Re: Slimming World--anyone tried it ?

There is absolutely no point in me responding to someone who is unable to see any view but his own.

Re: Slimming World--anyone tried it ?

Just as there was no point in you trying to exert your personal posting preferences on someone else and trying to "shut them up" instead of just providing your views on the thread subject. Lesson learned then one hopes.

Re: Slimming World--anyone tried it ?

Hi

You will lose this one Realist.

Best to give up now.

Mups is absolutely lovely and genuine.

Re: Slimming World--anyone tried it ?

Hi Swim

I'm not a person who thinks that open debating is something that is won or lost. It's not about winning or losing or scoring points. It is simply about the back and forth trading of ideas and opinions and the benefit comes from that journey. Debating is a skill to be learned and I know from experience that it is uncomfortable and sometimes upsetting to debate from a position of poor foundation or to simply allow emotion to fuel one's contributions so I learned to research and argue as best as I can from a position of fact and strength. I maintain my view that good nutrition and good eating requires only the will of the person and the knowledge/education to understand what is good and bad. All of that is free knowledge which requires no payment, no diets, no clubs. I'm happy to debate with anyone willing to make a case on the issue, however I won't be dictated to about what I should and should not post by anyone, however "lovely and genuine" you believe them to be.

Re: Slimming World--anyone tried it ?

Thank you Swimmy for your support. x

If this man endeavoured to listen sometimes, instead of talking down to everyone, he would see quite clearly that the ladies were unhappy with being spoken to like ignorant 10 year olds.

Is it really so bad that they enjoy their club meetings? Good luck to them I say. Most others have wished them good luck too.
Why can't some people see that we are all perfectly entitled to enjoy things our own way, without having to justify ourselves - especially by anyone who has never even been to a modern meeting!

Hey ho though . . . I'm off for a cuppa - and without justifying it too, little rascal aint I.

Re: Slimming World--anyone tried it ?

Making stuff up again Mups? Really silly. A couple of views in this thread from the ladies you cite:

Truth is only Flowerpower had issues and got increasingly frustrated because I was putting forward a cohesive argument. She vented her frustrations and you topped it off with a silly post trying impose your personal preferences on others and to shut them up.

Mariana I respect greatly and she and I have discussed food, diets, weight loss in other threads very happily. She has made the firm point that she likes the support she gets from slimming clubs which she can't get from anywhere else given her personal circumstances and travel restrictions, and that's fine.

Again making stuff up. No-one is being asked to justify themselves. It's just a simple thread discussing the merits or otherwise of Slimming World and other clubs. You are trying to invent a situation that doesn't exist in order to create a platform to vent your personal frustrations and general intolerance of others views and posting styles.

Like I said before. Not interested, cuts no ice with me. Join the debate or butt out.

Re: Slimming World--anyone tried it ?

Oh dear, you see this is what happens when control freaks don't get their own way.

Re: Slimming World--anyone tried it ?

Ok so you're frustrated initial post to put me down and shut me up has failed and now you are resorting to name calling.
"Control freak"?

I will report that post for the benefit of the thread which has already been derailed and deteriorated by your personal jibes. It will simply get out of hand if not nipped in the bud.
Just utterly childish all round sadly.

Re: Slimming World--anyone tried it ?

Back to the topic at hand . . . .

In looking for evidence as to whether slimming clubs work I came across a BBC article which referenced a study published in the British Journal Of Nutrition. The study looked at Weight Watchers and recorded the percentage of people who were able to maintain their goal weight after 1, 2 and 5 years. Dr Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine at Oxford University analysed these results and talked about them in the BBC programme:

"The Men Who Made Us Thin"

His conclusions of the study were as follows:

"What it shows is that [after] two years… about 20% of them maintain their goal weight. By five years that goes down to 16%,"

In talking to the WW representative he goes on to say:

"So basically you pick the best people, the lifelong members and actually even they struggle, with the majority of people not obtaining their long-term goal weight. After 40 years of them when are people going to wake up and say this is not the answer?

