The Food Philosophy blog

I haven't written a post in a while - well, quite a long time. But I haven't been sitting around twiddling my thumbs, I've been researching and working with those clients who seemed to struggle getting the Food Philosophy principles and making the programme much better than it was before. It's now so good that even if you've done the online course, you will hardly recognise the content.

Visit the Food Philosophy website

I haven't changed the premise of the original course or deviated at all from my beliefs, but I have updated the programme to include the very latest research - and as you'll know if you've ever had any contact with me, I'm still 10 steps ahead of the 'experts' in eating disorders, disordered eating and weight loss.

So the latest research means all the medical and scientific research available boiled up together and processed in my funny head to end up with a complete picture and that IS most definitely THE latest research - as I am proving to be the most advanced thinker there is on the subject.

That's enough of blowing my own trumpet. I'm not bragging, though, just pointing out that I CAN help you if you struggle with controlling food and worry about your weight. I do really appreciate the gift that I have. I'm going to invite some of my clients and FP fans write blog posts and then they can tell you exactly what I mean by my 'advanced thinking' and my gift and how it's helped them.

Popular author Keris Stainton and Food Philosophy supporter will be first to add her opinions to this blog and I was touched by her offer. You probably know her already but if you don't, she's a great writer and prolific blogger with a very entertaining turn of phrase. You can find her website here

So keep your eyes peeled and look out for Keris' post.

I've been reading about the death of newspapers and of the media as we know it. The women's magazines I used to work before I left to teach The Food Philosophy are all laying off staff in their hundreds. Sales are down on all print media and it's because all the information reported is available for free online.

The death of newspapers, however, certainly doesn't mean the death of news! What's happening is a Godsend for all of us because the Internet means that the public is now taking control and choosing what it wants to read, listen to, talk about. This is fantastic because giant corporations that used to control the media will no longer have the power that they had and this will give us all a chance to free ourselves from being directed and coerced into thinking the way they want us to think.

What will this mean for overeaters? It will mean more chance of being free, simply because the advice and information available through the traditional media is faulty and designed to create a consumer and not to cure you of your problem. The Internet will allow people who have become enlightened to what is happening to them to talk together and to share their own stories and this will create a change in the way the whole problem is viewed.

The monopoly of the giant diet and fitness corporations (the most successful failed businesses in the world!) is going to come to an end.

This might be a long way off yet - as the TV is still monopolised by the diet message and as long as this is happening people will continue to be duped into thinking that dieting or healthy eating in order to lose weight (trying to cure a physical side effect of a psychological problem) is the only answer - when it's really the cause. Also, GPs, nutritionists, 'health experts' and the Government are still perpetuating the problem through their ignorance (and sometimes through their greed).

People will continue to go round and round in circles, attempting food restriction and overeating, attempting food restriction and overeating.

So it will take time before the truth, where overeating is concerned, will become the normal way of thinking.

But the structure that holds the diet message up there is weakening. This is the beginning of the end for the diet industry and the start of a whole new way of thinking.

That's something to celebrate. Surely?

I've just read a great article in The New Statesman. It's about Susie Orbach's new book 'Bodies'. Orbach and I don't agree on everything but she makes some very valid points. Here Laura Tennant writes insightfully about the book and the reality of compulsive overeating and its effect on our bodies and our minds.

Never shy of controversy (she once threatened to sue cuddly, reassuring WeightWatchers because "its philosophy is based on a lie"), Orbach goes on to debunk the so-called obesity epidemic, pointing out that a 1995 World Health Organisation revision of BMI (Body Mass Index) guidelines designated Brad Pitt as overweight and George Clooney as obese.

The usual suspects, in other words. But when bodies are the location of so much distress, dissatisfaction and illness, doesn't it make sense to locate the problem in the physical world, with eating patterns that disturb our natural appetites and visual imagery that reminds us of our own inadequacy streaming into the cerebral cortex? Not least because, instead of blaming ourselves (our messed-up childhoods, our lack of discipline), we can place responsibility where it belongs: with industries whose profit margins depend on our unhappiness.

Read the full article here

www.foodphilosophy.co.uk

I was having a look at the latest 'news' from the National Obesity Forum (NOF) when I noticed that Anne Diamond has been appointed their patron. I believe that Anne doesn't know what she's doing and I want to help her to open her eyes so I've written to her in the hope that she's as innocent as I think she is. Before I go on, I'll give a bit of a description of both the NOF and Anne so that you know what I'm talking about.

