For dieters, it feels like the world, led by Fat’s evil twin, Bread, is against you. Dieters are made to believe that they can have nothing to do with bread — not even anything that tastes like bread, looks like bread or rhymes with bread — if they want to lose weight.
Therefore, some dieters stop at nothing: eating their hamburgers without the bun, soup without crackers, chocolate chips without the cookie.
That’s why, when I discovered double-fiber bread, which is worth half the “points” of regular bread on popular diet plans such as Weight Watchers, I felt like I had just discovered a great secret, the key to dieting success. At first, I didn’t wish to share my secret. But Dustin was trying to lose weight, too, so I introduced him to my new favorite food group: anything with extra fiber.
“You can eat two slices for the ‘cost’ of one,” I told him.
There are, of course, sound explanations for why fiber helps you lose weight. All of them boil down to this: Fiber makes you bloated. Fiber does not break down into glucose the same way that carbohydrates do. Instead, it sits in the hollow of your stomach, soaking up water and fat and making you feel full. Then it slugs its way to its destiny, soaking up more things as it goes, until finally it settles in — well, you know, and continues to grow and possibly procreate, and you feel like you’ve just sent a whole watermelon down your digestive tract.
But the important thing is not the sluggish journey or the watermelon, or even the food. The important thing is the part about fiber not breaking down into glucose. That’s what makes fiber almost a negative calorie. You eat it and feel full, but it counts for basically nothing.
“Why didn’t we think of this before?” Dustin said. “Why didn’t anyone think of this before? Maybe we should bottle fiber in powder form and sprinkle it on everything we eat!”
Dustin and I seriously considered this option as we stuffed double-fiber bread into our mouths, and later when we bought every item at the grocery store marked, “Now With More Fiber!”
Soon after, terrible things began to happen in our stomachs. The noises alone were startling. Imagine two steel beams slowly collapsing onto one another, grinding and moaning as they go. That’s what it sounded like. And, in fact, it felt like that, too. When people heard the noises rising up from my insides, they asked with worried looks on their faces, “That wasn’t your stomach, was it?”
Then the bloating began. It started in my stomach and
worked its way through, until I felt like I would belch bubbles. It might not be coincidence that “bloat” and “float” rhyme, because by the end of it, if you had set me in a pool, I could have floated to the top. The buttons on my jeans pulled the fabric like Silly Putty. I felt like I had swallowed the Big Apple, and New Jersey and Russia, too.
Dustin couldn’t handle it. He swore off double-fiber everything. But I was a trouper, even if I did cut myself back to consuming only 100 percent of the suggested daily grams of fiber per day.
Eventually, my body adjusted. I wasn’t bloated anymore. Although my stomach would become quite cranky if I missed a dose of double-fiber bread.
Then one week I was staying with my mother in Virginia, eating several helpings of her homemade muffins, when the violent noises in my stomach began again. But I’m only eating 100 percent of the daily recommended amount of fiber, I thought. Had I miscalculated? Did I have one too many pieces of bread?
“Weird, I’m bloating like I did when I first discovered double-fiber bread,” I said to my mom on the last day of my vacation.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” she said with a smile. “These muffins have 50 percent of your daily recommended fiber in them. Isn’t that fantastic? Fiber helps you lose weight, you know.”
I wondered what kind of sick joke fiber had played on me. Still, I continued to eat it. Because once the pain and bloating had passed, I found myself thinking, “Ah, that wasn’t so bad. And just one point! What a deal!”
Which doesn’t mean fiber shouldn’t come with a warning label. And, well, actually maybe it does. It’s possible that in my excitement over double fiber I could have consumed that, too.
Maine author and columnist Sarah Smiley’s writing is syndicated weekly to publications across the country. She and her husband, Dustin, live with their three sons in Bangor. Sarah Smiley’s book “I’m Just Saying …” is available wherever books are sold. You may reach Sarah at sarah@sarahsmiley.com.