Recent Study Proves Dieting Doesn't Work

Gretel Hallet, is a Trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich - perfect for beginners to experience the core principles of Beyond Chocolate and equally great as a refresher for any Beyond Chocolater. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate or her workshops, get in touch with Gretel.

I’ve just found this article on the internet – it made the news headlines, but I wonder how many people will notice it or believe what it has to say. I know that (generally) listening to gurus is unwise, but this looks like it was a serious scientific study, and as the results confirm what I already know to be true, I’m happy to accept their findings.

The article claims:

“Once you are fat it is unlikely you will ever return to your former size, no matter how hard you diet. Scientists have confirmed what most dieters already suspect; most people who lose weight end up putting it back on again, according to a long-term study of 25,000 men and women living in the UK.
The scientists, from the Medical Research Council's National Survey of Health and Development, tracked 5,362 adults who were born in 1946, and 20,000 born in 1958, assessing their weight, blood pressure and lifestyles.
While around 12 million Britons go on diets of one kind or another every year, only around 10 per cent lose a significant amount of weight, and most regain it within a year.”

This may look like depressing reading, but it does confirm what Beyond Chocolaters already accept, that dieting is a pointless activity. Interestingly, the article did look at lifestyle, and I would hope that their subjects were drawn from as wide a range of geographical locations, social and economical backgrounds and lifestyle choices as possible.

The really depressing bit about this article is the alleged fact that around 12 million people in Britain go on diets every year. 12 million people! That’s around the number of people that live in the metropolitan area of London. That means that around 1/5 of the UK population is on a diet every year. And for the overwhelming majority of them, it doesn’t work.

I wonder how many of those 12 million people are serial dieters; people who are returning to dieting after previously unsuccessful attempts. I wonder what has to happen for those people to realise that if it didn’t work last time, it won’t work this time. I wonder how long it will take for those people to look for an alternative. When they do, we’ll be here and we’ll understand and we’ll be able to help them. I look forward to it.

Sixty-one and on a diet

Sixty-one
Sixty-one and on a diet.
Will I end up thin or fat
When my heart and brain go quiet?
Sixty-one and on a diet
Yet again. My hopes run riot:
Better life, new start - all that.
Sixty-one and on a diet.
Will I end up thin or fat?

by Wendy Cope



Thirty-one, forty-one, fifty-one, sixty-one… How old do we have to be? For how many years will we keep buying into the fantasy? For how long do we let our hopes run riot? I dieted for 20 years. For all that time I yo-yoed up and down in weight. Thin, fat, thin, fat. Endlessly. Hoping beyond hope that I would ‘end up’ thin. For good.

Diets equal deprivation, iron will, endless counting and measuring, trusting anyone but ourselves, our own bodies, often, far too often, starving. Literally. Starving, to have a body that says “I am in control, I am successful, I am acceptable, I am lovable, I am sorted”. Starving to make sure our bodies project the security and confidence that we don’t necessarily feel inside. Going hungry. Going without. Forgetting what it means to experience the sensual pleasure of taste, without guilt. So long as we look acceptable we can play the part. We can act as if, we don’t have to acknowledge even to ourselves that all is not as perfect as it looks. No one need know that our houses are built on sand. That when we look in the mirror we don’t like what we see, that our reflection will never be quite good enough.

I am so grateful that I won’t reach the age of sixty-one still wondering whether I will end up thin or fat. So grateful in fact, that I have made it my lifetime’s mission to empower myself and other women to know and trust our bodies, to reach sixty-one feeling good about our relationship with food and the way we look. To know that we are good enough. That confidence and beauty and value does not depend on the size of our bodies. For me, that’s what Beyond Chocolate is all about.

PS - Thank you to the Beyond Chocolater who introduced me to Wendy Cope's poetry. This one is taken from her book Family Values

Gretel's weekly rant - slogans for success

Gretel Hallet, came on our Chocolate Fairy Training in 2008 and is 1 day and 1/2 day workshops in Norwich. If you live in the area and would like to attend a Beyond Chocolate course, Gretel would love to hear from you! Meet Gretel.

There are no strangers here

Only friends you have yet to meet

Slimming World has a slogan on the board outside the room where they meet. Whoever came up with this slogan deserves a life annuity – it’s pure genius. There is so much contained in these few words; there’s the promise of friendship, the reassurance that you won’t be faced with a load of strangers, the support of a fellowship of members, a future full of hope. To say nothing of the juxtaposition of the words ‘strangers’ and ‘friends’, turning one into the other. Pure genius. I take off my hat to you!

It set me thinking. If Beyond Chocolate is to compete on a national scale (or even global, let’s think big!), what would our slogan be? We would need to come up with something catchy, something that promises what Beyond Chocolate can offer. We do already have ‘Taste The Freedom’, which is a great slogan, but what the Slimming World slogan offers is somehow more personal.

