We Crave Gimmicks!

According to CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, Americans spend between 35-40 billion dollars a year on dieting or diet-related products.  Why is it we believe we can purchase something for $19.99,  wear it to bed and we will wake-up thinner in the morning?  

We search endlessly trying to find the “perfect” food plan and we are tempted to put a check in the mail immediately when we see mouth-watering enormous portions of food they say we can eat and still lose weight with.  Most of us are willing to spend whatever we can afford, and then some, for what we believe will be the “cure” to our weight problems.  

When I first started to lose weight, I wished I was Oprah Winfrey and I too had a personal trainer,  my own gym,  and a chef that followed me around and cooked the right meals for me all day.  The reality was that I had a well-equipped kitchen that I felt was the root of all my evil, a park nearby that forced all of the elements of nature on me, including rain, hail and snow, and an open-to-the-public gym filled with people that I was ashamed to face because I was morbidly obese and at the time, unemployed.  I yearned for the gimmicks that would help me to lose the weight.  Lucky for me I faced my plan of attack, losing weight, with a limited budget. 

When I speak publicly I often feel the lack-of-interest vibrations emerging from the crowd when I tell them I basically live on fresh fruits and vegetables today.  Hopping on the band wagon that I too need a gimmick to keep people interested in my words, I now say, “I eat things that swim, hang from trees, come up from the ground, or occasionally roam free on earth.”  For a brief fleeting moment that makes people think I may be on to something new that may work for them too!  The quest for the perfect diet gimmick is in all of us.  

I suppose if I could invent a gimmick to help me, it would be for my car to turn into Knight Rider and when it pulled in my driveway it says, “This is not meal time.  You do not need a snack.”  I also would love a scale that says, “Well look at the weight that meal cost you, you fool!”   I want a tread mill that says, “Quitting so soon? I don’t think so!”  I would give a year’s wages for the gimmick that could bottle up how I feel when I am doing aerobics and that same feeling would come over me when I touched the handle on my refrigerator.  Now those might be investments even I would make.

There are no gimmicks to help me; I learned that the hard way wasting time searching.  Today, a smaller dinner plate helps me with portion control, a pedometer thrills me at the end of a long walk, and my Ipod takes my mind off aches and pains, but that is it when it comes to gimmicks that help me.  

The funds remain limited, and no chefs are applying for the job to cook for me.  I shuffle between a gym packed with friends in the winter and our breathtaking parks in the summer.    All of that helped me get rid of more weight and frustrations than any product the diet commercials could have done for me.  Many products and diets have come and gone to help us all lose weight, but the one gimmick we all need is inside of all us; it is called our self, and it is free.