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Being Overweight Is Not About Will Power – It’s About Manipulation

I was working on my new video called Diets Make You Fat and I got totally sidetracked by something I discovered while I was doing my research.

One of the reasons many people are overweight is because they are being deliberately manipulated by Big Food into eating very much more than they need, simply in order to make sales.

Many people think that being overweight is about will-power, or rather the lack of it. But overeating has nothing at all to do with Will-Power and everything to do with the way your brain chemistry is being deliberately manipulated by the chemical additives in food.

I had no idea about the full extent of this, and to be honest, I was disgusted that Big Food just treats people as a source of wealth no matter how much damage is done to their lives. And let’s face it, being obese has a seriously damaging effect on almost every aspect of life. But perhaps the most pernicious is the low self-image that tends to be created, followed by the isolation, loneliness, and hell of being unable to control what you feel you should be able to control. Then, because you can’t, you think the fault lies with you.

Big Food manipulates us into overeating and this manipulation is the real source of the obesity epidemic.

What Are They Doing?

So what exactly are they doing?

They are by-passing your natural full signals and deliberately stimulating dopamine release. Dopamine is a neuro-transmitter created in the brain. Its effect is to make you feel good. It’s the same chemical that, when over-stimulated on a regular basis, creates physiological addiction.

It’s the mental stimulation derived from these highly palatable foods that makes so many people crave them, not hunger. This mental stimulation is responsible for re-arousing your appetite even after you are done eating.

This multi-billion-dollar food industry has discovered that three things: fat, sugar and salt, are the key ingredients for creating that mindless nibbling that never leaves you feeling satisfied but always leaves you wanting more. They use specific combinations of fat, sugar and salt — but different combinations for different foods — to make you crave these products. What you are after is your fat-sugar-salt fix. These are, as often as not, pre-packaged snack foods. But there is one more feature – the chemical flavouring. It is this, along with the specific combination of fat, sugar, and salt that you crave, which makes the whole thing supremely palatable to you yet leaves you permanently unsatisfied and always able to eat more regardless of how full you feel.

Is it any wonder you, and so many others, are overweight?

I don’t know about you but this makes me feel angry.

Too Big is the New Small

But that’s not the end of the story.

Portion sizes of innocuous seeming pleasures get ever bigger and there is a hidden calorie load here that you may be unaware of.

Coffee Houses

For instance a Starbucks Mocha Cookie Frappuccino Blended Coffee Venti (24oz – a little over a pint) with semi-skimmed milk has almost 700 Calories in it. If you drink one of these a day, 5 days a week – which many people do, it will add 52lbs to your body weight in a year. That’s almost 4 stone. And you wonder where the weight came from! That’s a four stone penalty for the simple pleasure of an enjoyable treat that makes work tolerable.

Cinemas

Of course a trip to the cinema would not be the same without a snack of something or other would it?

But this is where cinemas make their money, so you have to walk the gauntlet of these tantalising offerings before you get to your seat. For instance, at my local Cineworld cinema, a large (8oz) salted popcorn is over 1200Calories, so a trip to the Cinema once a week plus a popcorn will add 18lbs to your weight in a year. Throw in a large 32oz Coke, and you are adding 24lbs to your body weight each year. Keep that up for just 4 years and you will find yourself 100lbs (7st) heavier. This is how the weight sneaks up on you and again you wonder why you’re fat.

This snack is part of the enjoyment of the Cinema experience for a lot of people and to watch a film at the cinema without the Nachos, or the popcorn, or the ice cream, or the soft drinks would be no fun at all – might as well just be boring and stay at home. Still, the boring people don’t find themselves wondering where that 100lbs came from.

The Fizzy Stuff

Soft drinks are another huge source of hidden calories if you drink them regularly.

10 teaspoons of sugar, or the equivalent in High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), are found in a standard can. HFCS is absorbed more rapidly than regular sugar, and it doesn’t stimulate insulin or leptin production. Leptin is part of the body’s feedback mechanism that lets you know when you are full, so HFCS actually prevents you from triggering the body’s signals for being full and this in turn leads to over-consumption and increased Calorie intake.

If you buy bottles rather than cans then you are drinking 17 teaspoons of sugar in a 20oz bottle. Many soft drinks, particularly energy drinks, contain caffeine which is something else that people appear to get hooked on.

In the UK in 2002 the average soda consumption was around 2 litres per week per person. I don’t drink the stuff so someone must be having my 2 litres as well. US consumption was roughly double this.

