By June D. Bell

Eat all you want and still drop 10, 20 or 30 pounds when you take a special pill not available in any store! Wear shoe inserts that use the magic of reflexology to attack unsightly bulges! Wash unwanted pounds down the drain with soap that miraculously rubs fat right off your body!

If losing weight were as easy as lathering up, Americans wouldn’t be awash in an epidemic of obesity. More adults and children than ever before are tipping the scales in the land of super-size fries, free drink refills and all-you-can-eat buffets.

National health surveys estimate that as many as 64 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. Children are following in their parents’ lumbering footsteps. Each day, nearly a third of American kids eat a meal at a fast-food restaurant, which serves up a quick fix of fat, sugar and carbohydrates but scant nutritional value. That’s a key reason why U.S. teens are fatter than their counterparts in 14 other industrialized countries.

Fat Chances to Lose

It’s no wonder we’re desperate to lose weight. Dieting has become as American as Splenda-sweetened apple pie. And according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), nearly 50 million Americans will go on a diet this year.

Anyone trying to lose weight—and about 40 percent of women and 25 percent of men say they are—has a staggering array of places and products to turn to for help.

There’s The Zone, Sugar Busters, Dean Ornish’s low-fat vegetarian eating plan and that old standby still bouncing around the Internet, the cabbage soup diet. Oprah’s buddy “Dr. Phil” McGraw hawks the Ultimate Weight Solution. The South Beach Diet and the Atkins high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet are fixtures on the bestseller list.

Prefer to lose it with others? Jenny Craig offers group meetings and personal consultants to keep participants motivated, exercising and eating right. Weight Watchers, the grand dame of group weight loss, champions “points,” food diaries and weekly support meetings.

For the morbidly obese, there’s gastric bypass surgery, also known as stomach stapling. Weatherman Al Roker, American Idol judge Randy Jackson and singer Carnie Wilson each dropped more than 100 pounds after undergoing the procedure. About 103,200 operations were performed last year, up fourfold in five years, according to the American Society for Bariatric Surgery.

The Seemingly Simple Path to Skinny

If reducing your stomach to the size of an egg seems extreme, consider something far less drastic: Eat less and exercise more. Scientists, nutritionists and endocrinologists agree it’s the only sure-fire way to lose weight and keep it off. It’s a simple (and even dull) theory, but it’s incredibly difficult to pull off in practice.

Weight loss boils down to simple science. All calories—whether consumed as carrot sticks or carrot cake—are expended as energy, stored as fat or burned off as heat, says John B. Allred, a nutritional biochemistry expert. Exercise efficiently burns calories because it raises the body’s temperature. (Ephedra does the job, too, but it was banned by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration after being linked to fatal side effects. Proving once again that there is no simple path to losing weight.)

Diets that promise quick weight loss by selectively cutting carbs, protein or fat work for the short term because they’re also trimming calories, says Allred, co-author of Taking the Fear Out of Eating. When the diet ends, however, the weight inevitably creeps back on.

Research endocrinologist Christopher Heward, president of Kronos Science Labs in Phoenix, analyzed micronutrients in five days of typical meals in a range of popular diet plans, including The Zone, Atkins, Pritikin, Sugar Busters and Weight Watchers. “What matters is calories,” he concluded. “The only reason these diets work is you’re taking in fewer calories than you’re expending.”

Overcoming Our Hard-Wiring

The greatest challenge for any dieter is to make a long-term commitment to eating less. It’s easier said than done. Just 2 percent to 5 percent of people who’ve lost weight can keep even some of it off for more than five years, Allred says.

As many as 20 percent of Jenny Craig participants drop out in the first two weeks. On average, participants stick it out for 10 to 12 weeks before abandoning the regimen. “Doggone it, it’s hard,” says Kent Coykendall, a Jenny Craig vice president. “Losing weight is hard.”

