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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 2, 1999)
If you haven’t heard of the protein diet, chances are you’re probably dead. But-if you’re currently on the protein diet, well, there’s a good chance you’ll be dead before too much longer. Needless to say, I’m no fan of the diet that encourages consumption of protein-rich (and usually quite fatty) foods and calls foods with carbohydrates the work of the devil. Sure, it sounds like the orgasm of all diets — “Eat hamburgers, chicken, ribs and all the Cracker Barrel cheese you can get your hands on!” But let’s look past the hype for a moment. We, as a country, are fatter than we have ever been before. There are more obese children in classrooms than there have ever been. Did we get fat by eating cereal and white bread? No. We got fat by eating 99 cents hamburg ers, spare ribs on the weekends and spending more time on the couch than people who get paid to test couches. But wait — this diet supposedly offers weight-loss hope. And tons of people are buy ing into' it — even my own parents. You know what? They’re all wrong. First off, this diet will cause you to lose weight. This is the only fact I won’t dispute — based on what I have heard and read. How much? Ten to 15 pounds seems to be a short term norm. Now comes the barrage of criticism. First, not one health organization has come forth to say this diet is healthy. Take a look at the food pyramid we all have heard about since grade school. At the bottom of the pyramid is six to 11 servings of cereal and grains (carbohydrates). Fruits and vegetables are next, with five to nine servings. Near the top are high-protein foods, with four to six servings a day. With the protein diet, essentially you must drop most of the carbohydrates and fruits and vegetables (because they too are high in sugars Fat chance Protein diet nothing but hype and carbohydrates). Essentially, you’re left with 15 to 26 servings of high-protein foods. Does anyone honestly think eating dozens of hamburgers a week is “healthy”? That brings in another health concern — heart disease. I’m going to pound away at this point for a few paragraphs, because I’ve known a few peo ple who have died of heart disease. They ate like there was no tomorrow, and eventually they paid for it. We know fat and cholesterol causes heart attacks and heart disease. High fat intake also causes increased blood pressure, which puts further stress on the heart. This is something the protein diet seems to “skip over.” Why? Well, because people practicing the diet haven’t died yet. This is a new diet— but trust me, this is not a “diet for life.” People who are treating it as one will start to die. We were created as omnivores for a reason. People who choose to ignore this fact will get sick from deficiencies or die from clogged arteries. I welcome the almighty protein people to debate this with me, but until they get sick or drop dead, I doubt they’ll ever understand it. Another thing lost in all the protein hype is exercise. It doesn’t matter what diet you partake in — if you don’t exercise, you’ll never be healthy. There’s a stigma attached to exercise as too time-consuming, hard, expensive or demanding. It’s a bunch of whining really — we’ve only been lazy for a couple of gen erations now. Think about it; how many of our ancestors were able to drive a few miles to work after walking 10 steps to -9 their car? Then did they sit the entire day and work for about seven hours? And then J did they get their meals from a drive-thru window? They didn’t. Our ancestors would have been eaten, beaten or would have starved to death if they would have been so damn lazy. So exercise before trying the protein diet. You don’t have to starve yourself and become Jane Fonda to lose weight, but if you eat sensibly and work out three to five times a week, you’d be surprised how much better you’ll do. So let me sum things up for you. Protein diet: a heart-clogging fad diet meant to lose you 10 pounds while strip ping a few decades off your life. You: a person jff! with a choice. Either exer rise, eat well and realize that results don’t come overnight... or give into the hype and add this diet to your dusty collection of fads that are as helpful as a duster in a desert. Kasey Kerber is a senior news-editorial major and a Daily Nebraskan columnist. Bar blues Relationship’s end creates journey into the past You finally got the call you knew was coming for the last month. You had tried to prepare your self for it, but you really couldn’t. It had only been three hours since you hung up the phone. And now you were back. It was the same green ceiling and checkered floor, and you sat at toe same black bar stool with the rip in the middle. Neon madness and Budweiser signs emblazoned with a horse pulling a sled. The bartender was toe same, but the drink was different. But even that was the same; you never ordered toe same drink twice. You remembered toe days you used to come to this place for a differentreason. Days after eight-hour shifts at some dump