Re: Slimming World--anyone tried it ?
Hi Mariana
This is a topic that has been much discussed before so it's worth searching the forum. My take is as follows:
Diets, of any kind, do not work. The sooner people accept and understand this the better.
A diet can
temporarily result in a loss of weight, but as soon as that diet stops, the body re-adjusts and typically you will put the weight back on and more besides.
Slimming World and Weight Watchers are, imo, a silly business aimed at getting people to hand over money for relatively nothing whilst putting them on an eating regime, i.e. DIET which is therefore doomed to fail.
The most important thing to do to maximise your health is to understand how the world works, what the aims of manufacturing companies are, how they constantly dupe you and keep you ill and in generally poor health.
When you turn your focus away from YOU and YOUR WEIGHT and instead focus on the war that is going on around you to make you fat, addicted to substances and eating foods laden with additives and chemicals, THEN things will begin to change. Weight loss is not about doing this or that. Weight loss is a NATURAL by-product of your own body's functions when you finally choose to give your body the right fuels and when you decide to don your battle armour and get serious about the "food war" that you are in whether you like it or not.
When people say things like "I've switched to the "light" version of a product" or "I've started buy the Lo-Fat version" etc then that simply means they have succumbed to the media marketing and are still likely ill-informed about the "food war".
This is too big a topic to cover in this thread but I will offer these main principles.
1. The weight that took you years to gradually put on, will take a similar time to come off again, and SHOULD take that time as it's a natural process. Trying to lose stones of weight in weeks is not natural and as mentioned above means a person is focussed on the weight rather than the basic principles of eating healthy. You must forget the weight, discard it, stop weighing yourself and stop measuring your success or failure in terms of lbs put on or off. It's the wrong focus and will see you fail every time.
2. Sugar is your main enemy and is hidden is thousands of seemingly ordinary products that you might think are just natural. There is no such thing as "Natural Sugars". The sugars in an apple are sugar plain and simple and in just ONE large apple there are approx. 6 teaspoonfuls of sugar!
This doesn't mean eating an apple is a bad thing. What must be understood is how your body processes sugars. When you eat an apple you eat the whole thing which includes a lot of fibre from the skin and flesh. When you eat fibre with sugar the sugar takes much longer to be processed by your body and as a result that energy is always there when your body needs it so is used efficiently. When you eat sugars
without the fibre, the body processes the sugar very quickly and since your body isn't ready to use that energy straight away, it is stored away as fat.
So, it is vital that we understand not just the sugar contact of a product but also the fibre content to go with it. Eating an apple is healthy. Those with poor understanding would then deduce that drinking a carton of apple juice (or orange juice) must equally be healthy, but in fact it is anything but. As a juice you have typically all the sugars and very little of the fibre so it's going to get converted straight to fat.
Take a look at this picture I drafted to see how much sugar is in some common foods:
You are eating yoghurts right? Hmmm.
2. Bread, per say, is not an enemy. It is a wholesome food and has been for 1000s of years. Many overweight people seem to demonise it and cut it out of their diet which is a shame. This is again about the "food war" and education. Commercial bread found in supermarkets IS crap and unhealthy due to the myriad of awful ingredients and the "Chorleywood" process for making it. REAL BREAD requires only 4 ingredients which are Flour, Water, Yeast and a little Salt. Bread should be made with a process of long fermentation which changes the nature of those ingredients and creates a healthy loaf which is easily digested and full of wholegrain nutrition. Many people who think they are gluten intolerant are not, they are in fact intolerant to the additives and chemicals in their horrible supermarket bought bread.
Get to your local artisan bakery and buy proper bread.
3. Fizzy drinks are the second enemy of health. Laden with sugars or sweeteners they are essentially cups of phosphoric acid laden with crap that will screw your body. In particular they will simulate hunger cravings when in fact your body isn't hungry at all and so those people guzzling this poison will find themselves overeating to satisfy those false cravings.
The "sugar tax" being introduced will do nothing to fix the nation's problems with these drinks, people will just pay more for them. More profits for the criminals that manufacture them.
5. Cooking foods destroys much of the "life energy" and nutritional content in them. So in general we should try to eat foods in as close to raw state as possible. Eating "dead" food is not generally healthy for us.
This will do for now. Sorry for the very long post. I hope you got something from it. In the main, take control of your food education, DO NOT believe the crap coming from the media and marketing gurus, they are out for profit and don't care about your health. Ignore the "Light" and "Low this Low that" versions of products. Just buy natural foods, vegetables, fruits, meat, fish of good provenance and buy good bread. Above all, research, research, research ! It is hard, frustrating, time-consuming, often confusing, but it is absolutely vital for your future health.
ATB