Want to lose weight? Here's how...

Weight has become our national obsession. While food manufacturers invent ever-more addictive fatty, sugary and salty junk food – and advertisers seduce us into eating it – glossy magazines and tabloid newspapers ridicule celebrities who dare put on a few pounds. These same publications feature page after page of unhealthily skinny models (so unhealthy in fact that many of them starve themselves or fall prey to eating disorders to maintain that weight).

And the whole multi-billion-pound diet industry is a big con. Any diet that involves restricting either the amount or type of food you can eat; promises quick and drastic weight loss; and is based on the latest 'scientific' research by some dodgy diet doc will not only be bad for you – potentially damaging your health – but will actually make you gain weight in the long term.

Why? Because when you starve the body of calories it panics, thinks there is a shortage of food and so, when you start eating normally again, frantically stores up fat to see you through the 'famine'. So all that weight you lost goes straight back on. Study after study shows that this kind of yo-yo dieting leads to a long term weight increase for the vast majority of dieters.

So, if you want to lose weight, first read the excellent Overcoming Weight Problems, by Jeremy Gauntlett-Gilbert and Clare Grace. These two NHS obesity experts explain exactly why dieting is so bad for you and offer a proven, step-by-step guide to healthy, long-term weight loss. Their approach relies on the simple formula that to lose excess body fat, you must burn more calories than you consume. That, I'm afraid, is a law of physics (ie real science, not the 'science' behind most faddy, quick-fix diets). So the solution is to combine increased activity with a balanced, healthy diet – and stick to it, for life.

The book also uses cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques to help you change some of the unhelpful thoughts and beliefs that create and help maintain unhealthy eating patterns. If you would like to know more, do come and see me at my East Finchley practice.

Best wishes,

Dan

Tags: Binge eating, CBT, Cognitive Therapy, Diet, Eating disorders, Exercise, Fat loss, Fitness, Negative thinking, Weight loss