food joint you coined “The Ghetto,” you’d always show up here. One drink and another drink, and out came the roaring player you used to be. Sure, you showed some skills. You said hi; you got a few numbersrYou were always looking for some thing back then. Maybe not even numbers all toe time. Maybe not looks, but just something to talk about. Just some stories for your grandkids. A brief smile hits your face as you remem bered you’d gotten those stories at this place. But smiles don’t last at times like these. And you real ized that what you really wanted, you’d gotten miles away from here. But now that was gone, so you were back. No one was in the place at 3 on a weekday afternoon except the bartender and a couple ol guys who sat at the corner of the bar: tattoos, white-and-blue plaid shirts, maybe 50 years old. Weather-beaten skin, but still alive spirits, they’d probably been killing afternoons talking about nothing at this place for 20 years. You wondered if they’d ever had your prob lems. dui u icany uiuu i mailer. laiKing aooui nothing, they’d seemed happier than you’d ever been. Now you were one of them. They’d even thrown you a “Blues got you, partner? ... Well just do what I always do: Screw ’em, and foigel em. And then they went on cackling and saying, “You’ll be awright, buddy” At the rate you were going, you’d probably be at this place at 9 when it finally came alive - and 11 when people couldn’t move or think, bul everyone was looking for sex. You wished she would have had the courtesy to wait at least until & to tell you, maybe that way you wouldn’t be so alone. You wanted your old crowd. Your old home. In the 40 minutes you’d been there, you’d only lifted your head from your arms to drink your drinks and look at the old guys. At least the bartender saw your pain. The Iasi round had been on her. Now you looked up, and, for the fust time, you saw what was on television. Rerun of an old Super Bowl - ’85. Chicago 46, New England 10. East Coast beat down. Football had been the one vice you tried to hide from her. But you didn’t want to hide it any more. You wanted comfort. You had that football game. You had 300 men knocking the hell out of each other right there in front of you. You had men, real men running down the field sweating like men, being like men, looking like men. You had two men covered in tattoos drinking beer in the comer. And you were a man. A real man. A man who didn’t need her. A man who would be just fine alone. A man who didn’t need that woman. A man who ordered a double shot of Wild Turkey. A man who wasn’t that pansy man who she was with now. No, you were a man who was going to have some real stories for the grandkids. Then the turkey hit, and so did the fact that while you were drinking shots, being a real man, that pansy had his hands all over your old girl friend. And you couldn’t do a damn thing about it. When she called up, you tried to tell her you didn’t care, that she wasn’t the only one with a new person in her life. And you had a date for Friday night, and this date was a gorgeous blonde who was going to take care of you. And you were right. She was. You told yourself you liked this new girl. You respected her. But why lie to yourself? You’d thought about this new girl with her legs draped over your shoulders, and in that fantasy you hadn’t even had the decency to take her shirt off. And you’d never thought about the old girl friend like that... until it actually happened. There’s a certain level of respect you lose for someone when you think of them like that before you’ve gotten them naked on your own. But at least you weren’t the only guy who thought like that. Just the only one who would admit it. You looked up at the old green ceiling and saw the paint was peeling. It’s something you remembered seeing a lot, back in your old story days —something you remember looking at for a precious few moments of clarity in drunken stu pors. You stared jjp, trying to find that same clari ty, and it came in ways it did back in the old days, and back then you didn’t want to know it, and right now you didn’t want to know it. Back then it told you to leave this place, and few a while you did. TTiat’s when you found her. And now it was telling you the reason she left you was your own damn fault. The way you’d acted the last two months, you would have cheat ed on you, too. But you just told yourself you were drunk, and you didn’t know anything. She didn’t deserve any sympathy. You didn’t need her, and you didn’t need the girl you had the date with on Friday night. And now you sat on your old stool, with the two guys in the comer and the outdated football game. You told yourself soon you’d be back in happy land trying to hit on the same women and trying to find the same great times and the same great stories. And you knew you’d find them. But as you stared at the green ceiling with the peeling paint, for one split second you got wor ried about those grandkids. So you ordered another beer, for them. Trevor Johnson is junior secondary education and English major and a Daily Nebraskan columnist