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Eat Fat, Get Thin - part 3
'One must attend in medical practice not primarily to plausible theories but to experience combined with reason' . Hippocrates
The 10 September 1994 edition of the
British Medical Journal
published two papers about obesity. One expressed grave reservations about the
effectiveness of present dietary treatments for obesity while the other asked:
Should we treat obesity?
Being overweight has affected a small proportion of the population for
centuries but clinical obesity was relatively rare until this century. Indeed
obesity remained at a fairly stable low level until about 1980. Then its
incidence began to increase dramatically. By 1992 one in every ten people in
Britain was obese; a mere five years later that figure had almost doubled. In
the USA it is even worse: by 1991 one in three adults was overweight. That was
an increase of eight percent of the population over just one decade despite the
fact that, as a commentary in the 15 July 1994 edition of the
Lancet
pointed out, Americans spend a massive $33 billion a year on 'slimming', as
well as taking more exercise, and eating fewer calories and less fat than they
did ten years ago. There is now a pandemic of increasing weight across the
industrialised world.
It may be hard to believe, but this has occurred in the face of increasing
knowledge, awareness, and education about obesity, nutrition and exercise. It
has happened despite the fact that calorie intake had gone down by twenty
percent over the past ten years and exercise clubs have mushroomed. More people
are cutting calories now than ever before in their history yet more of them are
becoming overweight. Why should this be?
The fact is that obesity does not afflict any other animal species. Wherever
you look around the world, you will not find an overweight animal in the wild.
Animals in their natural habitat are either hunters or hunted. If they were
overweight, either they would have difficulty catching their prey, or they
would be easier for the carnivores to catch. Thus an overweight animal would
not survive for long. It is true that there are animals which carry a large
amount of fat: whales, for example, who have it as insulation against the cold
Arctic waters; or bears who store fat as a food reserve for hibernation in the
Winter. But this is natural, not obesity. Whether it is a herd of cows, a hive
of bees, a pride of lions, or any other animal species, all the animals in a
species are essentially the same size and none is obese.
Obesity is also noticeably absent in primitive human cultures.
The only animal to get fat is 'civilised' Man and his pets. And that is highly
significant. The reason cannot be genetic or hereditary, as some argue. If it
were, obesity would have plagued us for generations. And it cannot be simply
that we eat too much, although many of us do. If an abundance of food were the
cause, other animals with an ample food supply would also get fat yet they
don't. And if that were the reason, cutting calories would work yet it doesn't,
except in the short-term.
The overweight are a ready source of income
Jules Hirsch, of Rockefeller University, New York, observed in the 1994 Herman Award Lecture to the American Society for Clinical Nutrition,
"The public must understand that all current methods, from thigh creams to stomach staples, are like gropes in the dark, and as such, are either totally ineffectual or are no more than counterforces to an incompletely understood regulatory disorder. There are no cures at this time."
In this he was wrong, as this book will show. However, Dr Hirsch put his finger on a major stumbling block when he said:
"The ambiguities inherent in [the] problem . . . has led to the growth of a flourishing industry for weight control. The basic tenets of this industry are that there are commercially available programs that can safely lower body weight more easily than those of competitors and unlike their competitors, once the weight is lost, it will remain that way for ever. On this basis an endless set of new products, new diets and drug interventions play legal tag with governmental regulatory agencies while reaping profit from a public desperate for answers."
In this Hirsch was right: the many commercial interests that rely on overweight
people to make a living compound today's weight epidemic. Walk into any large
newsagent's shop today and count the number of slimming magazines. Then add the
number of slimming articles in women's magazines. Add also the slimming clubs
and manufacturers of slimming products: foods, counselling, exercise equipment
and clothes. 'Slimming' is an enormous money-spinner. You may not have realised
it, but the first concern of the slimming businesses is not helping people to
slim. They are like any other business, working to make a profit, to increase
their market share and, above all, to stay in business. If they published a
dietary regime which really did slim you as easily and permanently as they all
say they will, would you need to buy the next edition or pay the next club fee?
No: if they did that, it would be tantamount to committing commercial suicide.
Over the past twenty years or so a number of diet books, videos and regimes
have been marketed with miraculous claims for their effects. They claim that a
dieter can lose more weight than is safe, yet be safe. One has only to read the
medical journals to discover how untrue those claims are. These diets tend to
have three things in common: they all restrict fat intake, they all restrict
calories, and they all don't work. Yes, you will lose some weight but in over
ninety-seven percent of cases it all goes back on again - and usually a bit
more besides. So you try another diet, buy another book or join another club -
and, of course, spend more money.