So what’s the way out?

The way out is to slowly reduce your consumption of these products. Just going cold-turkey will leave you with strong cravings that you will probably give in to. So reduce consumption slowly and get into the habit of reading the labels that tell you what is in the product you are thinking of consuming. And beware the term natural. Manufacturers use this to trick you into thinking something is good when it isn’t. Natural caramel  is sugar reacted with sulphites and ammonia. Ammonia is what makes bleach work.

Think before you eat, that’s all you need to do. And if you are hungry, then have a banana or an apple, or a handful of grapes and check in ten minutes later. If you still want the snack then have it and enjoy it.

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Words Add More Weight Than Calories

Words make you fat.

My work with hypnosis long ago taught me the power of words. I’ve changed lives, removed fears, eased pain, and helped people to lose weight. I did all of that using nothing more than words. But words have so much power they can harm as well as heal.

A recent long-term US study, conducted by A. Janet Tomiyama, Asst Prof of Psychology, UCLA, followed the weight of 2,379 girls from the age of 10 until the age of 19. Almost 60% of these children had been told they were too fat by the time they were 10. Girls labelled too fat were much more likely to be obese at age 19. The greater the number of people who told a girl she was too fat the greater the likelihood of obesity at age 19.

This is not just a case of fatter children growing into fat adults, because the effects of actual weight were statistically removed in the study. The only factor whose effect was measured was being told you were too fat and by whom. The greater the emotional attachment to the person who criticises the weight – the greater the weight increase in later years.

This is quite fascinating because one of society’s solutions for problems is to point them out.

That’s all that is happening here. People who love the child, and know the problems that obesity brings, simply want to help by encouraging the child to become aware of their problem.

But it has the opposite effect.

Of course if you’ve read my book How to Lose Weight and Free Yourself from Diets Forever you’ll know all about emotional eating. So what is it going to do to a ten year old girl to tell her, no matter how lovingly, that she is too fat – in a world where attractive & loved & popular & famous = SLIM?

It’s not going to cheer her up.

It is going to make her unhappy.

And what do overweight people do when they are unhappy and can’t control their world?

They eat.

Do they eat lettuce and apples? No! They eat sweets and cakes and fats and sugars.

“When people feel bad, they tend to eat more, not decide to diet or take a jog,” Tomiyama said. “Making people feel bad about their weight could increase their levels of the hormone cortisol, which generally leads to weight gain.”

All that matters, especially with a young child, is that they learn to feel good about themselves. Not good about what they look like, or whether they fit in with society’s current view of physical perfection, but good about who they are; good about their talents and abilities; good about how kind and loving they are; and good about everything they do.

Yes, it’s a good idea to ensure they have a healthy diet, but you can do that without stigmatising a child, or regarding a healthy diet as some sort of punishment for getting too fat. I mean what 10 year old has any idea of the connection between their long-term weight and enjoying an ice cream?

Be kind.

Encourage and support a shift to a healthier diet and more active play rather than computer fun. That’s all you need – except…

You just might want to tell your ten year old daughter how beautiful she is.

 

Inspired by:

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-girls-too-fat-obese-20140428,0,4057459.story

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-04-simply-fat-young-girls-obese.html

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That Cream Cake Might Kill You After All

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working with smokers and helping them to break their habit. You might expect that fear of lung cancer is what drives smokers to seek help to quit, but that isn’t always the case. In fact concerns about ill-health only drive smokers who are already experiencing health problems to quit. The majority don’t like the anti-social aspects of being a smoker or the smells.

Part of the problem is that people only seek to take action to maintain good health when their health is already beginning to fail. While individuals have no adverse symptoms there is nothing to drive the motivation for change. This is why the graphic anti-smoking advertising campaigns have little effect on smoking numbers.

Because of this belief in immortality and permanent good health, individuals tend to continue to do what they do. So if you live a healthy lifestyle with lots of nourishing food and exercise then you will continue. But if you live an unhealthy lifestyle with an unhealthy diet then you will also continue. The reason for this is that although, when we worry, we worry about the past and the future. When we eat or exercise we do it now. So unless you have developed the habit of exercise in the same way that smokers develop the habit of smoking, you will choose to eat rather than to walk, run, jog, or cycle.

That is why change is so difficult for most of us. We did what we did yesterday and nothing bad happened so we can probably do it again today and nothing bad will happen – and that’s good – right?

