohydrate laden garbage. I want to reach out and tell them, I want to grab them and shake them and wave my book in their faces like a preacher waving a bible.
But we all know that those sorts of tactics rarely work. They usually make things worse. I commented to one of my pie-eating coworkers last week that he was effectively eating poison, and he laughed and said that he never tasted such sweet poison. Had I pressured him further I’m certain he would have become irritated. More flies with honey, I guess, but there’s those carbs again.
When I was very young, I saw on television one of the first science fiction movies I was allowed to watch, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” It both captivated me and creeped me out. I haven’t seen it in ages, but I believe at the end of the movie the main character, a doctor played by giant-jawed Kevin McCarthy, stood in panic, alone, in the middle of an intersection of the invaded town. Trucks drove past him in each direction, loaded with huge pods which were intended to blossom into replacements for humanity… dull, emotionless replacements.
imbd.com lists a quote from the trailer for the movie, and it’s the doctor shouting, apparently at the audience: “Listen to me! Please listen! If you don’t, if you won’t, if you fail to understand, then the same incredible terror that’s menacing me WILL STRIKE AT YOU!”
Somehow, that’s kind of the feeling I’m having.
Filed under: Books, Megamas, Mindset, Personal Journal, general health
Your point is well taken. Complacency is a huge barrier when it comes to improving the nation’s health. But perhaps weight control isn’t the key issue here. After all, you know many slender people who consume the same diet that made you over weight and they don’t have a problem; well not yet anyway.
Fat or skinny, today’s food environment is conducive to chronic disease and vulnerability to infection. Regarding the latter, just look at the amount of immunization going on these days. Part of that is due to the fact that the public health service is enamored with the concept of vaccination as a means for controlling infectious disease. And part of the problem has to do aggressive business practice on the part of pharmaceutical companies. For more on this Google “Mary Tocco Why Vaccinations Aren’t Safe.
At any rate, don’t get discouraged. If you really want to help the people you know become healthier, talk about the quality of the food supply and chronic disease. That’s in Gary Taubes’ book also. Get their E-mail addresses and send them interesting articles about the food supply. Admittedly, there are some who will never be receptive. There’s nothing you can do about that. So concentrate on the ones that can be rescued.
Dave Brown
Nutrition Education Project
Good advice, Dave, thanks. With every page I read in GC,BC I realize that this so much more about the complete health of the body than just how much one weighs. That’s why I say the smartest thing my wife and I ever did (beside quitting smoking) was starting low carb in 2003. Entering our 50′s at the time, I hope we were able to reverse some of the damage and not just stop it from occurring.
You are definitely not alone. We’re just very quiet about it now.
I couldn’t agree more. I just had tea with a lovely older (mid 70′s) lady friend of mine and while I watched her eat a white bagel with jelly while she told me about her dizzy spells and her husband’s various health problems, I wanted to rip that bagel out of her hand and throw it across the room.
When I read about rising health care costs and think about aging baby boomers, I see doom and gloom on the horizon. I can only hope that GC,BC will ignite a large enough spark to make a difference. It did for me and I foist it on people as much as I can get away with.