NOF

The NOF describes itself as 'an independent charity, working to improve the prevention and management of obesity'. But if you look through the pages of their website you'll see that they're not really an independent charity at all because they're sponsored by the branches of the diet industry, including Canderel, and drug companies that produce weight loss drugs, such as Abbot Laboratories who produced questionable diet drug Reductil.

Their website states their aims and objectives as:

To create recognition of obesity as a serious medical problem
To provide education and training on obesity management
To produce guidelines for obesity management within primary care
To provide a network for health professionals and an obesity management support and information resource
To convince Government and healthcare works to give obesity a high priority nationally and locally.
To raise the profile of obesity via medical and lay media channels
To highlight the health inequalities of obesity
To promote quality clinical care via an annual "Best Practice Awards"

In a nutshell their aims and objectives are all designed to keep the status quo and have overeaters trying to lose weight for the sake of their health using advice, products and services that have and always will have a 95 to 98 per cent failure rate. Advice, products and services that CAUSE the problem in the first place.

Nothing they report has any absolute scientific or medical back up. All of the information and advice that they make public and state as medical and scientific fact has a great deal of evidential material in the form of clinical trials and studies that show that their point of view is UNTRUE and based in propaganda, myth and misinformation.

They are, in my opinion, a marketing device for the slimming industry (the most successful failed business in the world) and not a charity devoted to helping the obese.

Anne Diamond

Anne is a TV presenter/UK celebrity and compulsive overeater who has had what she sees as weight problems for many years. After failing at dieting (surprise, surprise) she had bariatric surgery (which failed originally and which she admits has a great many unpleasant physical and psychological side effects). This surgery didn't, of course, help her with her compulsive overeating. She has allowed herself to be persuaded and used by the diet industry because her problems meant she was open and in receiver setting and in desperate need of a solution. She has absorbed 'knowledge' directed at her from questionable sources and is now a passionate diet industry/diet surgery industry/diet drugs industry spokeswoman. I believe she has accepted the position of patron of the National Obesity Forum thinking that it is a charity that helps people. I think she cares very much about helping people because she knows what they feel!

She is misinformed and innocent.

I would like to offer her the other side of the story.

I've written to her:

Dear Anne Diamond,

I'm hoping that you will take just a minute to read what I have to say. I have seen that you are the Patron for the National Obesity Forum. I can see from your appearances on TV and from what you say in the press that you fully believe that the message you passionately preach is the truth. I have been researching the subject intensively for a great many years and I can see that there are a lot of gaps in your knowledge of the subject of compulsive overeating and weight loss. Gaps that I can help you to fill, with a very short exchange of emails.

I ask nothing of you other than that you be willing to learn more than you know and I offer you knowledge that comes from sound scientific research and will provide links to this research so that you can see for yourself that the message you are making public is harming rather than helping the people I know you care so very much about.

The National Obesity Forum is sponsored by companies that make money out of obesity and they benefit from keeping people in the trap and from the repeat custom from drugs and products and services that not only don't work, but which directly cause the problem in the first place. My motivation for writing to you is ONLY to help you to see the truth and when your eyes have been opened, I do hope you won't allow yourself to remain associated with such a harmful company that disguises itself as a charity.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

I'll let you know if she replies. Watch this space.

Sx

www.foodphilosophy.co.uk

The Food Philosophy will show you how to lose weight, feel genuine choice and control around food and set yourself free from overeating for the rest of your life.

www.foodphilosophy.co.uk

This morning's health news is interesting for Food Philosophers. There are reports of a study that shows that women respond to hunger differently than men and that they are less able to suppress it. Another study mentioned in the report says that obese women have a "much stronger reaction than normal-weight women in brain regions related to reward".

You can find the report here

Anyone who has studied a Food Philosophy course will understand the reasons why this study has come up with this conclusion and most of us could have predicted this outcome.

The report says:

"Faced with their favorite foods, women are less able than men to suppress their hunger, a discovery that may help explain the higher obesity rate for females, a new study suggests.

Researchers trying to understand the brain's mechanisms for controlling food intake were surprised at the difference between the sexes in brain response."

