Conscious Choice: Chicago: Fat City

October 2004

Chicago: Fat City

by Caroline Casper

The only thing growing faster than the $55 billion diet industry is the American waistline, according to Rob Stevens, author of the new anti-diet book, The Overfed Head. Stevens is not a nutritionist. In fact, he’s not a health practitioner. He’s just a regular every-day Joe. So what makes him a diet expert? Well, for one thing he’s not fat anymore. He started out as a chubby 10-year-old and for years wrestled a losing match with his weight, trying various diets until he had an epiphany and emerged with an amazingly simple diet plan: Just listen to your body.

A lifetime of dieting is “a perpetual conflict between deprivation and overindulgence that alters the body’s natural metabolism, Stevens says in his book. People obsess about food until they are “out of touch with the physical signals that tell them when they need to eat and when they need to stop.”

Stevens should know. After years of the now-familiar yo-yo dieting syndrome that so many Americans are suffering through, Stevens passed the 300-pound mark. Today he is healthy and fit at 160 pounds — a weight he has maintained for six years.

The diet industry has polluted our minds,” Stevens said. “First it was calories, then it was fat grams, now it’s carbs. What’s next?”

How about an undiet diet?

The Diet-Dump Phenom

The Overfed Head teaches dieters to only eat the amount of food they need and provides a hunger guide to help readers identify the way they feel while eating. Stevens’ plan involves simple awareness. “We just encourage people to slow down when they eat and stop when they feel satisfied, not full,” he said.

If that’s the answer, apparently not many people have been hearing what their bodies have been trying to say. Every year, Americans are gaining more weight and Chicago is no exception. The city ranks fifth among the fattest cities in the United States and the latest statistics (2001) show that about 47 percent of all residents in the Chicago metro area consider themselves to be overweight or obese, according to Tom Shafer of the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Despite our obsession with food and dieting, Americans are still getting fatter, Stevens said. “Every year, 300,000 people die from weight-related problems,” Stevens said. “This is a growing problem.”

Diets are only a temporary solution, because as soon as a diet ends the pounds quickly return, said Stevens, founder of the new Chicago-based weight-loss company, Thintuition, an internet-based program.

Stevens promotes his anti-diet diet on his website, www.thintuition.com, where recovering dieters can avail themselves of his “Dump the Diet Days” program for a monthly fee of $30.

At two recent diet-dump events held at fitness centers in the downtown Illinois Center and in Lincoln Park, fed-up underfed dieters came carrying armloads of books bearing titles such as The Atkins Diet, The Zone, South Beach Diet, Suzanne Somers’ Eat Great Lose Weight, Dr. Phil’s Ultimate Weight Solution, and Weight Watchers. Within seconds, the diet books were thinned out to pasta-like strips that were spit out of a paper shredder.

“There are a lot of carbohydrates in that truck,” Stevens said as he stared into the shredder. “If people really studied carbohydrates and their effect on our bodies, they’d never give them up.”

But when Stevens explains his eating habits to dieters, many are skeptical and ask: How can you eat anything you want and still lose weight?

The answer is simple: portion control.

“Stevens believes that if you listen to your body, ultimately you’ll give your body what it needs in terms of nutrition,” said Laura Concannon, an internist at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center who specializes in bariatrics, or weight-loss management. “Stevens first addresses the behavioral component of eating. I like [his method] precisely for reasons that it isn’t a diet. It’s a lifestyle.”

As a culture, we eat for many reasons other than providing our bodies with energy, Concannon said. We’ve been taught to eat larger portions, but the reality is the human stomach is only about the size of a fist.

Many people who have read Stevens’ book are happy with this non-diet, weight-loss method.

Susan Taylor, a retired Chicago banker, said she didn’t realize that she was overeating until she met Stevens at a weight-loss seminar last year. Now she says she’s lost 15 pounds by simply observing the way she feels as she eats.

“I never dieted with his method and I still lost weight,” Taylor said. “I just stop eating when I’m satisfied. It makes so much sense. When you start a diet all your energy goes into obsessing about it. This is a different message than what we’re hearing.”

Regardless of whether Stevens has seized upon a gathering collective consciousness or simply a good marketing idea, judging from the response at his events, it’s apparent some former carb counters now feel like eating bread.

Caroline Casper is a Conscious Choice staffer who still likes to eat carbs.

October 2004

Chicago: Fat City

by Caroline Casper

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