http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/life/story.html?id=a985a57c-ce03-402f-89cf-719ceec5632a&p=1
Chris Zdeb, CanWest News ServicePublished: Saturday, July 15, 2006
Cheating can make you a loser. More and more diet plans are counting on it, allowing dieters to have their cake and eat it, too.
Proponents of the new weight-loss programs say the more strict and rigid the rules surrounding eating healthily, the more likely people are to fail. For example, you're more likely to crave and binge on chocolate if you're banned from eating it than if you're allowed to eat it occasionally.
It's an idea that goes beyond popular media, notes Dr. Geoff Ball, director of the Pediatric Centre for Weight and Health at the Stollery Children's Hospital, and assistant professor in the department of pediatrics and child health at the University of Alberta.
Weight Watchers' dietary approach and nutrition plan has changed dramatically throughout the years from something quite rigid to something much more flexible. The Canadian Diabetes Association has also come out with a new eating approach that is more liberal.
"There's some good evidence that having a diet that is much more flexible is more realistic," Ball says.
Based on the fact that people are more likely to cheat or eat foods they normally don't eat on the weekend, Dr. Paul Rivas, a Baltimore internist and diet doctor, practically gives them dispensation to do so in his book called The Cheater's Diet: Lose Weight By Taking Weekends Off.
If you eat healthily 80 per cent of the time, eating something less healthy the rest of the time won't hurt you, Rivas explains. Monday to Friday people follow a "Mediterraneanish diet," but on weekends they can cheat with chocolate, pizza and beer.
The restriction is you can't cheat on binge foods that you can't stop yourself from eating once you start, Rivas says. But the diet tries to make cheat foods healthy as well.
"If you're going to have chocolate, pick the dark (it's healthier); if you're going to have pizza, choose thin crust and vegetarian."
Ball doesn't like the idea of specifically cheating on weekends because it's tied to the dichotomy that there are good foods such as broccoli and skim milk, and bad foods such as burgers and fries and you are what you eat.
"If you eat good foods you're a good person, but if you eat bad foods there are a lot of negative connotations that go along with that," he says.
Nobody's eating habits are perfect. There are going to be days such as birthdays and anniversaries or situations such as when you're travelling when you won't be able to eat healthily, Ball says and if you think that's bad you're going to feel guilty and possibly give up.
For almost five years, Christina Cacho has kept off the 165 pounds she lost while loosely following a Weight Watchers plan. When she first started to lose weight she ate everything by the book.
"Then I began to realize I'm passing up so much," she remembers, and decided to treat herself while still staying within the points or calories allotted for the day.
Cacho says she never called it cheating. "I don't think treating yourself to something that you normally don't always have should be called cheating.
"I figured if my body is craving that, then there's something obviously lacking," Cacho says. She basically responds to cravings but analyses first if they're what she really wants. If the craving is related to boredom or to give her hands something to do, she gets busy in other ways.
Charlotte Vareem-Sanders, a registered dietitian, guesses that The Cheaters Diet is named that to stand out from the hundreds of other diet books on the shelves.
She tells her clients that losing weight is more skill-power than willpower.
"When people have the skills and knowledge to help them eat healthily and then have some treats, that's the ideal," Vareem-Sanders says.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2006
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