DIET WATCHER'S GUIDE: A PROVEN METHOD OF WEIGHT REDUCTION BASED ON THE GROUP PROGRAMS OF DIET WATCHER INC.
And this was when my mom and I both joined Diet Watchers. For those of you who have never heard of it (which is probably all of you), Diet Watchers was a diet program based, like Weight Watchers, on nutritional guidelines developed by Dr. Norman Jolliffe, of the New York City Board of Health, and incorporated by a couple of ladies with weight problems, named Ann Gold and Sara Welles Briller.The two programs are so similar, that I frankly am amazed that Ann and Sara ever managed to get theirs incorporated. These days they'd see their now-shrunken butts sued for copyright infringement as soon as they convened the first meeting. But these were the free-and-easy 1970's, and anyone was free to do their own thing, which apparently included being able to start meetings under practically the same name as another diet plan, teaching people to follow a practically identical program, and making money by selling them books with yummy recipes in them, such as Mock Sweet Potato Pudding (the mockery, in this case, coming from the fact that sweet potatoes were forbidden by the Diet Watchers' program; LOL, those orangey vegetables you just gobbled, were actually summer squashes in disguise).
Weight Watchers was already a very successful program, by the time my mom and I started out to lose weight back in 1973. They had meetings, and recipe cards with pretty-colored pictures on them, and everything. Diet Watchers, was like a low-rent cousin, with only two cookbooks for sale, and no pictures in either of them, and recipe cards that were mimeographed by the local group-leaders, rather than pre-printed by the company and full-color gorgeous.
In her book The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan, Wendy Mc'Clure has already done an awesome job of showing just how ugly and disturbing-looking even the best food photos from the era could be (especially food with names like Inspiration Soup and Fish Balls), although she's helped out of course, by the fact that the food in most old photos looks like barf. If you want to see more of the horrors of 70's-era diet food, you should definitely find a copy of her book and read it, because it's laugh-aloud funny. If you want to read more about what the food tasted like, stay here.
Dr. Jolliffe's original idea of course, was to make a nutritionally sound program. Poor fellow, he dreamed of taking all us red-blooded meat and junkfood-eating American couch potatoes, and introducing us to the joys of green vegetables and plenty of fish. His program was a little restrictive sure, but hey, you don't lose weight by snarfing up every T-bone and sack of Granny Goose chips you see. What Ann Gold and Sara Welles Briller made of it however, is something that has haunted me ever since my childhood.
It was a very rigid plan, you see. If you're mostly familiar with the current Weight Watchers plan, and how it gives you a certain number of "points" that you're allowed to eat in a day, with special provisions you can go by if you've got a holiday coming up and want to allow for overeating, then be prepared: There was none of that in the Diet Watchers program. The foods were all listed, which ones you could eat, how much of them you could eat and when, and which ones you could not eat, under any circumstances.
Bread, for instance, was mandatory, one slice at breakfast, and one slice at lunch, with none to be consumed ever, at any other time at all. Milk was another mandatory food, with all adults required to drink two cups a day, and all teens (such as I was when I was on the diet) required to drink four cups. It had to be skimmed milk of course. But the rules specifically said, you were not allowed to drink fresh nonfat milk from the market, but instead had to make up your own as needed, out of powdered instant. To add just a couple more examples of inconsistency: Julienne-sliced green beans were a "free food", as in you could eat as many of them as you wanted, any time, anywhere. But straight-cut green beans were strictly limited; you could eat them only at dinnertime, and never more than a 1/2 cup portion. And tomato sauce was forbidden, not to be eaten any time for any reason, but tomato juice was an unlimited food (when served in 8 ounce portions. And I ask you: If you can have unlimited 8 ounce cups of juice, isn't that the same as saying you can have as much juice as you want?).
Such were the arcane rules that went with being a Diet Watcher. I haven't even mentioned the fact that watermelon was forbidden (Why? I don't know. It only has about 50 calories per cup). Or that sauerkraut was unlimited, and hot dogs came in portions of 4 dogs per serving, so that conceivably, you could sit down to a whole can of salty-salty kraut, with half a pack of wieners soaking in it, and consider yourself a successful Diet Watcher, as long as you didn't add a bun (because no bread with dinner, of course).
I stayed on this diet for about three years. My mom stayed a lot longer, but by the time I was in 9th grade, I'd pretty much had it with eating horrible food, and I rebelled. Because the food we ate really was pretty horrible. Diet Watchers' spaghetti for instance, was ground beef in tomato juice, over a bed of canned beansprouts. Diet Watchers' gravy was reconstituted bouillon cubes, thickened with dry milk powder. And Diet Watchers' cookies were dry milk powder mixed with saccharin and canned pineapple chunks.
It was awful food even for a sedentary adult, but for a young teenager like I was, who walked a mile each way to school every day, and rode her bicycle the 5 or more miles it took to get into town whenever she wanted to go to a store, it was positive torture. I felt like I was starving pretty well the whole time I was on the diet, even with the petty thievery I committed whenever I could, snitching handfuls of dry cereal, or a few of my father's peanuts, or a pat of butter if I couldn't get something better, anything to slow down the pangs of hunger a little. The thing that finally pushed me over the edge and made me rebel, was what I like to call The Ground Tuna Incident:
It was on a Saturday. I spent the morning, helping out with a 4-H carwash, and well before my shift was over at 1:30 P.M., I was famished. I spent the last hour or so, thinking thoughts of food, going over everything that was in the kitchen, and wondering which of it my mother would give me for lunch when I got home. Now you have to understand that just recently, my mom had gotten a good deal on a case of canned tuna. She didn't read the labels too carefully, and when we got it home and opened the first can, we found out it was ground tuna, not the flaked kind people normally eat. Even then, you mostly only saw ground tuna sold as catfood, but this was labeled for human consumption, and after she'd paid good money for it, by god my mom was going to make sure humans consumed it.
So that day of the carwash found me coming home the hungriest I could ever remember being in all my young life. I was hungry enough to eat anything, I told myself, having forgotten entirely about the ground tuna. -- My mom and I used to eat a lot of tuna while we were dieting. Diet Watchers' rules mandated that we eat at least 5 fish meals a week, and it was hard to keep that much fresh fish in the house, especially in the 1970's, when for most Americans, dinner meant red meat. We ate tuna mixed with mayonnaise and mustard, and tuna on toast with melted cheese on top, and tuna with pineapple mixed in (which was actually pretty good), and tuna mixed with chopped apples (which wasn't). -- And of course when I came in the house and sat down for lunch, that was what I was given. And my mother had mixed it with some of the soft apples from the very bottom of the fruit bowl, the ones I always tried to avoid when I got a piece of fruit for myself to eat. Hungry as I was, I couldn't stomach a bite of it.
And the next day, I told my mom I wasn't going to diet any more. No matter what happened, or how fat I got, that was it for me, I wasn't going to starve all day any more, just for the dubious opportunity to enjoy catfood-and-mushy-apples again. And this is what I looked like a couple of years later:
Here again, I don't think I look all that fat. But my closet still had a rack (more accurately, a pile) of fat clothes, that I wore all the time, and a rack of skinny clothes, that were waiting until I could lose 20 pounds.
HyperSmash
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