Survey: Fewer Americans are Dieting
According to a recent industry survey, fewer people are dieting now than they were two decades ago.
When it comes to dieting, Americans put on a good show, buying millions of diet books, watching TV programs about weight loss, obsessing over celebrities and their baby weight. But in the end, that may be all it is: a show. The number of people on a diet – 26 percent of all women in the United States and 16 percent of men for the year ending February 2008 – is the lowest it’s been in more than two decades, according to a soon-to-be-released survey.
“Our interest in losing weight is waning,” says Harry Balzer, lead food and beverage industry analyst for The NPD Group, a market research firm, and author of the survey, the Annual Report on Eating Patterns in America.
The report, which asks 5,000 Americans to keep a daily journal for two weeks about their eating habits, also found that despite high levels of obesity nationwide, a declining percentage of people want to slim down or, for that matter, consider excess weight unattractive. In 1985, 55 percent of those surveyed “completely agreed” with the statement, “People who are not overweight look a lot more attractive.” Today, only 25 percent completely agree with it.
Dieting was once practically a national pastime. In 1990, the same report found that 39 percent of women and 29 percent of men were on a diet. So, what’s happened? Balzer, who’s tracked Americans’ eating habits since the 1980s, believes the answer is that dieting is simply too hard. “It’s much easier to change your attitude,” he said, than to sustain the willpower to eat less.
I guess you could say that I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this means fewer people are engaging in futile starvation and/or gimmicky, unsustainable diets. And lord knows, a ton of money is wasted on useless supplements and expensive – and unnecessary – diet food/products. On the flip side, I have a sense that the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater. I’ve seen some people go from flabby to fabulous without having to either starve themselves, nor kill themselves in the gym, so I know it can be done. Giving up isn’t necessarily a good solution, either.
