Crash course in dieting
IN THE midst of crippling price hikes, stomach-churning health warnings and widespread bans, my old neighbour rigidly stuck to her 20-a-day cigarette habit. “It all goes around in circles,” she would say, puffing and coughing away.
“Give it another 10 years and the scientists’ ll be saying it’s good for you.” My neighbour didn’t live long enough to find out that she was wrong but there was some logic to her argument.
Take eggs. Good for you. Not good for you. Good for you again. Exercise. The only way to lose weight. Useless for losing weight. Useful but not as useful as a spoonful of bacteria. The science we put so much trust in is, like history, constantly being revised. Just as we’re now supposed to view Genghis Khan as a cultured scholar with an interest in embroidery, THE BIG CRASH DIET EXPERIMENT (BBC1) was telling us sudden bouts of starvation are the next big thing.
Condemned for years as the losers’ path to temporary weight loss, crash diets have been brought in from the cold. Psychologically, it’s thought, the sudden drop in weight motivates people to carry on. On a biological level, it’s almost as if some SAS survival team springs into action when the calories are suddenly reduced.
Deadly build-ups of fat around the organs are suddenly turned into energy, heart problems, high blood pressure, even diabetes can seemingly be unpicked by a shortish bout on a VLCD. That’s a very low calorie diet, as suffered by four obese clients on last night’s programme. Think wee, wee bowls of soup and nothing else. It seemed to work.
Weight loss or being “beach body ready” were more or less side dishes in this programme, compared to the more drastic consequences of having a fat-laden body.
For Catholic priest Paul there were signs, little short of miraculous, that a one per cent reduction in the fat cells of his liver was rebooting his insulin system, potentially reversing his diabetes.
Amazing stuff. Suffer a little. Not that months and months on a gerbil’s diet is exactly a little. Even so, benefit a lot. Live. Don’t lose your sight or have to have limbs amputated. This was great news, tempered only a little by stuff they forgot to mention. What happens when you start eating again?
All art documentaries should begin with a quote from Ecclesiastes. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” BIG SKY, BIG DREAMS, BIG ART: MADE IN THE USA (BBC4) showed us vividly how the new world recreated the old one its painters came from.
Even though he called himself a futurist, Naples-born Joseph Stella made altar-piece paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge, the light and the colours reminding us of stained glass windows.
New York’s Chrysler Building, the tallest in the world when it was built in 1928, even had gargoyles, albeit modelled on the hood ornaments of Chrysler cars.
According to presenter Waldemar Januszczak, modern American artists were heavily influenced by a Russian occult movement that traced its roots back to Hindu mysticism thousands of years old.
Even Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, was apparently on some weird mission that involved spreading the light into the darkness. So the modern is ancient and the ancient is modern. Small wonder Silicon Valley is full of cults and prophets.