|
||||||||
By
Brenda Polan
Kate can never go near a diet book again. After ten years of
trying every title on the market, she is suffering the consequences of serial
dieting. My metabolism is wrecked,' she says. "Just to stay at a constant weight
is like being on a diet. One week of even slightly letting go and I pile on the
pounds. If you lose weight quickly like I've done many times, your body needs
fewer calories, and the less you need to eat. It's a complete trap" Now she's
at least two stone heavier than she was five years ago.
Weight and its loss
have become a national obsession. We are fascinated by the melting of the once
too solid flesh of Vanessa Feltz, Geri Haliwell, Alexander McQueen and Martine
McCutcheon and vicariously enthralled by shows like ITV's Fat Club. No doubt we'll
be grimly compelled to watch the forthcoming BBC documentary Diet or Die, focusing
on obesity and whether diets work.
According to a Gallup Poll published last
year, 12.8 million Britons are on a diet at any one time, 60 per cent of them
on a specific programme carrying medical or celebrity endorsement. From their
number, a die-hard 1.7 million people claim they are never not dieting. Many questioned
had tried a high percentage of every fashionable, faddy new diet to hit the bestseller
lists.
The provision of slimming cures is an industry and never has it been
so rich, so aggressive or so sophisticated. Suffice to say, the diet industry
is a nice little earner. In Britain alone it rakes in #2 billion a year.
It is not really in its interest to sell anything but the illusion of success.
Failure plus ever renewed hope is much more profitable.
'There is,' says Carolyn
Edwards, a clinical psychologist who works with the charity Weight Concern, 'a
lot of money to be made out of the cycle of quick-fix promises, where what appears
to be personal failure - there must be something wrong with me - leads to frustration,
guilt, despair and binge eating for comfort. And, despite all the claims for a
scientific basis made for most diets, the truth is that very little real research
has been done. But what we do know is that only long-term changes in lifestyle
are really effective. For most, that just means becoming more active"
That,
after all, is the difference between us and the ancestors whose lifestyle was
well served by the metabolism which makes us fat. They ran around a lot more.
If food was short, their bodies clicked into famine mode and eked out the energy
from every mouthful, storing what it could.
Relentlessly subjected to diet
after faddy diet, the chronic dieter's body, like Kate's, is certain a famine
is raging. Sure that starvation looms, it adjusts its metabolism and hoards calories
like there's no tomorrow - literally Dieting makes you fat. The more you diet,
the fatter you become. And the more slimming aids the diet industry can hawk.
Either that, or, desperate and deluded, you starve and purge yourself into anorexia
or bulimia.
Although it is, according to the British Medical Journal, the
sanctioned weight-loss diet (often embarked upon at the behest of or in emulation
of a parent) which provides the initial impetus towards anorexia or bulimia in
young women, the slimming industry has never taken any of the blame. The BMJ concluded
that adolescent girls who diet even 'moderately' are five times more likely to
become anorexic or bulimic than those who do not. Those on 'strict' diets are
18 times more likely to develop an eating disorder. When Tessa Jowell invited
a flattered collection of magazine editors, fashion writers and model-agency heads
to a 'body image summit in Downing Street to scold them for promoting impossible
standards of slenderness, her victims emerged chastened and the governments caring-cred
score soared. At no point was the finger of blame pointed where it really belongs:
at the slimming industry.
Since we cannot possibly subscribe to the view that
the government is stupid, we have to conclude it is prepared to tolerate a #2-billion
industry which makes some people starve themselves to death and many more eat
themselves into self-hating obesity The evidence, after all, is irrefutable. If
dieting doesn't kill you, it does indeed make you fat. Fewer than five per cent
of dieters lose a significant amount of weight on calorie-controlled or low-fat
diets and medical research conducted in America shows that 90 per cent of dieters
regain every ounce, and more than 30 per cent actually gain more.
The snare
and delusion, the great con at the heart of the diet culture, is that we all believe
we are one of the five per cent. Certainly the diet industry gives us every reason
to think so. For if you ever wondered what became of the descendants of the 19th-century's
snake-oil salesmen, wonder no more. They are busy peddling diet books, slimming
pills, weight-loss magazines, exercise videos, treadmills, calorie-free meal substitutes,
health-club memberships, fat-free, sugar-saturated foods, therapy groups, miracle
recipes, magic bullets and psychotherapeutic tracts on dysfunctional approaches
to food.
Is the diet industry cynically conscious that most of its panaceas
don't work? Well, no. It's not that simple. Slim Fast, for example, proudly claims
its success rate is high. 'Our weight maintenance is the longest of any commercial
company,' says Tessa Prior, its medical marketing manager. 'With Slim Fast, people
know exactly how many calories are in our meal replacements. There are no problems
with miscalculating.'
