Do It Anyway

Here are two contrasting facts: I make at least some of my living writing about nutrition and weight loss. I am not fashionably skinny.

A while back, a reader asked how things had gone with my nutritional program, weight, and health since I wrote How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost 40 Pounds. I told the truth: That since I wrote the book there have been challenges – like a car wreck that kept me from exercising for two years solid, hypothyroidism, reaching middle age, writing cookbooks on a killer schedule – that have caused ups and downs, but that I have never gotten back to the size I was before I went low carb, and I have never questioned that my nutritional program was right for me.

In response, another reader commented that she admired me for sticking to my low carb diet when it hadn’t made me as slim as perhaps I’d like to be. She wasn’t sure she could stick with it if her diet just made her thinner, not really thin. If she couldn’t control everything, she wasn’t sure it was worth trying to control anything.

There are two opposing points of view that dominate the conversation about weight control in America. One group – many of them people who have never had a weight problem in the first place – are sure that it’s all about sloth and gluttony. Those fat people have a character problem; if they’d just eat less and exercise more, they, too, could look like the people on television. Others, often discouraged by low calorie, low fat diets that left them ravenous and tired, while not causing long-term weight loss, have thrown up their hands and declared that it’s all a matter of genetics and there’s nothing they can do. In other words, many people either believe that weight is completely under our control, or it’s not under our control at all. On or off.

This binary point of view strikes me as wrong-headed. It is my experience that I can’t control everything, but I can do what I can do, and it’s worth doing. No, I’m not skinny, just normal. On the other hand, I live every day with the knowledge that I have the genetics to be dangerously obese, that all it would take would be 18 months inattention to diet and exercise, and I could be a size 24, no problem. I was a size 20 and gaining rapidly when I went low carb. I’d sure rather be a size 10 than a size 24.

More important, I’m healthy. I have absolutely zero patience with ill-health; it annoys me no end to be even a tiny bit under the weather. I have more energy at fifty-two than I did at fifteen; that alone is worth eating right. I’ve been stopped in the hall at the doctor’s office, and had the nurses demand to know the secret of my HDL and triglyceride numbers. ("Three eggs a day and all the red meat I can scarf.") My A1C – the measure of blood sugar over time – is golden. All this tells me that I’m at a low risk for being slowed down by circulatory problems as I age.

The kicker is that research shows that perhaps the greatest contributor toward aging is sugar – also known as carbohydrate. Through a process called “glycation of proteins,” glucose in the bloodstream bonds to connective tissue, blood vessel walls, skin cells, you name it, causing them to become stiffened and inflamed. Can you say arthritis, heart disease, wrinkling, failing eyesight, and quite a lot more of the changes we attribute to aging? It’s the same process that causes rampant destruction in diabetics; it’s just a little slower in the rest of us. And the most recent research suggests that by controlling carb intake, and thus insulin levels, we can switch off the “Grim Reaper” gene and switch on the “Sweet Sixteen” gene, prolonging youth and lengthening life.

“But Dana,” I hear you cry, “You’re going to get old anyway! You’re going to die, no matter what you do!” I understand that. I do. But there’s aging and there’s aging. I watched my father, the poster boy for rotten diet and self-abuse, age badly. He had two kinds of cancer, and the surgeries and radiation that came along with them. He gasped for breath. His balance was shot. He had trouble walking. He tired easily. And this went on for years and years.

I may not be able to prevent all of that; I’m under no illusions that aging will not touch me. But if I can prevent even some of the disability that plagued my father for the last several years of his life, it’s worth it. If I can put off the worst of aging for a decade or two, or even a year or two, that’s worth it. I appear to have already started; I have friends my age who have for a decade assumed that their iffy health was simply an unavoidable consequence of aging. Yet I appear, so far, to have avoided it.

But you could get hit by a car tomorrow! Don’t I know it. That’s what happened to my exceedingly healthy mother, triggering devastating Alzheimer’s disease. But even a speeding car can’t take away the years and years I’ve had of feeling good. And -- what if I don’t get hit by a car? My father’s father died at fifty eight, and Dad, as a consequence, said he hadn’t expected to make it as far as he did. If he’d known he wasn’t going to die young, maybe he’d have taken better care of himself.

You do what you can do what you can do, and you leave the rest to chance. Just because your house could burn down doesn’t mean you don’t make the mortgage payments. Just because your kid probably won’t get into Harvard doesn’t mean you don’t make him do his homework. Just because you might not get the job doesn't mean you don't go to the interview.

And just because you can’t completely control your body doesn’t mean you give up and stop trying to eat right and exercise.

I know I have to die, but I am determined it will be from something other than my own willful butt-headedness. Anyone care to join me?