The Key West Citizen

Insurance Co.
Proposes Program
To Aid Dieting

BY CYNTHIA LOWRY
AP Newsfeature Writer

One of the nation's largest insurance companies (Metropolitan Life) recently launched one of the most ambitious programs in business history. It proposes to persuade 25,000,000 Americans to shed 500,000,000 pounds of excess weight.

I cannot restrain myself from predicting utter and complete failure on the company's part, even though they mount their corporate white horse with the blessings of the American Medical Association, the Heart Association, and other interested organizations.

To lose weight you've gotta diet and diet. In addition to being a four-letter word to most of us, it is also a private affair. It's one thing to join into a popular national movement, like giving blood to the Red Cross, beating your neighbor to a price-war bargain counter, raising your hem-line an inch or furnishing your house in late-Victorian style like everyone else is. Going on a diet is something else, and decision springs from an entirely different, individualistic source.

Of course the insurance company isn't being completely altruistic in its interest in getting chubby Americans to slim down. It simply a matter of statistics and good business. The records prove that ladies and gentlemen without excess tonnage have on an average a longer life span.

I'm sure that too many of us Americans are hauling around more weight than we need. But I don't think that many of us are going to be moved to join any fat-destruction campaign conducted on a mass-appeal basis. Diets come into a person's life in another way and no matter what the experts can do to sugarcoat the process and make it sound like fun, it's a grim business requiring fortitude, constant morale-building and unflagging determination.

People go on diets under various circumstances. They are frequently scared into losing weight by their doctor who regards them gravely and talks about heart strain and blood pressure. In most cases, they have to be kept good and scared or they'll forget and slide into the old mashed potato and banana-split rut again.

Others diet when the placket of last summer's dress stubbornly refuses to close, although first the victim will try to blame it on a new girdle. Another excellent stimulus is the careless remark of a friend you haven't seen for six months—"why, Harriet, you look wonderful, but haven't you taken on some weight?" It usually takes about three of these encounters in rapid succession to really put a girl on the lamb chop and lettuce leaf regime.

For some time it has been women's habit to overlook the average male's interest in maintaining his waist-line, although a guy who can still button his World War I—or even World War II—uniform is invariably a dreadful braggart. The lads, however, show a marked tendency to give up ale and four-course lunches when they have trouble picking up golf balls or are the butt of a few insidious locker-room remarks about avoirdupois.