How about

There are no failures here

Only successes we can all measure

Or

There are no guarantees

Only certainties

But I’m sure you can come up with something much better than that!

Although I admire the sheer cunning of the message, I can’t admire what Slimming World is actually doing. I know some people who read this blog object to us ‘bashing’ the diet industry, but really it deserves it. Slimming World offers failure on an attractive plate, garnished with criticism and sprinkled with false hope. I have heard women discussing what they ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ eat; how they manage their ‘syns’ with the eagle eye of an accountant fiddling the books, of their ‘failures’ and how ‘bad’ they’ve been this week. I know from experience that every woman who walks through that door is doomed to ultimate failure and is messing up her metabolism to boot.

On the Google search engine, Slimming World comes up with another slogan, ‘because you’re amazing’. Again I have to hand it to them. They are entirely right. Women are amazing, but they are amazing just the way they are – not just because they want to hand over lots of money and control over their eating to an organisation that is, to be frank, in it for the money.

How many broken dreams do there have to be before the diet industry finally admits what many scientists and nutritionists are telling us – diets don’t work. Those women attending the Slimming World meetings are amazing; their dedication and determination to succeed in the face of certain failure is truly extraordinary. How very much better it would be if they turned that dedication and determination towards working with their bodies and towards freeing themselves from the yo-yo diet-binge nightmare.

We would love them to come and Taste the Freedom we offer.

Woman's Hour Diet Special - A bit of a rant!

Today Woman's Hour dedicated the entire show to a dieting phone-in with the following premise:

"Are you a habitual dieter? What strategy has worked - or gone horribly wrong - for you? Why? How much have we been conditioned to think we have to watch our weight every minute of the day? And can dieting ever be the answer, or should we just learn to love ourselves the way we are?"

We know that quite a few Beyond Chocolaters called in to take part in the show (thank you to all of those of you who did, by the way, we appreciate your support HUGELY!) eager to talk about their experience and spread the word. They wanted to talk about how much better their lives were since they'd stopped dieting, how much more in control they felt about food and how they viewed their bodies in a completely different light. They wanted to talk about the fact there is another way -  the only viable alternative to dieting or 'just learning to love ourselves the way we are'. They know from experience that when we have a happy, healthy, balanced relationship with food and and our bodies - we reach a happy, healthy, balanced weight as a consequence. When we stop focussing on the symptom, which is the weight, we can start to make changes. When the researcher who screened their call to decide if they would be aired on the show or not asked how this had come about they went on to talk about Beyond Chocolate and how it had changed their approach to weight-loss completely. 

Result: none of them were aired because they were considered to be 'promoting a company'. Instead, Woman's Hour interviewed a real estate agent who had lost lots of weight and whose best tip for success was to 'eat less but don't deprive yourself and move more'. Then they talked to cognitive behavioral therapist (another man - Excuse me, this is WOman's Hour is it not?) who said some pretty reasonable things about the problem being our emotional attachment to food and then said that it would be great if 'people had downloads they could listen to when they get the urge to eat'. Of course, no mention was made of where those downloads could actually be found (pssst...we've got a few good ones here - the Stop Overeating and 1 Minute Mantra ones are just the ticket).

I'm sitting in front of my computer listening to this and thinking of the millions of women out there who have tuned in to listen with the hope of finding an alternative, of learning something new and inspiring so that they won't have to go on another diet doomed to failure or just give up and learn to live with being overweight and instead all they get is a real estate agent telling them to give up drinking and eat less so that they shrink their stomach....and I feel furious. 

Not because I want Woman's Hour to promote Beyond Chocolate so that we can get rich (that would be the day!) but just to break this cycle of talking absolute drivel every January and to give desperate dieters - and the growing number of women who have given up altogether - another way forward. There are thousands of women who have turned their lives around thanks to the Beyond Chocolate Principles - it's doable, realistic and we don't take the piss by ripping people off and selling false promises - it's absurd that more women don't know about it.

The media won't give Beyond Chocolate any air time because that would be a gross and unfair promotion of a money making business (What money?! I haven't paid myself a decent salary since I started 10 years ago - I do it because I'm passionate and determined to get the word out!). On the other hand, dieting companies like Weight Watchers and Lighter Life are busy making millions by infiltrating doctor's surgeries with glossy brochures and the National Obesity Taskforce....the mind boggles.

Rant over.

Gretel's Weekly Rant - another stoopid diet study

Gretel Hallet, came on our Chocolate Fairy Training last year and is running workshops in East Anglia.  If you live in the area and would like to attend a Beyond Chocolate course, Gretel would love to hear from you!  Meet Gretel.

