Excerpt from WOW Chapter 4

When Food Went Wrong
Until just 70 years ago we ate fresh vegetables and fruits, along with whole grains, fresh dairy, fish and meats. Recipes were handed down from one generation to the next. Restaurants didn’t provide our daily fare, frozen and takeout didn’t exist, and church or social feasts were made fresh, not served up from Costco.

Food began to go wrong near the turn of the 19th century when pasteurization was developed to sterilize certain dairy foods, killing both the good and the bad bacteria. It really went wrong in the 1940s when food processing plants and rice mills were the hot new American industry. Kraft Foods introduced its processed cheese slices, and General Foods gave us Minute Rice, one of the first grains marketed that were no longer whole.

We may have begun stripping our foods of nutrients, but we were still a hardy group of women in those early days of convenience foods. Mowers were pushed, not motorized. Television didn’t exist, nor did air conditioning. We beat rugs to clean them, we got on our hands and knees to garden and scrub floors, we moved the furniture, washed the dishes and cooked the food, much of the time with a toddler on our hip. This lifestyle existed in a majority of American households into the 1950s. Washing machines, frozen foods and television began to pervade modern American life. By the late 1960s we were marching for equal rights; by the 1970s the computer began to invade our homes and workplaces, and our fingers began to do the walking and the running while the rest of our bodies went sedentary.

In a nutshell, we’ve got about 70 years of nutrient destruction and about 20 years of being lazier than a sloth. In the United States these conditions have manifested into...

• The highest obesity rates in the world
• Staggering increases in childhood obesity and a decreasing lifespan for future generations
• More diet-related diseases and deaths than from all other causes combined

Big Money and Big, Fat Lies
If you investigate to find out how much money is made in the food, meat, beverage and supplement industries, the figures go off the charts. In mathematical terms it might be a quintillion or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, a “googol” or a “megiston.” It is definitely enough money to keep laws in favor of profits for the industries.

What this means to the consumer is that we are fed a bunch of big, fat lies. I am many times shocked by what these industries get away with. All sorts of sugar candies declared themselves fat free during the fat-free fad of the 1990s, and consumers thought that meant they were low calorie. Hello! They had so much sugar that it didn’t matter that fat has more than twice the calories of sugar; they still contributed way more calories to your diet than you needed.

How about foods that declare themselves “cholesterol free”? To have cholesterol the food must have had a living, breathing mother. Do Gummi Bears and CornNuts have moms? No—so there’s no cholesterol—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t full of sugar or sodium and trans fat.

I recently saw a bulletin board: On one half it showed a diet soda, and above the photo it read “Zero Calories.” The other side of the billboard showed a large bottle of rum, and above the photo it read “Zero Fat.” The implication was that a rum and coke had no calories or fat. Get a life! Rum is loaded with calories if not fat, and I take issue with the reality of zero calories in diet sodas.

We are in an uphill battle against the food manufacturers. They will continue to portray their food as healthy and diet conscious. We have the choice of acting like full-time nutritionists and analyzing every label (more of that later), or going back to a diet that is full of fresh vegetables and fruits, whole grains and real dairy.

Before	After
Cheryl Belletto used this same diet to shed 25 pounds at age 60, proving you can do it at any age.

Back to the Kitchen
I took home economics in seventh grade, years before the Women’s Movement began. We learned to cook and sew. I still cook and sew; I enjoy the creativity of both activities. When I first began my Diet Support groups at the club, I realized that younger women today do not cook (or sew). As a matter of fact, young Americans think it’s cool not to cook.

I am going to share with you the same diet and tips that have worked to help my clients lose many hundreds of pounds. At the start of what I call my Diet Support groups I suggest a vegetable soup—without meat or dairy—as a staple for the week. The first year I proposed this, several members asked me for the recipe. A recipe for vegetable soup, I thought? Come on, you throw a low-sodium broth into a pot then add all the miscellaneous vegetables from the fridge. Who needs a recipe?

Well, as I’ve discovered, younger generations need it all spelled out. I have attempted to do this, with entire meal plans and lots of my own recipes. However, the fact that today’s youth do not cook leaves them uniquely uninformed about what goes in their mouths. We must get out of the meal-in-a-box mentality and start preparing our food in a healthy fashion if we are ever going to turn around the increasing obesity rates in this country.

The author Laura Dayton shares her favorite natural, healthy recipes.

We must get out of the meal-in-a-box mentality and start preparing our food in a healthy fashion if we are ever going to turn around the increasing obesity rates in this country.

Living in the wine country of Northern California, I have year-round fresh fruits and vegetables in abundance. Each summer I spend at least one evening each week shopping for the fresh and often organic produce that comes to town. Over the years I have concocted lots of healthy ways to eat veggies. I don’t usually tamper much with fruit. Although I am not zealously religious, I do believe in the grand scheme of things. Fruits exist because they are our natural candy, or what I sometimes call God's candy. They come in pretty colors, with wonderful scents, and they’re sweet. Who needs Skittles when you can munch on fresh cherries, white peaches and strawberries?

I eat by a simple rule: eat what nature has given us, not what man has given us.

This chapter will provide the guidelines to begin changing your health habits. You’ll learn about good foods, bad foods, how to read labels and even how to cook, complete with some of my favorite recipes. In the back of this book you will find several very helpful tools. I know it’s a pain, but food journaling is one of the best ways to begin to change your diet.

We eat for many reasons, and one is just because it’s there. Many times people have told me they never eat candy or sugar. However, when these same people start writing down every morsel that passes between their lips, lo and behold! How quickly they forget about the candy dish in the bank or on their co-worker’s desk, the frozen yogurt for dessert, the chocolate banana before bedtime. Sure, they may not be “candy” per se, but those sweet indulgences are nearly all sugar!

It takes three weeks to make a habit. Just like in my club, I ask you to make a 12 week commitment, just three short months, three times a week working out, making better food choices and reducing your calories by just 10 percent per week. In this case, more is better. More exercise and a greater reduction of calories equal faster weight loss.

Why a 12-week commitment? I have watched hundreds of women begin diets and/or exercise programs. More than half will drop out by the third or fourth week, another half in the following three weeks. On average, only 10 percent of the women finish the entire 12 weeks. Those women will each have achieved significant weight loss and will continue losing weight until they reach their goals.

I use the diet and exercise principles in this book myself. Twice in my life, at age 44 and 54, I got lazy, lost track and packed on pounds I didn’t need. It’s not as if I’m fitness model—most of what I do is in front of a computer not a camera. We all fall off the bandwagon and the older we get, the easier it is to pack on pounds. It may be a little more difficult to drop the weight, but if you buy into that mentality you’ll never achieve the body you want.

Mature women need to rally the strengths of our wisdom. We know 12 weeks is not really a long commitment. Remember when 10 months (yeah, that’s how long it is) sounded like you’d be pregnant forever? Well, it flew by. So what’s three months compared to that?

I like to focus on a short term rather than biting off a whole new lifestyle as if it was a change in hairstyle. Three months to transform your lifestyle, body, health and future. Go ahead, take the bait and run, as they say, you have nothing to lose but the weight.

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