Lucy's Blog
I've never been a fan of supplements, at least not the kind designed to help you lose weight. And this week, when more than a dozen Hydroxycut products were taken off the market because they are linked to liver damage, seizures and in one case, death, I felt completely vindicated in my absolute anti-diet pill stance.
I know how hard it is to lose weight. I have lost about 25 pounds and managed to keep it off—but without my passion for a cardio-intensive sport (triathlon) and the change in the way I eat (more fish, veggies and fruits, plus healthy fats from nuts, avocado and olives), I never would have been able to do it. I failed at every diet: Atkins lasted about two hours and gave me an intense headache. I read South Beach but I knew I couldn't stay away from fruit for the two-week phase-in plan, so I didn't try it. I even attended a Weight Watchers meeting once. When a young woman, a chef in a nice restaurant, got up and confessed that she couldn't help but pick off the trays of desserts (I love a good brownie edge myself), my heart went out to her. But I decided that to have to confess our "sins" in group therapy wasn't my bag. I quit.
So diets never worked and I could be called the perfect target for the marketing of a supplement for weight loss. Except for one key thing: I don't like to relinquish control. Not to those I love and certainly not to a stranger packaging something so potentially damaging that it could cost me my good health. Because no matter how much I hated my saddle bags, I liked myself too much to jeopardize the organs and heart and functionality that had always served me well. I loved my body, I just hated the fat that lay like a big blanket on top of it.
My solution was to cut out a lot of sugar, stayed away from bread and stick to one glass of wine three nights a week (OK, sometimes on Saturday night I had two!). That was less than I'd have before, and the thing about alcohol is that it washes away my resolve. So in the pre-slim me phase, a second glass meant I'd reach for the ice cream or cookies without even a blink. Now I still have those treats, but not every night and not in the same way. In other words, I eat healthy. My number-one rule is if I lived on a farm and could grow this on a tree, a bush or in the ground, I can have as much of it as I like. That's basically my "diet," and it works like a charm.
I have always been active, on high school and college crew teams, running and even doing the NYC marathon more than once. But that, I thought, meant I could eat all I want, and the truth is you can't. Your muscles are one part of the machinery that makes up your body, but they don't burn hot enough or long enough to make up for all the sugar and high-fructose corn syrup that most of us get in our diets, unless we are careful and choose to eat healthy. So yes, exercise daily, but don't fool yourself that by doing so, you've earned a free pass to chow down.
Back to Hydroxycut: Like fen-phen before it, it has been shown to cause damage to your insides. My pal who once took fen-phen ended up with a heart murmur. She never will know for certain that was the cause, but I have my suspicions. My attitude is that you wouldn't relinquish control of your body to a stranger, so why would you give it to a strange pill? We all know the FDA is supposed to protect us, but things are allowed to go on the shelves unless they are proven unhealthy, and even then the "proof" is sometimes hard to come by. Until there is a real magic pill, I still rely on healthy eating, no strict dieting, and a good dose of exercise (yes, for me that's about an hour a day, five days a week, and more on weekends). But I love healthy food. And I love to move. So these aren't punishments. Just a way of saying thank you to my body for being healthy. I consider it a lucky and privileged job to keep it that way.
Published at http://www.self.com/magazine/blogs/lucysblog/2009/05/diet-pill-dangers.html
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