Are "they" trying to keep people fat?

The diet industry rakes in $59.7 billion dollars a year.  Keeping one-third of Americans overweight is a very lucrative business.   Dieters need to beware of ways the diet industry may want to pull — and keep, the wool over our eyes, such as:

1) Using words like “Fat Free” on packaging, tricking dieters into thinking they are eating less calories.  For example, Yoplait advertises their yogurt as ”99% fat free;” however, one container has 170 calories.  Dannon Fit ’N Light Yogurt only has 60 calories per container; it’s what I eat every morning for breakfast.  Did you know that if you eat 100 more calories than you burn in a day, you will gain one pound in a month, or 12 pounds in a year — or 120 pounds in 10 years?  It adds up.

2) Watch out for clothing retailers that trick people into feeling thinner than they really are, by

Sonja in Haleiwa, Hawaii, August 2011

making them fit into “smaller” sized clothes — or so it says so on the tags.  Old Navy is mentioned on MetaFilter as one of these, with women saying they fit into a size 4 or 6, when they are 8s and 10s anywhere else.  Men are quoted as saying the clothing there is “wildy big,” and while they are a large or XL at all other stores, at Old Navy they are a medium.  I think this sets people up to think they can now eat more because they feel thinner — and, of course, they will want to shop at the store with the “smaller” size.

3) The very lucrative $59.7 billion-dollar weight loss industry, and all the diet programs that go along with it (I know, I have probably been on every diet out there).  They all work.  I even lost my final 50 pounds on a nationally known diet, and bought food, products and supplements from them.  It’s not the diet, I have found, it’s living thin and keeping it off afterwards that is tricky.  Eighty to ninety percent of dieters gain their weight back after they quit dieting.  The diet industry keeps dangling new diets in front of our noses, telling us what was wrong with the last diet, and telling us why the new diet is going to work.  Aren’t we smarter than that?  Quit financing the diet industry, and live thin, my friends!