X-fat, a liquid dietary supplement that claims to bind'
fat when taken after a 'fattening' meal, is similarly confident: 'We recommend
you can lose two to three pounds a week, but the success rate has a lot to do
with that person and their metabolism rates', says spokesman Luke Hartley And
yet, you can't help thinking, they must be aware of the extremely high failure
rates of all diets. And, consequently the fact that people are likely to return
to them for quick-fix results. Let's face it, if any one diet could guarantee
long-term weight loss, the slimming industry would not be remotely as wealthy
as it is now.
Carolyn Edwards and Weight Concern would certainly like to see
the diet industry regulated, its claims examined. 'Almost all forms of weight-loss
treatment have proved to be unsuccessful in the long term.' she says.
Asked
to search for the phrase 'weight loss', Google reported 1,950.000 sites. For diet'
it found 5,030,000. Amazon.co.uk offered 7,133 diet titles, more than 800 of which
were new. The current favourite - not only with Jennifer Aniston and Minnie Driver,
its vocal proponents - is Dr Atkins' Diet Revolution, a high-protein diet first
popular in 1972. Medical experts, such as biochemist Dr David Bender of University
College London, say its consequences could include constipation, diverticulitis,
irritable bowel syndrome and colon cancer. 'There is,' says Bender, 'a library
full of diets that make no sense at all, and Dr Atkins flies against all good
thinking about food and nutrition.'
Most of the miracle diets come from the
US, truly the land of the fat. There, the diet industry is worth $40 billion a
year and, despite all its expensive efforts, the proportion of the population
that qualifies as obese just keeps on growing. Today, that's more than a quarter
of Americans, Each year 280,000 of them die deaths directly at attributable to
their weight.
America may be world flab leader, but we are wobbling along
in its wake. We are, it seems, the fattest people in Europe. According to the
National Obesity Forum. 19 per cent of the population now qualifies as clinically
obese. Half of us are simply overweight. If the current annual percentage increase
in bodily lard continues unaltered, by the year 2030. 50 per cent will have waddled
into the danger zone.
And it is of course very dangerous. The cost to the
NHS of treating obesity and obesity-caused diseases is estimated at #500
million. Obesity is a recognised cause of all kinds of health problems, including
diabetes, arthritis, hypertension, heart disease and even cancer.
The American
nutritionist, Professor David Charles Dodson, is convinced that being overweight
is connected to psychological issues not solvable by a crash diet. 'Most people
with weight problems have struggled to lose for years and in the process have
become quite expert in the fields of diet and exercise... yet their weight remains
out of control. This implies a sort of mental block, an inability to apply the
knowledge one has. For example, if a 150lb person on a 2100-calorie-a-day diet
walked for one hour a day, that person would lose 361b in a year: at 30 minutes
a day 181b. Many people know this, yet how many are doing it?'
In short we
know how to lose weight: eat adequate number of calories and burn up mo of them
by exercise. But the gap between what we know and what we do is large and it is
in that gap that the slimming industry insinuates itself, promising that it needn't
be hard, that we needn't change our ways, that it can all done quickly and painlessly.
The problem, says Dodson, is that we are talking of the habits of a lifetime.
If we have always overeaten and played couch potato, once we do shed the desired
amount of weight, we revert to type. 'It is better,' he says, 'to stay overweight
than to engage in the "rhythm method of girth control", also known as yo-yo dieting.'
One method by which the diet industry circumvents our logic filters is to mirror
the language the current health orthodoxy. A report from the Social Issues Research
Centre notes, 'Monitoring the media, one cannot help noticing that current health-promotion
messages are often virtually indistinguishable from the propaganda of t multimillion-pound
slimming/diet industry. Both make the basic (mistaken) assumption that slim equals
healthy', and both often adopt the same scare tactics and moralistic tones.
Of the thousands of 'weight-loss programme on the Internet, nearly all emphasise
health rather than vanity and claim to he formulated by a doctor. Take the Weight
Loss Lab (nice clinical sound to that 'Lab' which boasts it 'helps YOU discover
how to achieve healthy permanent Weight Loss', Even the diet-pill sellers ('Instant
Results Guaranteed) favour reassuring stock shots of medical persons dressed for
surgery and accessorised with a stethoscope.
The health establishment, surely
self-appointed guardians of our well being, doesn't appear to notice how its theories
are being opted in the interest of (someone else's) profit. The SIRC report suggests
that it should be 'expressing concern about the ways in which the slimming industry
exploits and preys up the anxieties of vulnerable adolescent girls'
These web site links are listed as a convenience to our visitors. If you use these links, we take no responsibility and give no guarantees, warranties or representations, implied or otherwise, for the content or accuracy of these third-party sites.
Home:
Sitemap:
© Disability UK - Richmond - UK
Back to Index.