Life Saving Diet For Black Women

By DENENE MILLNER
Daily News Staff Writer

You hear it so many times, but don't pay it any mind.

Grandmama eats it, and mama does, too, and they're just fine. Macaroni and cheese, greens and ham hocks, roast beef, sweet potato pie? Yum-m-m-m-m-y. Might add a little meat to the bones, but soul food won't hurt a sistah.

Well, that's precisely what too many African-American women think.

The truth is that the high-fat, super-rich foods African-Americans have been piling on their plates for decades are hurting black women in ways they never imagined.

Diabetes.

Hypertension.

Heart disease.

Cancer.

All potentially life-threatening diseases that can be linked to the bad eating habits of black folks.

Angela Ebron, co-author of the new book, "Slim Down Sister: The African-American Woman's Guide to Healthy, Permanent Weight Loss" ($23.95, Dutton), says it's time for black women to make the connection between soul food, weight and bad health.

"Sisters don't want to be fat, and it's not like they don't care — but they're not making the link to health," said Ebron, who co-authored "Slim Down Sister" with nutritionists Roneice Weaver and Fabiola Gaines.

"If they do have health problems, they're not getting the connection. Too many times they assume it's hereditary. They need to know that these foods not only cause serious weight gain, but that that weight can be linked to diabetes and hypertension and all the other diseases that tend to plague us."

This is not to say that health-conscious black women don't exist; magazines like Heart & Soul and African-American exercise gurus like Donna Richards find a captive audience with large numbers of women of color interested in getting — and staying — healthy and fit.

But a 1993 study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control shows that 52% of African-American women are obese — a sure sign that more than half the 17.8 million black women in America aren't taking that age-old adage "A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips" seriously. Poor eating habits, slow metabolism, lack of exercise and a higher incidence of positive self-image among overweight sistahs are all contributing to the upsizing of black women.

"For a lot of them, it comes down to esthetics," Ebron said. "If we look good in our clothes and we're hooking ourselves up and we're getting compliments, we're good to go. It takes a health scare to shock people into realizing, 'Omigod, I have to do something about this.'"

Indeed, black women have something to be scared of. Obesity-related illnesses like hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and certain types of cancer are killing them at much higher rates than white women.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 23% of the deaths of African-American women in 1993 — the last time statistics were available — were attributed to high blood pressure. That's compared to a mere 5% of white female deaths.

The same study also showed that diabetes claimed the lives of 27% of African-American women — nearly three times the number of white women killed by the same disease.

"With each additional pound, you put more pressure on your heart and lungs," Ebron wrote in "Slim Down Sister." "Digestive diseases, reproductive problems and obstetrical complications can also be tied to creeping weight. Because black women are twice as likely as white women to be heavy, shedding those excess pounds is a much more pressing issue."

So, what to do? No self-respecting sistah, after all, would make collard greens without ham hocks, or serve up a Sunday dinner without homemade corn bread. And there's only so much those cabbage soup diets and SlimFast can do for her before she breaks down and gains all the weight back.

Tamara Jeffries, health editor for Essence magazine, said it's important for black women to get mentally fit before they try to lose weight.

"If you're looking at yourself and saying, 'I'm so fat, I'm so big, I'm so ugly,' it's a different mental place," Jeffries said. "You may lose the weight, but you're losing it for all the wrong reasons — and eventually, you're going to put it back on.

"When women start to get healthier mentally and emotionally and loving themselves more, then they're actually able to do what they need to do to lose the weight and keep it off. That could mean getting out and walking, or going somewhere and dancing. You tell yourself, 'I don't need this piece of cheesecake to make me feel better because I'm already happy.' It's the same outcome — you lose weight. But it comes from a different mental place — and it stays off."

Leaving the spareribs on the grill and cutting back on the five-cheese macaroni wouldn't hurt either. But this, Ebron argues, is perhaps the hardest part of all — letting go of comfort food that recalls ancestry and home.

"I remember at my family get-togethers, my mother would take pictures of the table," she said. "There would be closeups of fried chicken and collard greens. It was just something that was so important. They were proud of that; it's just the way we feel about food, especially when we get together with our kinfolk. That's not something easily let go."

"Slim Down Sister" offers a host of diet plans, recipes and exercise regimens tailored to African-American women. Included is a soul-food pyramid — a take on the traditional USDA food pyramid, but using low-fat versions of traditional Southern dishes — that black women can follow to eat the foods they want but stay healthy while doing it.

The book also gives survival strategies for staying on track during family gatherings — add smoked turkey to the collards instead of pork, and tell your man that while being "thick" is cute, being healthy is much better — and creating a sister circle support group to stay on a healthy exercise and eating track. It's topped off with easy-to-fix soul food recipes "that keep the flava, but lose the fat."

"It's about moderation, not deprivation — that's our motto," Ebron said. "It's a learning process. We're not saying it's easy; we're just saying try to take it one step at a time."

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