There is yet another study out claiming to have the answer to keeping weight off for good.  The article on the internet claimed this was the ‘world’s largest diet study’ during which 938 ‘overweight’ adults from eight European countries.  These lucky people (it’s unclear whether they were men or women or a mixture) were put on a strict 800 kcal a day diet for eight weeks, and their weigh loss was recorded. They were then randomly assigned to one of five different low-fat diets, and tracked for six months to find out which diet was best at preventing weight gain.

After the initial eight weeks, the dieters lost an average of 11kg. But after 6 months, they re-gained around 0.5kg. Only those on the high protein/low glycaemic index diet managed to maintain their new weight.

People following a low-protein/high-GI re-gained nearly 2kg in weight.

Let’s have a look at those figures before we all get too excited and rush off to find a high-protein-low-GI diet book.

938 people lost ‘an average’ of 11kg.  That means some of them won’t have lost anything at all and others will have lost more than that.  An average is a mid-way point calculated by dividing the total amount lost by the total number of dieters.

I would guess that pretty much almost anyone who was put on a severely restricted food intake would lose some weight over 8 weeks.  But even that would depend on their previous dietary history, their gender, their age, their activity levels etc.  And what did it mean by ‘overweight people’?  A few pounds, a few stone (sorry, kilos!) overweight?  And who decided what the ‘correct’ weight for each of these people was in the first place?  This may have been ‘the world’s largest diet study’ as the article claims, but there’s a lot that isn’t being said here.

And then, these volunteers, having been starved for 8 weeks, were randomly put on one of 5 diets.  Again, the article doesn’t say what all 5 of them were.  The only ones we get to hear about are the most and least ‘successful’ ones.  The most we know is that all the diets were ‘low fat’.

And what about those that maintained their new weight on the high-protein-low-GI diet?  What did that mean exactly?  Well, for those 187 people, (some of whom would have lost weight initially while others didn’t) all maintained the weight they’d started at.  But they were only monitored for 6 months.

Those that didn’t maintain their new weight gained between 0.5kg and 2kg in weight.  All of them?  Apparently so.  So, some would have actually GAINED weight from their starting point if they didn’t lose any in the 8 week initial diet phase.  (For those of you, like me, who operate in pounds and ounces, a quick conversion chart follows.  2kg = 4.4lbs, 0.5kg = 1.1lbs).

So what is my point?  What am I trying to say here? 

1. 11kg is 24lbs (which in turn is coming up to 2 stones).  That’s a lot of weight to lose as an average and they lost the weight quite fast (in just 8 weeks).  Some people may well have lost a lot more than that in order for 11kg to be the average.  Therefore a gain back of 2kg (or 4.4lbs), over six months, seems quite little in comparison with the weight lost.
2. We know so little about all the other conditions surrounding this study that it’s impossible to come to the conclusion that the high-protein-low-GI diet would benefit everyone or (as the author of this article claims), be ‘the perfect diet to lose weight and keep it off.’  Because (slap me if I’m being fussy here) those people on this high-protein-low-GI diet DIDN’T LOSE ANY MORE WEIGHT while they were on it.  They maintained their weight instead.
3. So, the conclusion that this diet would help everyone to lose weight is clearly false in the context of this experiment.
4. What I know about dieting from my own experience is that it can take longer than 6 months for all the weight AND MORE to creep back on.
5. Following one diet with another is likely to keep the body in a state of deprivation, and only when these people cease dieting all together will the true consequences of this study become apparent.
6. What I know about low fat diets is that the body quickly becomes dissatisfied with low-fat foods and will (sooner or later) force the dieter to binge on high fat foods to make up the short-fall.  Fat in foods is necessary for our mental health and for our nervous system – low fat diets deprive the body of an essential food group.

A sample menu is attached to the article:

Breakfast: low fat milk with muesli (without added sugar), wholegrain crispbread with low-fat cheese, an orange

Lunch: wholegrain rye bread with lean meat or chicken, mackerel in tomato sauce with a selection of vegetables

Dinner: Stir-fried turkey with veg and wholegrain pasta, avocado salad with feta cheese and sugar peas.

Snacks: veg and low fat cheese sticks.  Wholegrain rye bread with low-fat liver pâté and cucumber

Only water or low fat milk to drink

Can you see anything missing here?!  How long have you got?!

I’ve been there, done that with low-fat diets.  I’ve also had a spirited go at GI diets of various sorts.  They are all but impossible for vegetarians to do anyway … but even if I did eat meat and fish, the sorts of food restrictions indicated by the sample menu as listed above would drive me straight to the cream cakes within a couple of days.

The only reasonable, truthful and realistic option is the one that Beyond Chocolate advocates and demonstrates so well.  Attempting to remove food groups of whatever sort from our daily intake will lead to feelings of deprivation and from there to binges.  Only when we are at peace with all foods and with our bodies can we achieve a stable weight that will be different for each one of us.  And we never need to diet again.