Slim Chances

Dr Jen Durr,
Cleveleys News Medical Correspondent

Want to know about a diet that will guarantee you lose 257 pounds in one year?

Easy. The one that costs £4.95 a week.

I know - not the kind of pounds you were hoping to lose.

Modern life makes it all too easy for people to get massively, massively overweight. Cheap foods full of saturated fat and sugars coupled with hours every night spent sedentary in front of a Netflix box-set is pretty much a recipe for obesity. We binge on TV, and we binge on food.

Statistics for Blackpool published in 2014 showed that 31% of adults were obese and 44% of adults were just plain old-fashioned overweight, meaning that a whopping three-quarters of all adults in the area are heavier than they ought to be. No wonder then that Blackpool’s local amateur publication The Gazette has teamed up with Slimming World to promote their diet regime through a series of inspirational articles about local people losing weight.

Dieting is big business. Slimming World costs £4.95 a week, Weight Watchers is £6.25. And they are everywhere - mainly in church halls where overheads are low but keeping hot cross buns and communion bread away from the members can pose tiresome issues. The obese and overweight line up at these places to hand over their money, get weighed, and hear inspirational talks from their highly-trained consultants and fellow weight losers.

But do you really need to pay to lose weight?

If you have the willpower to do so, you can turn around the bad habits that got you overweight in the first place. Stop eating rubbish, control your portion sizes, and get some exercise. Unless you have an underlying medical condition, it really is that simple - eat less, move more, and you will lose weight. But some people feel they need additional motivation and a support network, and weekly weigh-ins at diet groups along with their inspirational meetings provide both of these. Remember though - dieting groups are businesses, so while they may help and provide the motivation you need, their entire purpose as a business is to make money from you.

While these weight-loss programs clearly do get results, they don’t actually teach people the core knowledge and skills which would enable them to lose weight through sensible diet and exercise. They shroud the simple science of diet and weight control under a complex set of terminology that they invented to ensure that you will always need to keep paying them if you want to stay thin.

Calories. Remember them? They are what we used to worry about if we wanted to control our weight. Calories are a measurement of energy gained from food. The same measurement is used for energy burned up by exercise. It’s simple really - if you eat more calories than you burn, your body stores up the excess as fat and you gain weight. If you burn more than you eat then your body dips into your fat reserves for the extra energy it needs and you lose weight. One measurement of energy going in and out of your body seems easy enough for anyone to grasp - why complicate it?

Go to a meeting of Slimming World or Weight Watchers and they don’t talk about calories - they talk about ‘Points’ and ‘Syns’. Eat too many of these and you put weight on, they say. But how do they equate to calories? Slimming World says 20 calories = 1 “Syn”, but not all calories count. For example, there are 88 calories in a banana, but you can eat as many bananas as you want on Slimming World because they say they are “free” (they aren’t, they cost 89p a bunch in Lidl). What they actually mean is they don’t contribute to your daily allowance of Syns.

Confused? We haven’t even got started yet. Mash your banana and suddenly it gains 5 Syns. Ask why, and you’ll get an even more confusing answer:

“When you mash fruit, it releases more of the sugars and you’re likely to eat more of the fruit”.

This obviously doesn’t make any scientific sense, especially when you consider that you’ll be mashing the banana with your teeth before you swallow it anyway. It makes even less sense when you learn that a marshmallow Flump has just 1.5 Syns in it, meaning Slimming World would rather you eat 3 Flumps than a mashed banana. It’s also a bit insulting, isn’t it? To suggest that the strongest reason (once you discount the unscientific rubbish reasons) is that you’re more likely to stuff more into your face if the banana doesn’t feel as big when it goes into your mouth.

Not only do they make the measurement of what you eat confusing and contrary to science, but they have a jolly good go at making the calories you burn up in exercise baffling, too. Both major slimming groups advocate exercise, but they don’t always refer to it as such. Slimming World calls exercise “Body Magic”, and recommends that you get at least 15 minutes of said Body Magic every day. No link is ever made between exercise and calories though - they just tell you that if you do it, it will help you lose. A shame really, because 15 minutes of walking only burns off the equivalent to one-quarter of a slice of cake. Understand calories, and you can quickly calculate that walking for a whole hour burns enough calories to eat the whole slice, which is surely what people want to do?

Something else that bugs me is that all these faddy diets make fat into the enemy, when actually, fat is one of the three essential macronutrients the body needs, along with carbohydrates and protein. Adherents to these diets throw away cooking oils, even the healthiest ones like rapeseed oil, which is full of Omega 3,6,9, Vitamin E, and the “good” monounsaturated fat. They instead favour spray oils full of chemicals over a teaspoon of olive oil containing about 40 calories - enough to shallow fry with, some of which will be leftover in your pan anyway and the remainder divided between all the portions (ie cook for four people and that's a maximum of 10 calories per person). Of course, there are plenty of “bad” fats - saturated fats and hydrogenated fats should definitely be avoided - but on the whole, fats are not our enemies. Our bodies need fats to produce testosterone. Cut out the fat and your body is more likely to crave carbs, and high-carb diets can lead to increased triglycerides and risk of diabetes.

There is a strong argument that our obsession with cutting out fat has almost certainly contributed to obesity problems, not the other way around. Take milk for example - when was the last time you had whole milk? Yeah, that’s right - “full fat” milk, as people like to call it. Most people don’t touch it, preferring semi-skimmed, or skimmed instead. Skimmed milk is 0% fat, which is why it tastes disgusting. It’s basically white water, and why anyone would choose it is beyond me. Semi-skimmed has had half the fat taken out, and is 2% fat. If you’ve done the maths you’ll have already realised that means “full fat” milk has only 4% fat, making it by definition a low-fat food, as dieticians say that no more than 7% of your total daily calories should come from saturated fats. In fact, as many of the vitamins in milk are fat-soluble, skimming out the fat means you are also taking out the nutrition too. And when you don’t get enough nutrition, your body tells you to eat more.

This isn’t an attack on Slimming World or Weight Watchers (lawyers take note) but rather a statement of fact that some weight-loss plans take the thinking away from you, and in doing so do not actually enable you to make balanced food decisions on your own. They hope that you’ll be tied to them for life, always needing to consult with their advisors on the latest changes only they understand. Once you reach your target weight, Slimming World let you continue coming to their meetings for free - but as soon as you put a pound back on, out comes your wallet. The diets are also chock full of contradictions which they flat-out refuse to explain because it would lift the lid on how you could do it without them. They won’t talk about calories and the direct link between exercise and weight-loss, because then people would realise they could exercise themselves thin at the gym. They’d rather you do a token 15 minutes and pay for their classes. They encourage you to eat artificial rubbish like chemical sweeteners, modified oils and processed milk because it better fits their program.

Of course, if you are overweight, do what you gotta do. If you need a support network and can’t lose weight on your own, these places can help and to be fair, they do get results. GPs often refer patients to them (for want of anywhere better) so they are legit. But healthy eating, sensible portions, and regular exercise are all most people need. All the best with your efforts.