The Slim Habit Blog

Do diets work? Every year, more and more people decide to go on a diet to try and get rid of unwanted pounds. They put their faith in some new formula which promises to deliver their dream – permanent weight loss. Be it the Atkins diet or the South Beach Diet, their expectations are always high. These diets can deliver short-term weight loss, but the majority of dieters will be disappointed because permanent weight loss will not happen.

The essential ingredient that is missing is the means to effect change, permanent change. What is needed are new habits, slim habits if you like, that can be repeated and practiced to effect that change, not just another restrictive diet.

Traci Mann, who is a psychologist at UCLA has been doing some very interesting work on the effectiveness of diets. She didn’t take just one or two diets, she studied 31 – and over a period of between two and five years. What she discovered is that for the majority of people, diets don’t lead to better health benefits or sustained weight loss.

The study found that you can lose between 5 to 10% of your bodyweight on any number of diets, but the weight comes back. The majority of dieters put all the weight back on again – plus some. Going on a diet can actually make you fat. Another study found that only one person in every 100 loses weight permanently – that’s a failure rate of 99%!

There have been some enormous advances made in the fields of neuroscience and psychology. There is now a far better understanding about how our body and brain work, how they interact and what we can do to make change and take control of our lives. One new weight loss system, the Slim Habit, puts this new knowledge into plain, easy to understand language and translates it into practical applications – ’slim habits’. This is interesting because learning new habits and discarding old behaviors is the way to achieve permanent weight loss.

Making change is not difficult, but it helps to have a program that supplies a knowledge base and also a means of offering long-term support. We need help and a formal structure if we are to identify our old behaviors and learn new habits. We have to have a means of taking control of our lives to make long-term change. It needs to be a program of learning and where we can discover our true strength and resolve.

Habit change is not difficult, but it takes commitment – as does anything that is worthwhile. Permanent weight loss doesn’t come from a formula or by spending eight weeks restricting your calorie intake, it comes from learning new habits.

For those struggling to lose weight permanently, the big weight could soon be over.

Henry John has been writing and commentating on health matters for many years. He has a particular interest in permanent weight loss and behavior change and has been a member of the Slim Habit team. www.slimhabit.com

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Most of us are pretty reluctant to give up something we like – or have got used to. We enjoy a beer or a glass of wine. Alcohol puts us in a good mood (in the beginning) and all our troubles seem less of a problem. It puts a gloss over the trivia of daily living and the world seems a better place. We feel we can cope with life. If we drink too much, the depressing effect that alcohol has, brings us down to earth with a bump, and we live in the land of regret for a while until the clouds pass over and reality stares us rudely in the face again. Whether we drink a lot or a little the choice is always ours – until the spectre of addiction appears, but that’s another issue.

We make choices based on our likes and dislikes. We choose to do something because we have facts that influence our decision, but we sometimes make some bizarre choices and stupid decisions. In fact, it’s said that most of us take decisions based on 5% of the available information. No wonder we get ourselves into a mess.

When it comes to alcohol we think we are pretty well informed. Many of the ‘facts’ we’ve picked up about alcohol are not facts at all, but rumours and hearsay that have been embellished in the telling. This is certainly the case when it comes to the relationship between alcohol and weight gain. ‘If you’re on a diet, it’s okay to drink’. ‘Alcohol makes you fat’.  These are two conflicting statements neither of which is completely true.

The first thing to understand about alcohol is that it is stuffed full of calories. All nutrients have different calorific values. Proteins and carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram. At has 9 calories per gram and alcohol has 7 calories per gram, nearly as much as fat!

The interesting thing about alcohol is that it contains no carbohydrate (apart from a few sweet drinks) which means that your body can’t store the energy it provides. Faced with this dilemma it converts this new energy into something called acetate.

The body uses acetate as a source of energy as it would the stored glucose and fat in your body – but here’s the rub. It uses the ‘acetate energy’ before and in preference to your stored glucose and fat. The truth is that alcohol doesn’t make you put on weight, it prevents you from losing it.

If you’re trying to lose weight then you should also be aware that alcohol stimulates your appetite. If you’re trying to lose weight the last thing you need is a stimulated appetite. It also removes inhibitions and melts your resolve… ‘one more cookie won’t hurt’  and you’re on the way to trashing all your efforts to lose weight.

