Dietism

Dietism - the tendency to regiment one's eating habits strictly according to detailed rules even after one goes off a prescribed diet.



To their consternation and horror, doctors, psychotherapists and block counselors found that at least a third of the time, refugees from the Other Side/USA were recreating and sometimes sticking to diets they had been forced to follow on the Other Side, even though the FatLand Constitution expressly forbid them. Upon discussions with these patients, doctors, psychotherapists and counselors all concluded that they had to do a lot more toward making patients at home with their bodies and their food choices than just telling them not to diet.

They decided that the best way to do this would be a series of social events, parties in buffet style highlighted by Tasting FatLand. This is/was a three day festival in which different restaurants and food stores and boutiques put out some of their favorite offerings on tables on the sidewalk on a couple of intersecting FatLand avenues. "You don't have to eat most of them," the counselor assured her patients. "Try some. See what you like. Ask the chefs about them."

This proved successful with about seventy five percent of the patients, who started adding more and different kinds of foods to their meals.

The other twenty five percent needed something else. The doctors, psychotherapists and counselors put their heads together, and decided that the best way to wean these often-still-frightened dieters off diets was simply not to say anything to them but to have them work - actual work, not psychotherapeutic work- with people who enjoyed their food, whatever it happened to be.

Bingo. Ninety five percent of the other twenty five percent got out of the dieting mentality.

It turned out the the other five percent were following certain diet-like plans for a very good, albeit horrific, reason. They had had electrodes implanted in a certain center of their brains, preceded by deep hypnosis which ordered them not to eat certain foods. (Jimmy in FatLand : The Early Days talked a lot about this.) The electrodes were removed from their brains. Their reactions toward forbidden foods remained for some time. Slowly the proscriptions started to erode.

Very slowly.