When the bad is small, we do not notice it. But when the small bad happens every day, then one morning we wake up and we’ve got a big bad that seems to have appeared out of nowhere.

I was reading today about how obesity is now being linked to several cancers:

Breast – 33,000 cases a year caused by obesity.

Endometrial – 13,900 cases.

Kidney – 13,900.

Colorectal – 13,200.

Pancreas – 11,900

Oesophagus – 5,800.

Gallbladder – 2,000.

These are US figures for incidence of cancers directly related to obesity.

With breast cancer the problem is increased oestrogen in the bloodstream after the menopause. The oestrogen levels are directly linked to excess fat. The slimmer you are the less oestrogen you produce and the less likely you are to have to suffer the radical treatment offered for breast cancer.

“To lower your risk for cancer: Lose weight, increase physical activity and eat healthier”, says Anne McTiernan, director of the Prevention Center at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

The trouble is we worry about things that we think are definitely going to happen, like an interview next week, or a dental appointment next month; and we worry about things that we convince ourselves will happen, even though they don’t – like the plane crashing, or that person we like rejecting us. What we don’t worry about are the things our body might experience until it is.

The problem is motivation. We do anything – even eating less and exercising more – if we are sufficiently motivated. But when we are physically comfortable in our armchair watching mind-numbing dross on TV and enjoying our snacks the world seems a cosy place where nothing bad will happen if we stay just where we are. It’s not true, but we believe the illusion we have created and continue to do nothing to love and cherish our bodies by moving them and using them and caring about what we put inside them.

It’s up to you.

 

If you want some help check out my book How to Lose Weight and Free Yourself from Diets Forever.

 

Inspired by:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/04/weight-loss-breast-cancer/5201621/

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/weightloss/2009-11-05-obesity_N.htm

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More Bad News For Soft Drink Drinkers

If you knew that something caused weight gain, heart disease, liver failure, high blood pressure and diabetes – would you consume it?

Bit of a daft question really. Of course you would. Smokers know all about the dreadful health problems that smoking causes and they still smoke.

We all know that sugar makes us fat and rots our teeth but apart from that, it’s ok isn’t it?

More and more research is highlighting the fact that our bodies just cannot cope with very much of a sugar load. A new piece of research, conducted by Bangor University, has found significant metabolic changes in individuals who consume as little as two cans of sugar sweetened soft drinks a week. One can every day definitely causes problems, and it does it very quickly indeed.

This trial demonstrated that regularly drinking just one can of soft drink a day (one can contains the equivalent of about 10 teaspoons of sugar) caused an increase in fat deposition by inhibiting fat metabolism as well as increasing blood glucose. What happens in the body when you consume too much sugar is that you train your body to burn sugar, rather than fat, for fuel. But this training doesn’t reverse itself very quickly when you stop consuming sugar. So the longer you continue to take in excess sugar the more screwed up your metabolism gets. Then it becomes more difficult for your body to burn fat and harder and harder to lose weight. During the trial the metabolic change took place in just four weeks with fit, healthy and lean volunteers.

Another problem is that excessive intake of sugary soft drinks alters the perception of sweetness. I’m not a soda drinker and my hot beverages, with the exception of an occasional hot chocolate, are sugar free. I don’t eat chocolate bars or other sweets any more, and I’ve noticed that my tolerance of sweetness is much lower than most other people I know. I was at a party a few weeks back with some friends. I had a small slice of a gateau which I couldn’t eat because it was far too sweet. My friends had no problem eating and enjoying it. A few years ago I was eating some Walker’s potato crisps – prawn cocktail flavour – and I thought they tasted sweet. I checked the ingredients and sugar was on the list. So I can certainly endorse the idea that sweetness becomes much less attractive once you cut down on sugar intake. When that happens you lose the desire to consume excessively sweet foods and enjoy foods with a much lower sugar content so there is no long-term hardship or sense of having to do without.

Sugar is causing a lot of harm and the sugar in beverages is hidden. If you want to stay healthy and lose a bit of weight, cutting down on sugar is the probably the biggest favour you can do for yourself. And just in case you are thinking of switching to diet beverages instead, check out my article Is Soda Pop at the Heart of the American Obesity Epidemic?

Michael

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Belviq – Another Dodgy Weight Loss Fix, or the Miracle the US Has Been Waiting For?

