Weight loss guide: Here's how you can win the battle of bulge

Recently, at a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, I was shocked by the obesity on display both among participants and spectators. In complete contrast, pictures I'd shot as a rookie reporter from a parade in 1985 showed all-American guys and gals, all clean-cut and regular as in a Norman Rockwell painting. I must emphasise that mine is not an anecdotal beginning: studies have shown that fewer than 13 per cent of Americans were considered obese in 1960.

Today, the percentage has tripled and the number of those diagnosed with diabetes had shot up sevenfold from the one per cent in the '60s. This has been attributed in part to rejigging of diagnostic standards, allegedly inspired by Big Pharma, but the palpable excess of paunchiness unequivocally indicates that lots of people in the world's most powerful economy have lost their Battle of the Bulge.

What makes it ironic, even tragic, is that this simply isn't due to lack of advice. If anything, in the Wired World, the opposite seems to be true. There's so much advice on healthy (and unhealthy) eating and so much of it is conflicting that many people seem to be seeking comfort in the worst kinds of foods.

Nor are developing countries immune to such trends. A global study conducted in 2007 showed rising levels of obesity not just in the US, but also in virtually every country where detailed data was available. There were two 'big' putative culprits. One was the marketing of certain energy-rich foods. The other was institutionally-driven reduction of physical activity.

Now couldn't these 'Big Two' be combated, or better still, corrected? Action is not as simple as the Nike slogan that exhorts consumers to "Just Do it"! Compounding the difficulty is the fact that we do not suffer from a shortage of opinion on food and eating.

Everybody and her aunt has a take on what makes for healthful eating and its deleterious opposite. When you factor in constantly changing advice from 'experts' and spin-doctors (not to forget charlatans, cranks and venial vendors), you inevitably end up with a farrago of myth and fact about nutritional wisdom. Experts say this buttresses our fears and insecurities, both at the conscious and subconscious levels, leading to dysfunction and a lack of connect to genuinely healthful practices.

But the moot question remains: why is this so-called expert advice so fickle, so self-contradictory? Equally interesting is the corollary: why do so many of us remain all-too-ready to shoot these weathercock messengers? A 2014 study reported in The Journal of Health Communication indicated that exposure to conflicting news about the health benefits of certain foods, vitamins and supplements often led to confusion and backlash against recommendations.

As a result, people were more likely to ignore not only the contradictory information, but also readily-jettisoned, widely-accepted nutritional advice such as consuming plenty of fruits and vegetables and exercising regularly, reported the author, Rebekah Nagler, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Minneapolis.

Nagler also found that people who started out with confusion about nutrition in the first place were more likely to blame the media for their own bewilderment and lack of clarity. This seemed like a good recipe for a self-fulfilling prophesy. What's the more viable or sensible alternative? For starters, get beyond the headlines. Check the caveats. Read the fine print. Ask 'as compared to what?' (This comes from an apocryphal joke about James Thurber: when a friend asked how Thurber's mother-in-law was, the American humourist replied: "As compared to what?").
Rats fed on an immoderate excess of even the most beneficial food can become severely ill. Devilish torture methods such as force-feeding and waterboarding are based on just such a premise.

Forget what Franz Kafka told you about his protagonist metamorphosing into a beetle: men aren't mice or worms or cockroaches. Be especially wary of unwarranted extrapolation. Above all, follow the money. A 2013 analysis published in the journal PLos Medicine revealed, for instance, that studies funded by industry were five times more likely to suggest that there wasn't enough evidence to link sugar-sweetened beverages like soda to weight-gain and obesity!

Lobbying by special interest groups and industrial conglomerates adds to the confusion and cacophony. The sponsored comic character Popeye the Sailor's penchant for the muscle-building power of canned spinach supposedly led to a 33 per cent jump in consumption of the vegetable during the Great Depression.

But few are aware that the cartoon character's link between spinach and rapidly expanding muscles was actually based on a colossal scientific bloomer: due to a misplaced decimal point in an 1870 medical journal, many people in the '30s believed spinach held 10 times more iron than it really did, reports The Telegraph.

This is just what a blogger describes as "the headline-grabbing (equivalent of) equine excrement kicked off by somebody's misreading of a heavily-caveated and carefully limited (or nuanced) scientific paper".

"The problem is not with 'scientific advice'," Joshua Engel adds in his post on Quora. "The problem is with non-scientists dispensing advice that sounds scientificky." Thus, we need to separate the processed or second-hand spin-doctored variety of 'advice' from its real or perennial counterpart. But even here, one needs to be vigilant. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, makes a pithy pitch for moderate diet and exercise (Yuktaahar-Viharasya).

This is what diet and lifestyle guru Dean Ornish also advocates in his plea for the benefits of a low-fat diet coupled with exercise and relaxation techniques. But it would be counterproductive to concentrate on the low-fat diet alone (as many food cranks and faddists tend to do). And it would be just as erroneous to focus on exercise or relaxation alone without rationalising your diet according to the demands of your unique constitution and needs.

What this means in practical terms is that there are no magic remedies or instant fixes beyond broadest and the blandest of clichés and generalisations such as sunshine, exercise, adequate rest and wholesome food. These are the very things that one cannot 'buy' at a pharmacist, as Jerome K Jerome discovers in Three Men in a Boat. The hypochondriac's doctor prescribes him, "One pound of steak with one pint of beer every six hours and one ten-mile walk every morning and one bed at 11 sharp every night." The punchline of the prescription, "And don't stuff up your head with things you don't understand!" applies equally well to hypochondriacs in the 21st century.