The Problem With The Weight Loss Industry

Every day we work with people - mainly women in their 40s and 50s - who ask us to help them lose weight. And they want QUICK results. Like, YESTERDAY quick!

I spend time talking with these women, to understand their problems and goals. It usually turns out that these women have been gaining weight pretty consistently for a while. Not for a few weeks or months, but YEARS. Yet they still want, and expect, to lose all the weight within a few weeks.

So, why is this?

This is because the diet industry has been brain washing everyone for years. I don’t need to name and shame the various slimming clubs and programmes, but you know the ones I mean ;-)

The diet industry will have you believe that dropping a lot of weight very quickly is an easy, safe and effective way to fix your problems forever.

You may be sold a shake, juice, meal replacement or calorie restricted food plan. They will lead you to believe that all you need to do is eat far less than you are now (and some will encourage you to exercise, but not all), all the weight will fall off and you’ll live happily ever after.

Unfortunately the bad news is that the diet industry has a very low success rate at fulfilling the latter part of their promise. The ‘happily ever after bit’.

So, why not?

Once you understand the true nature of your body’s metabolism, you will learn that your body will fight back if you push it out of ‘homeostatis’. This is the body’s desire to remain stable and balanced. Crash dieting puts the metabolism under extreme stress, which means most of the weight you’ll lose will actually be muscle and water, rather than fat. I imagine you wanted to lose fat, didn’t you?

This will leave you low on energy, very hungry, soft and untoned. Not a happy place to be :(

So, what happens next?

The body goes in to survival mode. Your fat loss will plateau, and your body will make sure that the only weight you lose is muscle (and this happens even more if you’re not doing any exercise). It continues to hold on to as much fat as possible because it thinks it’s starving. It also starts to disrupt your hunger hormones to try and get you to eat more – especially sugary and carb heavy foods for instant energy. So your now experiencing extreme hunger, cravings and mood swings. REALLY not a happy place to be :(

And, what about after that?

Here’s the worst bit of all and here’s what the diet industry doesn’t tell you.

After losing all that muscle, your metabolic rate has slowed down to snail’s pace. So as soon as you resume eating a bit more food, you will regain all the weight very rapidly, and most likely put on even more.

You see, muscle is your metabolic fire and what keeps you burning energy all day long. Without it, the body will have a very hard time burning fat, and so everything you eat gets shuttled straight in to fat cells.

Hello yo-yo dieting!

Diet Industry – 1 vs You – 0

The industry is clever, and they know that the above will happen, they just don’t tell you that! They don’t tell you because they want you to come back again next year and do it all over again, to keep their business going. Is it just me or does that seem a little unfair?

So what on earth do I do then?

The only route to long lasting fat loss is to find an approach which you can live by in the long term. This takes time, re-education and a significant lifestyle change. Your results may come more slowly but you’ll never suffer the frustrations of yo-yo dieting ever again.

And that’s what we do best. We help to fix people who have been lied to and let down by the weight loss industry.

If you’d like more information about how we help people, visit our Facebook page.