Yesterday the Japanese drugmaker Eisai Co. had its shares jump 4% after the FDA announced approval for a new weight loss drug, Belviq. The drug is manufactured by its San Diego-based partner Arena Pharmaceuticals. There is no question that there is big money to be made with an effective obesity medication. Arena’s stock went up 29% yesterday. Unfortunately since the pharmaceutical industry has a greater investment in profit than it does in relieving human suffering (and there’s nothing wrong with making a profit – as long as no one is harmed in the process), I thought I’d have a look and see what the fuss is all about.

However, I have to make my position clear. Medication is for emergencies, and as a last resort. When nothing else works then fair enough give it a go, but I have had so many patients come to me for help when they’ve lost faith in their prescribed medication after realising that it just doesn’t work.

“There are two kinds of medications: cosmetic drugs and curative drugs. If you take an antibiotic long enough, it cures by killing the bacterial invaders. When you’re done taking it the disease will not recur because the pathogens are dead. Antibiotics are curative drugs.”

Martin Seligman PhD author of Flourish

Cosmetic drugs alleviate symptoms but they don’t fix the problem.

Weight loss medication falls into the cosmetic drug category.

Let’s look at the real problem. 2 out of 3 Americans fall into the categories of either overweight or obese – that is, they have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of over 25. Excess weight causes serious health problems. It is connected with the onset of type II diabetes and cardio-vascular problems. As weight increases, exercise becomes more difficult because of the body mass that has to be moved around. You end up with a Catch 22 situation where the weight itself prevents you from doing things that might lift your mood and burn some calories. So you eat because there’s nothing else to do that feels good.

We live in the Time of the Quick Fix. The Time of Instant Gratification where Instant is generally not soon enough.

When you are hungry, or even when you are just bored, there are places, for many people, within a few minutes drive (God forbid you should walk there) where you can enjoy coffee and cake, fries, burgers dripping with melted fat (sorry, I mean cheese), sugar loaded shakes, and all sorts of stuff that just ain’t good for you. Waiting while something cooks, never mind shopping for ingredients is just too much trouble.

Yes I know I’m being unfair. I know many people who struggle with their weight, and they exercise, and they shop for healthy home-cooked meals. But just have a look at your life and see how much instantness you choose in your day. Instant entertainment at the flick of a switch; instant contact with your friends via facebook or text; instant demand for medical fixes rather than waiting to see if the body can heal itself of a cold, or virus, without the need for a visit to the doctor; have it now with a credit card, rather than save up and buy it when the money is available. It’s all around. There’s so much of it, it seems normal, and so we expect everything we want to be provided instantly.

So when we’ve been struggling with a diet for a  week and the weight that’s accumulated over the last 12 or 24 months, or maybe the last 5 or 10 years, isn’t gone – we give up and start looking round for a faster solution. All we want is for someone to invent a pill that means we can carry on with our unhealthy, instant, lifestyle and have a body to die for rather than a body that’s killing us.

That desire is what the manufacturers of ‘designer’ weight loss drugs are preying upon.

They know weight is an emotive subject.

They know that losing weight in a healthy, sensible way is such a long-term project that most people give up in despair long before they come even close to success. They know that looking at an overweight body in a mirror, in the privacy of your own home, can reduce you to tears no matter what kind of a public face you wear. They know they can appeal to your emotions and your desire for instant gratification by suggesting that what they hold in their pill factories is the answer to your heart’s desire. They hint that they have the magic wand that will, Cinderella-like, allow you to go to the ball, and be the star.

You may have seen my article on another weight loss pill Qnexa. One of the drugs, phentermine, in Qnexa was formerly part of Fen-Phen a weight loss drug withdrawn due to problems it was causing with heart-valve function. Belviq is making use of the other drug, fenfluramine, that was part of Fen-Phen. I mean why let something go to waste just ‘cos it’s killing people?

Just as with Qnexa, the FDA is requiring long-term trials to establish cardio-vascular safety after the drug goes on the market!!!!

Belviq, just like Qnexa, has some side-effects – different side-effects. The FDA doesn’t want pregnant women using it. It can produce a fatal increase in the production of the neuro-transmitter serotonin. All this will do is to cause muscle rigidity, fever and maybe seizures. It may also adversely affect memory, and maybe cause a loss of concentration. Just what you signed up for when all you really wanted was to lose a few pounds.

