Dietary

It is generally agreed that given adequate determination, weight can be lost on virtually any dietary plan, good or bad, that insures a calorie intake less than what is required by the energy used. It is equally apparent that many diets are only temporarily effective and do not promote the fundamental purpose of permanent loss. not to mention good eating habits.

The principles of the good reducing diet continue to be essentially these:

  • The diet should be individualized in harmony with income, national origins, religious principals. and personal circumstances. It should be literally be a personalized prescription.

  • The diet should be practical, consistent with patterns and other everyday obligations and responsibilities. It should keep the individual functioning at his usual job and should not encourage invalidism, real or imagined. Inappropriate or excessive devotion to diet above and beyond actual need can be still another form of disability.

  • The diet should be flexible, and should a variety allow for a variety of foods so that the patient can exchange one of which he has tired for other that furnishes the same food values, not merely the same calorie count. The diet should be elastic but the dieting should within reason be rigid. The reducing diet may include an item such as ice cream, a commonly forbidden treat, prescribed not just permitted. once or twice weekly.
  • The diet should utilize readily available commonly preferred foods which all members of the family can be encouraged to enjoy, as distinct from unusual or dietetic foods.
  • The diet should be consistent with accepted health practices and compatible with any medical conditions, such as liver, kidney, and heart disorders, which may exist.

  • The diet should be balanced and complete in conformity with the Recommended Dietary Allowance of the National Research Council. Only the attending physician can assure the dieter on this point.

  • The diet, basically, should be a pattern for life not only for the period of weight reduction, but also for the long-term maintenance of "normal" weight and optimum health.

Dietary Objectives

For some dieters the total day's prescription may perhaps be distributed among three meals with calories represented equally. For others, it may follow a two-fifths, one-fifth, two-fifths pattern-40 per cent breakfast, 20 per cent lunch, 40 per cent dinner. Each meal should contain all the food components, especially complete proteins and essential nutrients in suitable proportions. When this ideal is too difficult, a balance over the day should be sought.

Recent reports indicate that smaller, more frequent feedings may be more conducive to weight loss than the more usual three-meal regimen and may also be more protective against nutritional disease. Somewhat in contrast, short periods of complete fasting are advocated by other competent physicians whose patients have achieved impressive weight losses. After fasting there has been good acceptance of regimens involving periodic complete abstinence without apparent adverse effects. Hospitalization is sometimes recommended, at least initially, in these and other cases where close supervision is essential.

Obviously, a fasting or starving person will lose weight, but the publicity given to huge losses may tempt the observer to try to do this on his own initiative. Such drastic methods are strictly for selected cases under medical care, and usually in the hospital. As a do-it-yourself procedure they are extremely dangerous. 

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