Over ninety percent of the British population has tried dieting at some time or
other, and at any one time a third of the adult population is trying to lose
weight. As the British spend £850 million and Americans spend $33 billion (£25
billion) a year on it, a prosperous slimming industry can look forward with
confidence to a never-ending income as products and articles, that promise
unattainable goals, persuade women (mostly) to attempt the impossible.
The magazines know that many women are so desperate to lose weight that,
although they constantly fail, they will try any and every new diet that comes
along. Whatever it is, they want to be the first to try it. It is not a new
phenomenon: as long ago as 29 March 1957, a 108 kg (17-stone) woman appeared on
the British ITV programme
State Your Case for £100.
She said that she wanted the money so that she could attend what she called a
'slimming farm'. She did not get the money. No doubt if she'd had £100 (about
two months' wages for the average man in 1957) at the time she would have spent
it all on slimming. The mere fact that she appeared on the programme at all in
front of millions of viewers demonstrated the strength of her need. So diet
after diet is published - all destined to fail. But fail in such a way that
they make you need the next one. It becomes an addiction that is created and
nurtured by the slimming and food industries for profit. For example, did you
know that Weight-Watchers, probably the best-known slimming organisation, is a
wholly owned subsidiary of Heinz Foods?
In November 1998 a British Channel 4 television series featured a similar
weight loss club, Slimming World. The programme showed club members who had
shed the most weight being given awards by Margaret Miles Bramwell, Slimming
World's founder and Managing Director – and she was obese! Talking on the
programme was one of Slimming World's most popular 'co-ordinators', Pat
Sheppard, who is also obese. Pat Sheppard admitted that she believed that if
she had never dieted, she would never have had a weight problem – yet she runs
a club for dieters. I am appalled that people, who so obviously cannot control
their own weight, are taking money from desperate women wanting to lose weight.
And I am also very surprised that women wanting to slim, and seeing
'co-ordinators' this size, cannot also see that the advice they will be paying
for is likely to be worthless. Let's face it, if the people running the club
and are, one assumes, experienced and knowledgeable, can't control their
weight, what hope is there for their less knowledgeable club members?
Even in specialist hospital obesity clinics, you may not be much better off
(although there is the advantage that, as part of the NHS, attendance at one
won't cost you anything). An audit of treatments and outcomes was carried out
by workers at the Medical Unit, St Bartholomew's Hospital, London in 1998. They
found that only a third of patients lost more than five percent of their body
weight during their treatment phase; forty-three percent lost between nothing
and four percent; and twenty-five percent gained weight. Twenty-four percent of
patients reported depressive symptoms and required psychiatric or psychological
care or antidepressive drugs.
So, what should you be eating to reduce to and maintain a normal weight? There
are so many apparently conflicting theories about diet.
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
looks at our evolution to see what foods we are adapted to eat. It discusses
the reasons why we alone, as a species, get fat, and it explores the history of
slimming over the past 130 years. It also contains yet another dietary regime.
It may seem a revolutionary regime but it is not a new one. For more than a
century it has been proven to be safe and effective, both in epidemiological
studies and in clinical trials. It is a dietary regime that is both natural and
healthy but more than that, as it does not restrict calorie intake, it is easy
to maintain - and it works. That it works should come as no surprise as
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
presents a regime which, unlike any other on offer today, is based on the
natural diet for our species.
In the beginning
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
really began in 1962 when I was working in Singapore with the Royal Air Force.
We had a problem, my wife and I - we were overweight. We had tried all the
usual ways to lose weight: cutting calories, eating inert fillers, taking
appetite suppressants, wearing sweaty clothes, indeed we tried just about every
weight-loss idea going - with results that were decidedly short-term.
The first moment of revelation came, sudden and unexpected, when I was walking
through the bustling Changi Market. I saw a second-hand bookstall and, as I am
an inveterate browser, stopped to see what was on offer. One small paperback
stood out. That book changed our lives - and our figures - for good. The book
advocated what we thought was impossible: an
unrestricted
-calorie diet for weight loss. It said in so many words: eat as many calories
as you like, and the pounds will fall away. Because this proposition seemed so
out of keeping with all we had read up to that time, we decided to see what it
could do for us. To our astonishment, it worked - and it has gone on working
now for over thirty-seven years.
Then the questions began: If an unrestricted-calorie diet can achieve such
results, why are all the books and magazine articles in favour of
calorie-controlled diets? I began my research and the answers came. All the
evidence I found persuaded me that low-calorie dieting is a snare for the
overweight and a delusion for all concerned.