This drug, under a different name from the same manufacturer, was rejected by the FDA in 2010 because of concerns about cancer. These risks haven’t changed, it’s just that the FDA has been persuaded that the drug’s benefits outweigh the risks. I’m guessing that means the benefits to Arena’s bank account outweigh the risks to any one individual. I rather suspect that anyone who contracts cancer as a result of taking this prescribed medication may well have a different take on this. Even then the onus will be on the cancer sufferer to prove it was the drug, and for that you need a lot of drug sales and a lot of people taking the drug to contract the disease. It’s a high price.

I found that the most interesting thing is that, in clinical trials, Belviq only produced a 3% weight loss compared to a placebo group. Anyone with very little effort can lose more than that just by following the weight loss guidelines in my book, and my book has no adverse side-effects.

But the real problem here is treating being overweight or obese as a medical problem. It isn’t. Being overweight or obese, is unhealthy, it does cause some quite serious medical problems, but of itself it is not a medical issue. It’s an issue of putting too much food in our mouths and not burning it off with activity. That’s a personal problem. It can’t be cured because it isn’t a disease. It can be helped, but it needs education in eating, in caring for the self, in recognising that our bodies actually do need looking after and caring for.

Even if weight loss seems impossibly difficult for you, as long as you are prepared to make some small changes, you can lose weight without needing to ‘take’ anything.

But what you really need to do, is to stop thinking that your excess weight is someone else’s problem and that they will fix it for you. They won’t because they can’t.

The minute we take personal responsibility; the minute we decide that we will look after ourselves and ensure our own health and well-being, that’s when things will start to change – for the better.

Michael

 

Thanks to:

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-06-27/fda-approves-first-new-weight-loss-pill-in-decade

http://vitals.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/27/12440533-fda-oks-first-new-weight-loss-pill-in-13-years?lite

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57461956-10391704/fda-approves-obesity-pill-belviq-for-obese-overweight-people-with-weight-related-health-problems/

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Obesity Checks – Big Brother or a Helping Hand?

The US Preventative Task Force has issued new guidelines for doctors for the treatment of obesity. You are obese when your Body Mass Index (BMI) is 30 or more – this is 1 in 3 Americans, so it’s a serious problem. The BMI is calculated from your weight and height and is a measure of whether or not you need to lose weight. If you are in the BMI range 25 to 30 you are considered overweight. Above that is obesity.

One of the problems with BMI is that it doesn’t work if you are super fit and carrying a lot of muscle, but if that’s you then you won’t be reading this anyway so that’s not a serious problem. Mind you, I would have thought that most people would know if they are carrying too much weight. I know when I am, and that’s true even when my BMI is in the supposedly normal range. So I sort of expect other people to be aware of when they are overweight and when they are not, but this does not seem to be the case according to this report. Apparently 50% of obese people have never had their doctors tell them they need to lose weight. “That’s just not fair to the patient,” said Dr Der-Sarkissian from the Los Angeles Medical Centre.

I don’t need a doctor to tell me when I need to lose weight, but then I’ve only ever barely been out of the normal category. So I don’t know if it’s possible to just be unaware of a serious weight problem. But it seems the Task Force thinks that getting doctors to point out the problem and then to offer solutions is the way forward. The solutions will be long-term counselling, nutritional advice, target setting and support – none of which doctors are geared up to provide.

Obesity and obesity-related diseases already cost around $147 billion a year in healthcare spending. Adoption of these recommendations would significantly increase that spending. But there’s something else that doctors can do, and that is write prescriptions. There’s a new weight loss drug about to receive FDA approval. I wonder if there’s a connection here, because the Task Force’s finding means that healthcare treatment will be available through Medicare and other health insurance schemes. Doctors can’t provide what’s really needed which is long-term encouragement and support, so will they just write a prescription? If they do then this drug’s manufacturer will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Another problem with the solution is the boundary line. You need to be clinically obese (BMI 30+) to qualify for help, so if you are just overweight, you have to pay for your own help. I wonder how many people will put on weight just so they qualify for free help?

Losing even a small amount of weight is beneficial. According to Susan Curry (member of the Task Force) “Losing 5 percent of your body weight has tremendous health benefits, and intensive behavioural counselling programs help you do that and sustain it. Your primary care provider can, we hope, help you to find evidence-based programs.” It’s that “we hope” part that’s worrying because – at the moment – they can’t.

Michael

Thanks to:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-obesity-screening-20120622,0,2815818.story

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/06/26/panel-doctors-should-screen-patients-for-obesity/

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2012/06/26/obesity-screening-height-weight.html