Culinary Currents
March 2005

Does Everybody Have the Willpower To Go On A National Diet?

By Peter Langlois

We’re no longer talking about weight maintenance in the U.S. Historically, we labeled foods with minimum daily requirements and then pretty much said if that amount is good for you, certainly more is better! Steadily over the years our American image has changed from chiseled to fat to perhaps even obese. Each January everybody I run into says: “I can afford to lose a little weight. I pigged out over the holiday.”

The new Food Pyramid clearly is an effort to encourage all of us to make healthier choices and lower our calorie intake. Along with making balanced choices in foods and beverages, daily exercise is essential as well. Yet we’ve all known the key to losing weight and being healthy is eat less and exercise more. I believe there is also an additional essential component.

Willpower that includes self-discipline is absolutely necessary. As a society, we’ve given way to excesses, and unfortunately in some cases, restaurateurs have contributed to this more is better mania. What message does a hot dog eating contest where someone consumes 50 to 60 hot dogs in a matter of minutes send? Out in West Texas, there’s a place that will pick up your tab if you can finish one of its 72-ounce steaks! We’ve got to put those things behind us. It’s a copout when we say people choose to do these things. If we didn’t make them available as choices, they wouldn’t.

Our challenge is to re-engineer our menus to not only provide healthy, tasty choices for our guests, but to feature them while still making money. With the world as our marketplace, exotic ingredients can add interest and zest to a category in which we’ve historically given lip service. Our customers are not farmers who work hard physically and burn off a lot of calories, and we’ve got to adjust. I understand this transition has financial perils in the short run, but we need to serve as examples of doing the right things.

I congratulate Applebee’s on its Weight Watcher Program, Ruby Tuesday on its focus on nutrition, and Claim Jumper, which has heightened exposure of entrée salads, for example. We need to do more to encourage people by making good choices available in our stores and follow the lead of Lloyd Hill, Sandy Beall and Craig Nickoloff, the CEOs of these three chains.