If you’re trying to lose weight, alcohol has some very clear consequences.  Whereas total abstinence may make life a little dull, It makes good sense to get into a new habit – a slim habit, if you like – which helps you to moderate how much alcohol you drink. All it requires is a little self-discipline to achieve the outcome you want.

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Obesity contagious? You can almost hear John McEnroe screaming in disbelief ‘You can not be serious!’ It might sound a bit far-fetched, but a group of researchers at the Harvard Medical School are pretty convinced. What they do not mean is that you are all of a sudden going to put on weight after you’ve shaken the hand of someone who has a few more pounds round their middle than they should have.  

The reason obesity’s contagious doesn’t lie in the fact that obese deliberately people find other obese people to hang out with, it’s more because there is a direct causal relationship.  In other words, a person’s idea of what is an acceptable weight changes as a result of being in the company of obese people. If all those around you are obese, then you start to believe – perhaps sub-consciously – that it’s okay to be like them.

For the first time obesity has been put into a social context.  If everybody is carrying too much weight then it’s easy to see why people are not concerned by their body weight. In fact many probably take comfort from the fact that they are no different to anybody else. If not in a ‘club’, they are certainly not made to feel that they need to make change – probably completely the opposite.

Interestingly, the obesity link between friends was very strong, and in several cases distance didn’t appear to be a barrier to contagion. Friends could live far apart and there could still be an impact. Researchers felt that this helped to show that the links could not be solely put down to lifestyle and environment.

What is alarming about this study is that it shows how social factors have amplified the current obesity crisis. Social acceptance of obesity may be the main cause of the dramatic increases that have been seen in the last few years.

If we take this situation to its logical conclusion, obesity will soon be the norm. Society will accept that excessive weight is not something to worry about…or will it?

The consequences of an overweight population is already a cause for concern for many developed countries around the world. Health care costs are going to increase dramatically and many people will face a very miserable old age unless something changes – soon.

It’s not all gloom and doom though.  If obesity is contagious, there is no reason why being slim can’t be contagious too! A ‘slimness’ epidemic is perfectly possible, but would it be difficult to sell? If feeling a million dollars, being physically able to do whatever you want to do, being happy, being on top of your job and in good health is hard to sell we should all pack our bags now! It’s time to get the slim habit!

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The failure rate of most diets is astronomical yet more and more people turn to diets to try and provide a solution to their weight problem.  If you’re a battle scarred veteran of the diet wars you’ll know just how much determination and effort it takes to lose weight.  You will also know how depressing it is when all the weight you’ve lost piles back on again when you finish your diet.

It’s a sad fact that well over 90% of people who go on a diet put the weight back on within six months.  The main reason for this is that your body actually works against you when it comes to losing weight.  Faced with a shortage of calories, its natural response is to conserve energy and so it stores all the energy it can find as fat.  Back in ancient times this mechanism helped your ancestors to survive a famine, but today it makes the life of a dieter very difficult indeed. It’s called the famine factor.

The famine factor has the effect of slowing everything down.  You feel tired and listless. This is to prevent you wasting vital energy.  Your appetite increases to persuade you to go and make even greater efforts to find food.  These natural reactions are just what a dieter does not want.  It means that throughout a diet you’re fighting an increased appetite and feeling tired and listless into the bargain.

As your diet continues, your body, faced with a reduced intake of calories or energy, begins to break down muscle tissue for fuel.  It does this by breaking down protein which releases nitrogen.  Your body clears away the nitrogen by releasing water from tissue your cells.  This has the effect of immediately reducing the water you retain in your body.  You’ll probably notice a marked reduction in your weight.  However, this reduction of muscle is not good. Muscle requires energy/calories to maintain itself.  The more muscle you have the more effective your metabolism.  Reduce your muscle and your reducing your ability to burn calories.  As your muscle mass reduces so does your requirement for calories.  To maintain your weight loss you therefore have to reduce your calorie intake even further.

Faced with the requirement to eat even less to maintain weight loss plus an undiminished appetite, this is usually too much for people to bear and slowly but surely they return to their old eating habits.  Unfortunately, when the weight goes back on, its fat not muscle that reappears.  This means that without muscle your metabolism is slower than it was before you went on your diet.  Your daily calorie requirement is less too. Having returned to your old ways you are more likely to become more overweight than you were before you started the diet. It might sound perverse, but diets make you fat. The alternative? Change! Change your behaviors and learn new habits – slim habits.

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