This is my first blog post and I think readers should understand the particular view I take on long-term weight loss. In short, one of the things I believe is that commercialism should be taken out of the weight loss sector entirely. I think it is profit and not fat, carbs or sugars that make us gain weight. Commercial diet books are designed to sell product more so than they are there to create weight loss, and commercial diet programs are there to either produce short-term results that are not sustainable or create long-term dependence or “customers for life” as marketers call them.
My view is this - if you want to lose weight long-term you need to prepare your mind for the journey so that you can make your own decisions and not someone else’s. One thing I have noticed about weight loss is that so many people relinquish their own decisions and responsibility about their weight loss to so-called “experts”. Now there certainly are some amazing people involved in weight loss who truly know their stuff and want to help people, and equally there are many dieters who do need guidance. However, I feel it is necessary for people who want to lose weight long-term to come up with their own views on what works for them, and that if someone has any more than 25 lbs to lose, they will have to switch diets and tactics on a regular basis when they plateau. Plateaus are times during the weight loss journey where what worked before to produce weight loss stops. At this point a person must make decisions about whether to continue or whether to stay where they are. That requires them to trust themselves and not someone else’s outlook, research or experience. As such, building up trust in yourself, your intellect and knowledge is critical.
Three examples will point this out. The first comes from Heather Robertson, a dynamo who has maintained a weight loss of over 170 lbs for at least five years, and runs a website and podcase called “Half Size Me”. Recently, she was approached by a national magazine who wanted her to provide them with a diet based on her experience that could be printed in their publication. Heather declined their request because what she did could not be summed-up in a formula or something like a plan guaranteed to make you lose weight easily. She was told “you have a great story, but we can’t sell it.” While Heather did refuse their request to provide an easy solution, I told her she should have said “Now you can see why my amazing story doesn’t include any diets from your publication.” This anecdote shows the fact that those who achieve long-term weight loss cannot simply summarize or even guarantee that what they did will work for others.
The second example comes from Dr. Yoni Freedhoff in his book “The Diet Fix.” Yoni, whom I have met twice is a world-renowned rock-start when it comes to weight loss, and rightfully so. He’s passionate, articulate, knowledgeable, effective at what he does and humble. Yet his book says “What if after 10 days, you could change your relationship with food forever? What if in 10 days you learned how to ‘eat just one’?... What if in 10 days even so-called danger food could be your friend?” After this battery of promising, yet rhetorical questions, are asked, he says “I know – it sounds too good to be true. And I’m often the guy quoted in the media as saying ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
I can’t help feeling that Yoni and/or his publishers have succumbed to the notion that it is necessary to make claims such as this to sell a diet, thus placing commercial and profitability interests above your own. While the tips in Yoni’s book are excellent and should be adhered to as basic common sense – and while he does not promise to make you lose 100 lbs in 10 days - I feel that the rhetoric provided here by him is what is wrong with commercial weight loss plans. Even the best people approach the line of making grand promises, blur it and then retreat to sell more product.
The third example comes from what I am seeing on some websites that make “absolute” guarantees about behaviour (“Completely eliminate all your bad eating habits”, “Never snack again”, “Banish all your cravings”). I see posters on these sites who express significant distress over the fact that they are unable to always follow a diet plan. Some posters even indicate the presence of psychological trauma or other conditions that makes them vulnerable to low self-esteem, thus intensifying the feelings of failure and fueling the very binges they are trying to avoid. I cannot stress enough to everyone good weight management is rarely about “never” or “always”. It’s about knowing and trusting yourself and learning how to manage cravings correctly – and you do that by learning how to trust yourself, not by banishing behaviour that is deemed bad by someone else.
My hope in throwing my hat into the weight loss arena is to say this – recognize that everyone in the industry is out to make a buck, and there are a lot of bucks to be made. If you want to achieve mediocre results, you will buy in to the full promises, or even half promises that are made to sell product. One of the first things you must do on your long-term weight loss journey is trust yourself and no one’s rhetoric. If you plateau on a plan, or can’t follow it, change it and don’t give up. Diets that make promises set you up for failure in two ways. Besides making claims that are there more to sell product than they are to lose weight, if you do not succeed you run the risk of giving up, thinking the fault must be yours and not the author’s or the program’s since authors and programs make such “strong claims”. To quote Yoni, if it seems to good to be true, it probably is, and I would add this… if you want to lose weight, only trust yourself.