washingtonpost.com
excerpted from Suddenly, It's a Guy Thing
In the Beginning, Before Low-Carb Eating, It Wasn't Manly to Watch Your Weight
By Judith Weinraub
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 29, 2004; Page F01
Then along came the Atkins diet and other low-carbohydrate, high-protein eating plans,
and things changed -- at least, that's the contention of New York University's Amy
Bentley, an associate professor in nutrition, food studies and public health at its school of
education.
Bentley and the other people interviewed for this story are careful to point out they are
not saying all men react one way to dieting, and all women another. But look at the
powerful role models for popular diets. The gurus of low-carb eating tend to be men,
Bentley points out: the late Robert Atkins; South Beach's creator (another doctor), Arthur
Agatson; the three doctors and one CEO of a Fortune 500 company who created Sugar
Busters. These are strong, successful male models, who promote eating plans that seem to
have quick results, not the female role models identified with plans such as Weight
Watchers, the L.A. Weight Loss Diet and Jenny Craig, programs that require dieters to
weigh food, count calories or tally points (a scoring system for foods) and to accept
continuous, moderate changes in weight loss as a good thing. More than half the
testimonials on the Atkins Web site come from men, too, she notes.
Bentley's article in the August issue of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture,
however, isn't based on long- or even short-term studies. And the research she reports in
her essay isn't footnoted. So, academic arguments aside, do men and women actually
approach dieting differently?
Yes, they do, says John La Puma, a Santa Barbara-based internist and professionally
trained chef with a national practice that focuses on medical nutrition and healthy weight.
"In my practice, men respond well when you tell them what to do and when to do it, what
to eat and what not to eat, when to eat and when not to," says LaPuma, whose patients are
about evenly divided between the sexes. "Both men and women need specific goals for
achievement. But goals are larger, more like visions or missions. Men often need
objectives -- little guideposts or milestones along the way. And we need strategies and
tactics to get there. It's the language of business school."
Initially LaPuma, who is also the co-author of "The RealAge Diet: Make Yourself
Younger With What You Eat" (HarperCollins, 2002) and "Cooking the RealAge Way:
Turn Back Your Biological Clock With More Than 80 Delicious and Easy Recipes"
(HarperCollins, 2003) took a more traditional approach. "When I was investigating
weight-loss programs 10 years ago, I found that 98 out of 100 were targeted for women,"
he says. "They were often process-oriented -- that is, they tried to make sense of the
problem and reason through it the way women often do with relationships, to turn the
problems over to fully understand them, and then to come out with a solution better than
what they went in with. It's a thoughtful examination of the reasons for eating other than
hunger, with small changes making a big difference. I started that way. . . . Three years
ago, it became clear to me that it worked for some people but not for others, and the
people it worked for tended to be women."
What he observed about the men he treated was that generally they were goal-oriented,
numbers-oriented and specific about wanting to be told exactly what to do. In general, he
found that approach works for his male patients and some women -- with a caution. "The
flip side is that it can seem parental," he says. "But it's not. It's more like a business
partner with experience in a specific area. . . . I give them specific goals -- weight, blood
pressure, cholesterol -- and I give them a specific time period to do it. . . . It's
prescriptive, clear, based in science, and it gives us something to shoot for."
La Puma isn't the only one to see a difference in the way men and women diet. At Weight
Watchers (where the amount and kinds of food allowed have been based on a point
system that is reliant on calories as well as grams of dietary fiber and fat), low-carb diets
are seen as serious competition, especially for male clients. Men have never been a large
part of the Weight Watchers constituency. Trying to make sense of that, the company did
extensive research about "extreme dieting" -- that is low-carb and no-carb dieting -- in the
United States. "We wanted to understand men, and their needs, preferences and weight
issues," says Karen Miller-Kovach, the company's chief scientific officer.
At Weight Watchers, for example, research has indicated that men go on diets primarily
for the same reasons that women do: to feel and look better, as opposed to a concern
about their health.
In contrast, LaPuma finds that his patients (who tend to be CEOs, very successful people,
yet they haven't been able to solve their weight problems) care mightily about potential
health hazards of being overweight. "They don't want the fact they're obese or hypertense
or have high cholesterol to steal from them what they've earned in life," he says.
Whatever the reason for dieting, the weight problem isn't going to go away -- for women
or for men. "There's too much food out there, too many choices. It's too tempting," says
NYU's Bentley. "We're in desperate times."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company