Chapter 1 - You Can Lose Weight

Quieting the Diet Quacks | Recognize Your Overweight Early | Your Blueprint for Weight Reduction

About 25 million Americans are overweight. If you are among them this book will help you. If you follow its simplified, point-by-point instructions you will be able to reduce to your most desirable weight.

More than 95 per cent of all overweight is caused by an intake of food greater than an output of energy. The energy you expend in work and play is a vital factor in your successful reducing. This varies from person to person and depends upon age, height, and occupation. How to Reduce Surely and Safely offers each individual reader his own personal reducing program.

In a matter of seconds you will be able to find yourself in The Calories You Work table on pages 58 and 59. Then, knowing your energy expenditure, you can select the proper diet for your requirements. Whether you are a man or woman, a housewife, executive, or factory worker, you can find your own Safe and Sure Diet among those listed on pages 62 to 85.

The Calorie Counter listed in Appendix A contains virtually all the food you eat. It is a handy guide in helping you to slim down to your desirable weight and a valuable permanent aid in your kitchen. The Calorie Counter and the other food tables which appear in these pages offer you hundreds of food substitutes. They eliminate the drudgery and complications of many diet systems.
If you reduce to your desirable weight, the scientific odds are that you will live longer. This fact is discussed in detail in Chapter 2, The Dangers of Overweight. You don't need science to tell you that you will also look better and feel better.

Better nutrition goes hand in hand with a weight reduction program. When you finish this book you will understand the positive values of nutrition. Instead of starving you, the Safe and Sure Diets will enhance your good health.

It is no coincidence that many members of the same family are often obese. Eating habits are difficult to break once they are set. But the deadly habits must be broken at some point.

They can be broken when parents follow their Safe and Sure Diets and set examples for their children. How to Reduce Surely and Safely will enable you to establish healthy nutritional habits for your family. It will give you the tools to help your overweight friends. At the same time you can become younger in heart, more attractive in appearance, and livelier in personality.

Within these pages you will find specific ways to reduce to your desirable weight without wasting money, without being boiled in a steam room, tortured by a masseur, or subjected to so-called nature foods. If you follow this guide to weight reduction, you can learn to prevent the return of unwanted fat.

Quieting The Diet Quacks

Having read How to Reduce Surely and Safely you will be invulnerable to the promoters of misinformation, impossible cures, and worthless drugs.

Today a parade of panaceas marches endlessly before you, vying for your attention and your dollars. In the ranks are food faddists, diet quacks, charm school hucksters, and twentieth-century witch doctors beating the drums for eternal slimness and beauty. Miracle diets, miracle injections, and miracle treatments pass in review. In the long run all are useless, many are dangerous.

Listening to the propagandists one would think America was the land of the grotesque and the home of the glutton. They paint a picture of middle-aged men and women, many of them with glandular disorders or unmanageable compulsions, devouring rich foods and puttering over pastries, racing each other to the grave over a path of chocolate icing.
The facts are slightly different. More than 95 per cent of our 25 million overweight people are not compulsive eaters, do not suffer glandular disorders, and require neither radical nor expensive treatment.

Recognize Your Overweight Early

How to Reduce Surely and Safely will focus on that 95 per cent. But later chapters will provide helpful information for the small percentage whose obesity results from physical or emotional causes, as well as for that much larger group at the opposite extreme—the underweight.

If there is one slogan that characterizes modern medicine, it is "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." The early detection of cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis, and other diseases is a major factor in arresting these potential killers. The prevention or early recognition of overweight is just as vital.

As a rule the average overweight individual does not eat more or richer food than in the past. His pattern of nutrition is the same that it has always been. But as he grows older, two basic factors change. His food requirements decrease, and he expends less energy.

As if this were not enough, civilization adds gadgets that make it more difficult for him to maintain his desirable weight. First coal, gasoline, fuel oil, and electricity reduced manual labor and made his life more bearable. These conveniences eliminated much of his normal, healthy exercise. Now the peacetime uses of atomic energy promise to reduce his labors even more—and increase his fat.

The more labor-saving contraptions he uses the less food he requires. But usually he doesn't see any connection between the new gadgets and his energy requirements. Possibly he figures that as long as he keeps exercising his digestive system, all will be well.

Almost imperceptibly he gains a few pounds each year, until suddenly his mirror and the unkind remarks of friends make him aware of a "new look." Only this new look is not fashionable.

It is compounded of unflattering bulges, wrinkles, chins, and jowls. Its effects are seam splitting and button popping. It means shortness of breath, palpitations, and a sudden awareness of encroaching age. It is the sensation of bending over for a routine chore and sending one's stomach into turmoil. It is, most of all, unnecessary.

If you are 10, 15, or 20 pounds overweight, you are in this category. But if you are grossly overweight, your very first step should be to contact your family physician and seek his advice and supervision of your diet. Whether your weight reduction should be large or small, you will find that your physician will be of great help, for he knows you and your habits intimately.

Your Blueprint For Weight Reduction

Your knowledge is your power. Learn the cause of your excess weight and you will know how to lose it.

This book will give you the answer to such vital questions as:

Are you overweight? How much?

What are the dangers of overweight?

How many calories are good for you?

How can you reduce?

Are there miracle diets or drugs?

What menus offer you top-notch nutrition while you reduce?

You'll find the answers to these and many other questions within the following pages. You will learn, for example, that the elimination of one pat of butter a day may mean a reduction of 7 pounds of body weight a year.

When you have completed this book you will have a blueprint for better health through better nutrition. You will be able to carry the right weight through a longer, more satisfying life.

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