ダイエットや健康に関する本はあまり読んだことはないのですが，このところ友人や同僚に勧められて，そのジャンルの本を2冊，立て続けに読む機会がありました。どちらもたいへん説得力があり，惹きこまれました。今までぼんやりとしか理解してなくて，「だから何？」と無関心だったことに明確な意味を感じて，「すわ，一大事！」とついに重い腰をあげたくなる，そう感じさせる本でした。
I haven’t read books about diet and health so many, but I had a chance to read two books of that genre in a row, which I borrowed from one of my friends and one of my colleagues. Both were quite convincing and I was absorbed in either of them. There had been many things about diet and health that I vaguely understood and had no interest so I was like “so what”, but once I read those books, I found those things clearly significant and I’m now like “This is serious” so I feel like practicing what these books say.
1冊目「医者が教える食事術」，は，現在，書店でベストセラーのコーナーにおいてある人気の本です。タイトル通り，お医者さんによって書かれており，専門的な知識に裏打ちされた内容になっています。糖尿病専門医として２０万人を診てこられた牧田さんは，明確な視点を持って，読者が抱きがちな，誤った常識や思い込みを情け容赦なく論破していきます。
自分が最も衝撃を受けたのは「血糖値」の大切さでした。糖尿病の恐ろしさはぼんやりと感じていましたが，普段の精神状態にまで血糖値が関わっており，日常を大きく左右していることを思い知らされました。他に印象に残ったことの見出しだけ少し並べてみると，「カロリーと肥満は関係ない」，「脂肪は食べても太らない」，「果物は太る」，「ポテトチップスは悪魔の食べ物」など，勇気づけられたり，ドキッとしたりする内容が盛りだくさんでした。
The first book titled “The Ultimate Guide to Developing Healthy Eating Habits” was written by a medical doctor as the title says, the content is bolstered with a technical knowledge. As a medical specialist in diabetes, Dr. Makita has examined more than two hundred million patients, so he refuted some wrong assumption or fixed idea which readers tend to have in their mind mercilessly.
What I was amazed by most was the importance of blood sugar level. I vaguely felt how dreadful diabetes is but it came home to me that blood sugar level has really something to do with usual mind condition and has great influence to one’s daily life. Some contents that impressed me was like “Calories have nothing to do with obesity”, “Fat won’t make you fat”, “Fruits make you fat”, “Potato chips are devil’s food”, and so on. This book was full of something that sometimes made me encouraged or sometimes made me stunned.
2冊目，衝撃的なタイトルである「いつまでもデブと思うなよ」は，２００７年に発行された当時のベストセラーのようです。著者は評論家であり，東大でサブカルチャーについての講師も務めたことがあるという岡田斗司夫さんという方です。体重117ｋｇから67ｋｇへと，1年で50ｋｇもの減量を成功させた経験に基づいて書かれたこの本は，「レコーディング・ダイエット」が大きなキーワードになっています。食べたものとその量を全て，そして毎日の体重を記録していくことで，助走→離陸→上昇→巡航→再加速→軌道到達→月面着陸といった段階を経て，太らない食習慣を確立するという内容です。御自身はのちにリバウンドを経験されているようですが，無理な運動や食事制限を介さないそのメソッドは，読者をその気にさせる力を持っています。
The second book which has shocking title, “Don’t treat me as someone who can’t lose weight forever” seems to be a best-seller at that time when it was released in 2007. The author named Okada Toshio is a critic and he once taught at Tokyo University about sub culture as a lecturer. In this book, the author wrote about his successful experience in losing his weight from 117kg to 67kg, 50kg in total, just in a year, and the keyword of this book is “recording diet”. What the author wants to say is that you can make an eating habits to control your weight through recording all the food and the amount you eat, plus your weight every day, you will experience phases as follows, a takeoff run → a takeoff → a rise → a cruise → a reacceleration → reaching an orbit → a lunar landing. He seemed to experience regaining weight later, but the method which doesn’t require extreme exercise and diet has a power that gives readers an incentive to try it.
