at least 50 or 60 pounds – but only in your wallet. And news travels fast, so if by the remotest chance any of these anti-fat treatments worked then nobody would have any fat. Surely this should tell you something. However, there’s no telling some people – and with time on your hands, fat on your thighs and money in your pocket, the choice is yours.
You could even join Cherie Blair on her Detox Slimming Machine. Appearing svelte and slim(ish) at the Labour Party Conference in October 2003, the prime minister’s wife was reportedly very enthusiastic about her three-times-a-week slimming treatments to get rid of ‘toxic waste’ and reverse years of ‘digestive abuse’. The treatment consists of lying on a couch and being attached to 32 electrodes that emit electrical currents to tap away at the ‘intestinal plaque’ lining the colon and intestines. A course of 12 sessions costs £695. A laxative would have the same effect at a fraction of the price as would taking a natural product like psysllium or ispaghula husk, marketed in the UK as Fybogel. You are also advised to go on a strict detoxification diet—eating only fruit, vegetable soup and salad with a small meal of chicken and rice for dinner. Oh really? No sausage, bacon and chips then?
Let’s talk toxins for a moment. A toxin is a poison usually produced in the body by bacteria. Health Encyclopaedia, the medical guide used by the Royal Society of Medicine, suggests that bacterial toxins are extremely dangerous, and if they enter the blood in more than minute quantities, the effects are always serious. If you suffered the build-up of toxins suggested by these so-called ‘health experts’ you would probably be dead, and the idea that you can be ‘cured’ of toxins by electrical stimulation, colonic irrigation or a detox diet is ludicrous. Not one toxin, as the term is understood by the Royal Society of Medicine, can be removed by any detox programme.
As Amanda Wynne, a spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association tactfully put it: ‘I can’t really comment on this so-called detoxifying process but the diet doesn’t sound hugely nutritious to me. You can lose between one and two pounds a week quite easily just by eating healthily and exercising—and save yourself £695.’
If you have that much money to spare, why not go for surgery? Plastic surgeons have developed a technique to get rid of the ‘orange peel’ effect of cellulite by snipping the ligaments just under the skin to produce a smoother look (Tucks R Us?). Unfortunately, this doesn’t eliminate the fat; you just look smooth and fat instead of lumpy and fat. Fatso intacto.
The only plastic surgery that will effectively protect you from all of the above is to cut up your credit cards.
Fad Diets
Even if you don’t succumb to slimming treatments, nothing it seems will deter you from going on your next diet. Over the years the professional dieter must have lost at least 40 stone. Each new diet promises you more food than you can eat, instant results and strangers on the bus coming up and asking you to dance.
Let’s face it: authors write diet books to make money. If they can think up some weird food permutation—the quirkier the better—that captures the public imagination, they are laughing. Even better, if loads of people try it and lose weight—as you do—word of mouth is the best publicity. What doesn’t concern these writers, however, is the effects their methods could have on someone’s health if they stay on the diet for a long period.
If you keep repeating the same action, you will keep getting the same results.
High-protein, Low-carb Regimes
In the same week it was announced that the Atkins diet book—which advocates foods high in protein and fat and low in carbohydrates—was rivalling Harry Potter in sales, a report was published in the Lancet medical journal linking too much fatty food with an increased risk of breast cancer.
Dr Sheila Bingham, who led the study for the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer and Nutrition said: ‘The effect seems to be related particularly to saturated fat found mostly in butter, meat, lamb, sausages, bacon and cheese,’ foods which are the main staples of the Atkins diet. Women eating the most fat had a 33 per cent extra risk of developing the disease.
So—are you dying to be slim?
Another report by Dr Bill Robertson, a clinical biochemist at the Institute of Urology at the University College Medical School, claims that although you could lose a stone on the Atkins diet, you could also gain a stone—in your kidney. Kidney stones are extremely painful hard deposits that often need an operation or laser treatment to remove them. Dr Robertson says, ‘It (The Atkins Diet) is the worst possible combination. The absence of fruit and vegetables means the body is deprived of a means of counteracting the negative effect of a diet rich in animal proteins and calcium oxalate. The high-protein diets have contributed to an increase in the number of kidney stones that we are seeing.’
Are you suffering to be slim?
These reports have caused the Atkins company to hastily ‘revise’ how the diet should be used. It appears the consumer ‘misunderstood’ Dr Atkins’ use of the phrase ‘eat liberally’ in relation to foods high in saturated fat, and are now advised to place more emphasis on fish and chicken rather than red meat. In other words, ‘Please don’t sue us if you get sick.’
Television personality, Anne Diamond, now more well-known for her fluctuating body shape than her presenting skills, described being on the Atkins diet as follows: ‘In my view, the Atkins diet is a recipe for a revolting feeling of bloated over-consumption, coupled with a disgusting, fatty taste in your mouth and breath like vapours from a compost heap. I tried it for six days. In the end, I gave up because I felt so nauseous, and I was seriously worried about my heart.’
Anne finally went to her GP with palpitations. Once he knew what she had been eating, he said, ‘Stop being so bloody silly and to go back to eating proper food in moderation.’ That’ll learn yer!
In the short term, a high-protein diet does little harm. The trouble is, it just encourages yo-yo dieting where you lose significant amounts of weight quickly, and put it back on as soon as you start eating ‘normally’ – then you have to go on the diet again to lose it, and so on. According to doctors, this sort of fluctuation is more dangerous than staying permanently at a slightly inflated weight.
An interesting fact to emerge from the Atkins diet is that, contrary to previous thinking about weight, dietary fat doesn’t make you fat—in fact, in the absence of carbohydrates it appears to have the opposite effect, albeit only while you adhere to this formula. It is sugar that makes you fat, and the fat/sugar combo found in cakes, biscuits and the like is the surest way to increase your girth.
So Why Diet?
The stupid thing is that most dieters are not significandy overweight. Dieting has become so much part of our culture that many people, especially women, go on diets regardless of their actual weight on the assumption that, no matter what they weigh, it would be better to weigh less.
The ‘what should be’ never did exist but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be’ – there is only what is.
Social Conditioning
Women are particularly vulnerable to the diet-based lifestyle. Girls tend to learn from an early age that their worth can be measured on a set of bathroom scales, and it sets the pattern for a lifetime of dissatisfaction with how they look. A study carried out by the University of London in September
