rehovot, Israel | Pharoah promised Joseph that if his brethren came to Egypt from Canaan, they would “eat the fat of the land.” Now, several thousand years later, a large percentage of their descendants in the Jewish state are less intent on eating fat than on shedding it.
Israelis aren’t as obese as Americans, who are world champions in this sphere as in so many others.
But at any given time some 400,000 Israelis are dieting, mostly on the basis of diets from books and magazines or within the framework of courses.
A typical full-page advertisement for such a course features before-and-after photographs of a woman in her 30s or 40s who proclaims: “I lost 90 pounds in 90 days. And if I succeeded, so can you!”
The approach of professional dieticians is quite different.
They realize that weight that goes quickly is likely to come back quickly, and so they try to gradually inculcate eating habits that will help ensure that weight loss — albeit considerably more modest than that promised by the ads — is permanent.
That is the approach of Dr. Sara Kaplan, who heads the Nutrition Department at Rehovot’s Kaplan Hospital. Together with her colleague, psychologist Yitzhak Feldman, she tries to help people — 80 percent of them women — to “think thin.” It isn’t a question of counting calories, which are never discussed in the programs of Kaplan and Feldman, but of modifying eating habits.
When asked whether weight reduction is more difficult to achieve in Israel than in other countries, Kaplan says there are indeed special problems.
Among Holocaust survivors, for example, food is apt to be a fixation, and one that, often enough, they pass on to their children.
There are also plenty of fatty foods in the traditional Jewish diet, be it the cholent of Eastern Europe or the burekas of Balkan Jews.
However, this is less of a problem today where weight is concerned; the bigger problem is the American-style fast foods to which many Israelis, and particularly the younger ones, are now addicted.