No matter how determined we are, our bodies conspire against us. We’re hard-wired to devour fat and sugar. Those cravings were a boon for our cave-dwelling ancestors, who needed the extra pounds to ride out unpredictable food shortages. Thousands of years later, however, our larders are bursting. Our refrigerators are packed with cottage cheese, beer, salami and guacamole. Yet our brains keep insisting we need to eat. “It’s not simply a matter of self-control,” Allred says. “It’s the biochemical hormones saying, ‘You’re starving me.’"

Eating the American Dream

In America, a nation built on the glories of consumption, eating less seems almost unpatriotic. The promise of inexpensive and abundant food enticed generations of immigrants to our shores, and it remains a hallmark of popular restaurant dining, says Warren Belasco, an expert on the culture of food.

“To counsel people to eat less is something the food industry will not do,” he says. Instead, our culture insists there’s no need to deprive oneself of cake, cookies, chips, beer and soda. Enjoy it all, but choose “light” versions with fewer calories, carbohydrates and fat.

“That is the ultimate American dream, isn’t it?” muses Richard Cleland, assistant director of the division of advertising practices of the U.S. Bureau of Consumer Protection in Washington, D.C. “Forget about the house! I just want to be able to eat everything.”

The paradoxical pursuit of satiety and slimness leads Americans to spend about $38 billion each year on diet sweeteners, diet beverages, diet products, diet books, diet pills, diet plans and diet equipment, according to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimates. Cleland estimates that about $4.5 billion of that is spent on bogus remedies like weight-loss soap.

Nutritionists advise investing in lean proteins and colorful fruits and vegetables, making regular exercise a part of your life and pushing the plate away before you feel full. “You don’t have to deprive yourself, but on an ongoing basis, overall, [say] this is how I eat,” says Heward of Kronos, which provides nutritional counseling and conducts nutrition research.

Despite the fact that fad dieters are doomed to failure, Heward finds a slender hope in their quest. “It’s a good thing we’re obsessed with dieting,” he says. “If we weren’t, we’d be even fatter.”

Move More to Weigh Less

The remote control, the car and the power mower are terrific inventions. They’ve also helped remove physical activity from our lives. Here are some painless ways to add it back:

• Instead of prowling parking lots for the closest space to the grocery store, stadium or movie theater, park far away and walk.
• Walk to the post office to buy stamps or bike to the library to return books.
• Use manual gardening tools to mow, trim and rake. Wash your car by hand.
• Make exercise a reward: Plan a hike in a national forest or a walk along the coastline.
• Take the stairs—not the elevator or escalator—every opportunity you get.
• Downtime at the airport? Walk around the terminal rather than sitting at your gate.

Are You Kidding?

It’s sad, we know, but diets that promise quick, permanent weight loss really are too good to be true. People desperately want them to work, but we can’t believe people actually fell for these diet gimmicks:

• The Cabbage Soup Diet. Registered dietitian Jeff Hampl of Phoenix abhors “that awful recipe for cabbage soup. That’s all you eat for several days. That’s why you lose weight.”
• Nutritional “supplements” that claim to burn pounds overnight. “There’s a lot of stuff out there that’s junk,” Hampl says. “Most of it’s not harmful, it’s just junk.”
• Appetite-suppressing eyeglasses. We hope most of you saw through this one. The obviously bogus claim here is that these eyeglasses with colored lenses actually project an image onto the retina, which decreases your desire to eat.
• The Hollywood or Grapefruit Diet. Versions of this 70-year-old plan permit nothing but fruit for the first 10 days or 585 calories daily. Even today, a Web site hawks grapefruit as “a catalyst to enhance the fat-burning process.” Sorry, Hampl says, “There’s nothing magic about grapefruit attacking fat cells.”
• The diet patch. The FDA has seized millions of these products, which have not been shown to be safe or effective for weight loss.

In September 2002, the FTC, which has jurisdiction over advertising and marketing of foods, non-prescription drugs, medical devices and healthcare services, reported that more than half of weight-loss ads included claims that were almost certainly false or misleading.

How do you know what to believe? If a diet plan or product sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Look for these key words for signs of fraud, says the FDA: effortless, miraculous, magical, breakthrough, mysterious, secret, exclusive or ancient.