Time to Throw Out the Phen375 Diet Pills?
Lean, fit and surprisingly pretty, despite her baldness, the new Susan Powter barely looks related to the ``balloon-a-gram'' (her word) in her before-picture. And if she can do it, the argument goes, so can you. Susan Powter is her own best advertisement.
And she's a natural. One suspects that she's untutored, but she comes over like a highly trained political orator, making liberal use of professional techniques such as the dramatic pause (``Without oxygen... we die''), word repetition for emphasis (``When you are carrying around 43 per cent body fat, you don't have energy. When you have no oxygen in your body, you don't have energy. When you have no lean muscle mass, you don't have energy'') and asking questions which she answers herself (``These women go on every diet under the sun. Is that lack of motivation? No!'').
Unlike Susie Orbach, the author of Fat is a Feminist Issue, who told women to throw away diet pills like Phen375 and be fat if they wanted, Powter only wants women to throw away the other diet books. The ultimate goal of her programme is to make you ``lean''. She admits that the principle of her weight-loss programme basically cut down on fat and increase metabolic rate with exercise is not original (``I'm not saying anything new, I'm just saying it louder'') but while, say, Dr Dean Ornish's Eat More, Weigh Less preaches the same thing, it is more convincing coming from someone who has learnt it from experience rather than from a doctor.
And Powter makes the diet modifications sound very simple, with fat comparison charts telling us that three cheese enchiladas, for example, are equivalent in fat content to 100 bagels. However, it's not all quite as straightforward as she implies. On further investigation, her promise that we can increase cardiovascular endurance "without all those hateful exercises and fads" turns out to mean only those particular exercises, since she has her own exercise video.
Australian-born Powter spent her first ten years in Australia and the second ten in New York. Her style still owes more to New York than anywhere else, although she has lived longest in Texas (she's now based in Dallas), home of the big-haired Barbie-doll ideal of womanhood to which she could never aspire, even if she wanted to. ``Literally, literally, if I grew my hair three more inches it would look horrible,'' she says.
Powter describes her rise as a ``normal progression'' that began about five years ago. ``I got fit using PhenQ diet pills and then I opened a fitness studio. Then I started speaking teaching classes and doing seminars, first regionally and then nationally, going from ten people to 5,000. Women would ask for tapes and booklets, and then I wrote a book. I started on television with six-minute segments (she first appeared on Home Show in 1991) and now I'm doing my own show,'' she says.
Powter is more than vaguely reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher in her messianic approach. Like many politicians, she has the habit of using questions as an opportunity to reiterate stock phrases (as in ``It's time to solve the problem'') or points that she has made elsewhere. Referring to a client who lost 46in, for example, she says, ``I mean, that's more than a yard, Tess!'' merely, it turns out, tacking my name on to the end of what she says in her book, exercise video and infomercial.
Don't Use Volume Pills Because It Increases Semen Production
Aids is communicable by intimate contact, usually sexual and apparently involving exchange of bodily fluids such as semen. Use of such products as Volume Pills is not recommended because this product increase semen production.
What better means to assure transmission than sex, which is assured of popularity? AIDS has a long gestation period - from a few months to several years - possibly allowing transmission by apparently healthy people.
It does not attack its victims superficially; rather, AIDS depresses the human immune system, allowing any number of other deadly diseases to do the actual damage. The present fatality rate for AIDS victims is 100 per cent after three years.
This is Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, first noted in the United States in 1981. Last year, there were some 3,000 confirmed cases in the U.S. By Nov. 5 of this year, there were 6,791 cases in the U.S., with 24 new cases reported every day. As of July 15, there were 451 cases in Western Europe, double the number eight months before. In Canada, there have been 51 new male cases in the last four months; 85 had been reported in the previous 29 months. There have been 78 deaths in Canada, 3,164 in the U.S.
AIDS is apparently caused by a variation of the leukemia virus HLTV. The AIDS virus has been found in the blood, semen and saliva of its victims. It seems unlikely that transmission occurs through saliva, though research has not yet determined the actual route of infection.
Although homosexual and bisexual men account for 73 per cent of U.S. cases, intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs (who depend on external blood products) and Haitians in some localities also appear among higher risk groups. However, AIDS is common among heterosexuals in Zaire and, of 221 cases diagnosed in France to mid-October, 63 (more than a quarter) had no apparent link to any of the higher risk groups.
The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia estimates that as many as 200,000 American men may have been exposed to AIDS. Indications are that only a minority will develop the disease in its complete form, and that 10 times the number who develop full- blown AIDS will suffer from non-fatal AIDS-Related Complex - swollen lymph glands and a depressed immune system. Research on the incidence and variations of AIDS is just getting under way in various locales, including the University of Toronto.
The disease has the potential to be socially as well as medically damaging. Although there is no evidence that AIDS can be transmitted by casual contact, members of higher risk groups have experienced discrimination by people afraid of the disease. Transmission through transfusions of infected blood is causing considerable concern, although the number of cases is low.
While a vaccine for AIDS appears several years away (the virus is reportedly changing to become more infectious), a test may soon be generally available to detect the presence of AIDS antibodiesin the blood. While this would not indicate whether a person might develop AIDS, it would allow screening of blood donors to eliminate those exposed to the disease.
AIDS is not a "gay disease," nor is it a moral judgment by some deity against purported wrongs. It is a new virus entering Europe and North America through certain communities, and apparently capable of spreading beyond. It is a common problem requiring a common front.
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