Today I’m begging a new blog series this time on our bodies and weight control, as you hear a lot of bullshit from the “Diet Industry” who are out there to profit from vulnerable people who don’t know how to loose weight, I’ve decided to do a series on it here, where I can share with you the things that I believe everyone should know about weight loss from my own experience and lifestyle. On my blog you can read about how weight loss works for FREE. I don’t even have ads on my site, everything I share with you is because I want to share not because I’m making any money.

I thought that the best way to start off would be to discredit the promises made by the so-called “Diet Industry”. I’m not on any commercial system, I don’t use their products, I don’t go to the gym, I have absolutely no affiliation with these companies. You’d be well familiar with this industry from their TV ads to their websites, etc. This is what I mean:

The above “pretend/composite-ad” is based on two products I dislike – Bodytrim and Rapidloss and the promises they make to potential customers. If you look up their websites you will see what I mean (no I’m not linking to them).

Bodtrim was founded and is promoted by Geoff Jowett, pictured to the left, and their catch phrases are “No Strenuous Exercise”, “Sustainable Weight Loss” and “A Lifestyle, Not a Diet”. Really? Look at Geoff – does he look like he doesn’t go to the Gym? He didn’t get that body without strenuous exercise. Also it is indeed a diet system – a high fiber, low carb diet; that’s what it is.

We’ll focus more generally on these promises now as they’re made by many of these products. I’m not saying these programs don’t work – but they’re commercialized and many of them are designed to keep you on them rather than to educate you, many – particularly those promoted on TV – are expensive and do not offer good value for money, and some are outright scams. Often they will suit some people but not others.

Look at the claims made by these programs. “Loose 5kg in your first week”. That’s outright dishonest. To loose 5kg of fat in 1 week you need to have a deficit of 38,500 calories. The average calorie requirement for women is 14,000 calories per week and for men 17,500. There is no way to loose 5 kg of fat in one week, even if you ate nothing at all the whole week, if you do not burn those calories off with very serious training. If you realize this and you realize I’m not lying to you, then you should ask yourself why these companies make this bullshit claim? I drink 3-5L of water per day, these claims exploits your expectations and works using a simple detox program at the start of the diet that removes carbs from your system, not burning fat from your thighs, hips or stomach. But, here’s the catch: you don’t ever need to detox. That’s your liver’s job. You may loose some temporary weight on a detox diet, however there’s no proven health benefit whatsoever and it’s simply a ploy to trick you into thinking you’ve actually lost 5-6kg of weight in your first week on their systems. A detox diet does not “flush toxins from your body” or any of that bullshit – just drink your daily water to do that!

And while we’re on the issue – “loose weight from your hips, thighs and stomach”? Another outright lie. You can not spot-target fat loss, it is impossible. Fat is lost over your entire body and you have to persevere with it to see results in any of those areas. “No exercise”? Many of the Diet-Industry products exploit this – but the fact is that a balanced system should promote both dieting and exercise. Products that have a diet plan but not an exercise regime and make the claim “loose weight fast” are lying through their teeth. There are three (main) ways to loose weight: 1. dieting, 2. exercise and 3. diet and exercise (in my next blog article I’ll take you though some of the more extreme and certainly not healthy methods often used by celebrates). The fastest, necessarily, will be diet and exercise, no other system can say that it’s fast and be legit. Many say “satisfaction guarantee” but the internet shows that it’s often difficult to obtain one.

If you don’t want to diet on your own or exercise then Jenny Craig is probably the best value product for you. The Jen4Men system costs $25/month plus food (the prepackaged food is recommended but optional). It’s certainly a lot cheaper than most of the other products being peddled these days.

But really, you should aim to avoid the commercial systems, they’re usually designed to keep you using their products and paying your fees. They promise rapid fat loss but they can’t deliver it, and here’s why.

The biggest lies that the Diet Industry tells is that it’s difficult to loose weight and that on their system you will loose it quickly. Well it’s not hard to loose weight, but it’s never a fast process. If your required calorie intake is 2,500 per day (average for me), and you cut out just 250 calories per day (10%), then you will burn about one pound of fat per fortnight. Cut out 550 per day (22%) and you’ll burn about 1kg of fat per fortnight. That’s the basics of weight loss, and I’ll be explaining a lot more later, but for now just realize that it’s not possible to loose much more than 1kg per week by dieting alone. I have done it a number of times, to loose that much weight you have to sacrifice more calories.

Many of these systems rely on your continual purchase of meals or meal-replacement shakes, protein bars, etc. The guides, cookbooks, etc, that they sell are also well overpriced – you’re better off getting a copy of Jamie Oliver’s book. Whilst researching for this entry I came across this blog, where the blogger comes out and says that she lost weight on the system, and gave rave reviews about it whilst getting it for free, but once she stopped receiving it for free the blogger didn’t know what to do to keep loosing weight without it, and the product was too expensive for her budget to stay on the system! She also missed having real food instead of shakes every day.

Above is a video from 2011 relating to Sensaslim – the brainchild of the notorious con artist Peter Foster. To put it simply, the product was marketed as an appetite suppressant (do we really need another?) but not only did it not work, it was never designed to work. It was simply designed to rake in cash from the booming diet industry, the way that other products and systems also exploit people’s desire to loose weight at any cost.

So if you’re thinking about using a commercial system there’s only three real things I want to get across. Firstly it’s that why should you trust products that make untrue claims? Even if they work their claims are bullshit there’s no getting around it! Why do they target people with promises of loosing body fat unrealistically fast? Of course this doesn’t apply to every single one, but it’s a common thread. Secondly, most importantly, these products/systems work better for some people than other people. None of them are “ideal” for 100% of people, and you should be looking for the system that is right for you, not the one that is right for someone else. And Finally, do your research on the product before buying it. There are two websites I will recommend you use to check which systems offer value for money. But there are others as well. These are:

• dietchoices.com
• everydiet.org