As I read on and on, it dawned on me that a vast 'health' industry made a very
good living out of the business of offering expensive solutions for the
problems, so they said, of keeping ourselves slim and fit. All those
advertisements on television - eat this special food, try that diet - could
they have anything to do with the profit motive?
Later we began to hear that the diet we were following, which was relatively
high in animal fat, might be dangerous in terms of increased risk of heart
disease. And so, when I retired from the Royal Air Force in 1982, I devoted
myself full-time to a literature search into the healthiness of 'healthy
eating'. I began in the medical library of a major Oxford teaching hospital and
I chased after the more recondite topics in Oxford's Bodleian and Radcliffe
Science Libraries. All too soon I found that, contrary to what we read in
newspapers and magazines, and hear on radio and TV, there is very little
evidence to show that 'healthy eating' is good for either the health or the
figure.
Cut down on calories; eat specially prepared, nutritionally poor but expensive
'healthy' or 'slimming' foods. There is no doubt that the food industry was
very quick to see the profits that could be made from frightening people.
Others too saw their chance and climbed on the bandwagon. Slimming magazines
and clubs sprang up almost overnight. Vast sums were invested in making people
feel dissatisfied with themselves so the they would spend even larger sums
trying to change.
But anyone who has ever been on a low-calorie diet must know that, in the long
run, it simply will not work. Even the medical profession is recognising this
truth. Professor Susan Wooley of the University of Cincinnati's College of
Medicine and David M Garner, Director of Research at the Beck Institute for
Cognitive Therapy and Research say that:
"The failure of fat people to achieve a goal they seem to want - and to want almost above all else - must now be admitted for what it is: a failure not of those people but of the methods of treatment that are used."In other words, blaming the overweight for their problem and telling them they are eating too much and must cut down, is simply not good enough. It is the dieticians' advice and the treatment offered that are wrong. Wooley and Garner conclude:
"We should stop offering ineffective treatments aimed at weight loss. Researchers who think they have invented a better mousetrap should test it in controlled research before setting out their bait for the entire population. Only by admitting that our treatments do not work - and showing that we mean it by refraining from offering them - can we undo a century of recruiting fat people for failure."
What Garner and Wooley are unaware of is that there is a better 'mousetrap'. It
was invented over a century ago and has proved to be very effective and safe
ever since. It is presented in this book.
Weight control combined with good nutrition need be neither dreary nor
difficult.
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
is really not a 'diet' in the way slimmers usually interpret the word. It is
only a diet in the sense that everything you eat constitutes your diet. The way
of eating presented here is actually the correct way to eat: eating naturally;
eating to enjoy food, with you in control of your food rather than having the
food controlling you. It is easy today to lose weight – all you need to do is
starve. The problem is keeping the weight lost from going back on again. This
is where
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
is unlike all the others: you really can stay on this 'diet' for the rest of
your life. The only difficulty that I find with this diet is getting people to
believe it can work!
If you are overweight, there is doubt that you will have to change the way you
eat. But eating
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
you will no longer have to count calories consciously. Given the right foods,
your body will do that for you automatically, the way it was designed to do
naturally.
Fats and health
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
advocates a diet that does not cut out fats. Until a couple of decades or so
ago this would not have been thought odd. However, dietary fat has had such a
bad press recently that to advocate such a diet today could make the average
dietician shudder. But in the medical journals the debate goes on and, like all
debates, it has two sides. Fats are essential for health. Make no mistake, cut
them out and you will shorten your life. And, as you will learn, fat actually
helps you to slim.
Slimming and health are big business. Without fat people, the slimming industry
would crumble; without ill health we would not need doctors. They all have
vested interests. As a consequence, they have subjected you to only one side of
the debate. One thing I can promise:
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
gives you a rare opportunity to read the other side of the slimming and health
arguments and the evidence on which they are based.
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
presents the evidence that the experts have presented. It is a matter of
record. The final judgement rests with you.
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
questions the perceived wisdom of low-calorie slimming diets because, although
they have been extensively tested, they have never been shown to work. It
questions them because history, epidemiology and countless scientifically
conducted clinical trials have shown that their whole philosophy is wrong. It
is the 'alternative' diet because, when all other diets cut calories,
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
does not; when all the other diets cut fats,
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
does not; and when all the other diets ultimately fail,
Eat Fat, Get Thin!
does not.
The father of medicine, Hippocrates, wrote: "One must attend in medical
practice not primarily to plausible theories but to experience combined with
reason". This is the attitude to adopt when considering which dietary regime is
most likely to be healthy and be of benefit in the fight against obesity.
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