Looking at the success of the WW business itself (rather than the success of clients) he says:

"It's successful because the other 84% have to come back and do it again. That's where your business comes from"

Heneghan published the results pictorially here:

http://www.carlheneghan.com/2013/487...-the-evidence/

Interestingly other people added comments to this webpage including one who claims to be:

"Working in a Level 3 weight management service, where local GPs refer obese patients to us – or those wanting bariatric surgery"

This poster states :

"In my 18 months of working in this service, I have found that many patients come to us having already tried the likes of WW, Slimming World, Lighter Life and Lipotrim. Many have tried the ‘Cabbage Soup’ diet too. I would say that in my experience, 99% (maybe more) have said that they ended up putting back any weight they lost whilst using these programmes (including WW) and more often than not (again, about 90%+), put on extra weight, leaving them in a worse position from when they started"

he goes on to say . .

"The difficulty that we face is that patients come to us already feeling hopeless, and report that they’ve tried ‘everything’, and so we have to work with them to educate them about healthy, sustainable lifestyle modification and improve their levels of motivation and hopefulness. It’s hard work for some, especially when achieving weight loss does require some sustained motivation, and especially when they really do feel that they’ve tried everything because they see many of these commercial weight loss programmes as being ‘expert’ services. This is quite troubling"

he continues with some statements that 100% gel with my views on the topic and which I have posted in this thread:

"One huge problem that really ought to be tackled is the causes of obesity. Increasingly, children are becoming obese, and the general trend seems to have come about following the introduction of fast foods and convenience foods (even at the supermarket) that contain hidden (and sometimes not hidden) sugars and fats. Soft/ fizzy drinks and even fruit smoothies are consumed in large quantities these days, which means people have a diet significantly higher in sugars (sucrose, fructose etc) than in previous years. Food is marketed as being less fatty or healthier when they simply may not be. Offers such as buy one get another free, or supersize/value for money meal deals is common place, and this encourages people to buy and consume more than they otherwise would have done.
The food market and food advertising seem quite irresponsible when it comes to advertising about food, with the intention of simply making money"

Re: Slimming World--anyone tried it ?

Another viewpoint on slimming clubs comes from Susie Orbach, a British psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic. Her first book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, analysed the psychology of dieting and over-eating in women.

Orbach gave evidence to a parliamentary inquiry on "Body Image" and criticised companies such as Weight Watchers and Slimming World for misleading slimmers by giving them false hope.

She singled out a TV advertisement used by Weight Watchers, which cost £15m – thought to be the most expensive advert ever shown in the UK. Orbach told the committee that in the advert "everyone was my size, but about 20 years younger" and suggested its publicity material always shows slim people.

To loud applause from members of the public attending the Commons hearing, she claimed these companies were locking their members into "straitjackets for the rest of their lives"

A well known feminist blog, The Fword, posted this article which is a useful read. It's from 2012.

https://www.thefword.org.uk/2012/02/...ence_of_susie/

It claims that:

"as women, we are living in a commercially constructed diet meritocracy."

One of the objections to the ethics of diet clubs was:

"their fake generosity in introducing you to the (only) answer to your hopeless overweightness. “I liked that nothing was forbidden”, because if something was forbidden, you’d think “to hell with this” and not pay for another week, right? Just count it up in your “How ‘synful’ have I been today?” total, then base your self worth on your ability to know the evilness-level of a Walnut Whip."

The blog concludes with the following paragraph

"When in Fat is a Feminist Issue , Orbach told women to – above all – listen to their bodies, not diet gurus, not calories, not even her, it was 1978. Now, 34 years later . . . have we moved forward at all? Or are women, not passive nor stupid, still victimised psychologically and physically by the diet industry? I’m not denying we as a society are having a body crisis, but slimming clubs are part of the problem, not the solution".