That researchers are surprised at this difference just shows you how far ahead we are in our knowledge of the psychology of compulsive overeating and I am proud to be part of a growing community that actually has a deeper understanding of the problem than the scientists and medical experts studying it!

"There is something going on in the female," Wang said in a telephone interview, "the signal is so much different."

There most certainly is! And it most certainly is NOT because of...

"different nutritional needs for men and women"

...and neither is it because it's...

"linked to gender differences in estrogen and related hormones,"

These suggestions for causes, as Nora Volkov (co-author of the study and my absolute all- time heroine) is quick to point out, are speculative - which means that they don't know the reasons and the interviewing journalist has pressured her into guessing at an explanation, which has then been published, leading nicely to the suggestion of a typical media health report style possible solution to obesity in women:

"...training in reducing food desires or in reacting to food cues could be effective treatments to combat obesity."

I should be used to it by now but I still find myself shaking my head in wonder at the utter obviousness of it all and how the truth is not just so blatantly ignored by the media but how the public is so clearly steered as far away from the truth as you can get!

What is the most obvious difference between men and women where food, overeating and obesity are concerned? Would you say it is hormonal? Would you say it is because men and women have different nutritional needs? Would you say it's because our society has more food available and that we are the only species that is hard wired to eat ourselves to death in the face of food abundance?

OR would you say it is more likely because women are unrelentingly exposed to extreme pressure to change their body shape by dieting and restricting food and men aren't?

Over-exposure to pressure to feel dissatisfied with our body shape and resultant food restriction is the very first track that scientists should be going down because it is the most obvious. But they won't go down this track. They rarely do.

I wonder why?

Duh.

The Food Philosophy has gone down this track and that's why we understand more than the 'experts'.

Sx

The Food Philosophy will show you how to lose weight, feel genuine choice and control around food and set yourself free from overeating for the rest of your life.

www.foodphilosophy.co.uk

I used to find Claire Sweeney likeable. Not so after watching My Big Fat Diet tonight at 9pm on ITV. I could only watch some of it as I found myself getting very upset. Not only was the programme really obvious propaganda for the diet industry and a disgusting display of hatred against anyone who is anything but the 'ideal' shape and size but the part I saw was choc full of misinformation and hearsay told as if it is scientific and medical fact.

Anyone with a body shape above a size zero would have been coerced by this programme into feeling at best dissatisfied with their shape and at worst totally inadequate, unattractive, unhealthy and, most cruelly, ashamed of themselves.

This, of course, was the object of the programme because what do most people do when they feel these feelings? They go on a diet and pay out money to the diet industry in an attempt to feel better about themselves by following the 'advice' on the programme.

Because of the 98 per cent failure rate of dieting, the next stage after that is a broken diet and a binge.

This is a story that repeats itself time and time again and every woman who has ever felt the kind of dissatisfaction and shame about her body that is pressed on to her by this programme will have experienced it over and over. I can promise each and everyone of you affected by this programme that this time will be no different.

You're being led by the nose into a trap that gets more and more difficult to escape from - and this time it's Claire Sweeney who has hold of the rope and she's pulling you as hard as she can. Maybe she's not aware what she's doing and just wants some company in the trap. Maybe she is very aware.

Who knows.

Who cares - I do.

The Food Philosophy will show you how to lose weight, feel genuine choice and control around food and set yourself free from overeating for the rest of your life.

www.foodphilosophy.co.uk

Apologies to all FP members and regular readers for the lack of Christmas wishes. I've been ill with a flu infection and absent from all computer duties. I've just about managed to get up and about for Christmas but, apart from a short car journey to a friend's house on Christmas Eve, I have yet to venture out of the house. One thing is for sure, I'll never EVER say I've got flu again when all I've got is a mere cold! Aside from the painfully aching bones, the high temperature and shivering (and being so weak that our hamster could have beaten me at arm wrestling) I couldn't breathe while I was sitting up and I couldn't breath while I was lying down and I think it's going to be months before my lungs recover!

The biggest apology is to those who needed help over Christmas as I've been unable to assist. I did get to some of you on Christmas Eve but I don't think I was working at full efficiency so if you've been feeling neglected, I am sorry and I'll try to make up for it during the first working weeks of the New Year.

Thanks to everyone who sent me get well wishes.

I do hope you all had a very merry Christmas and I sincerely wish you all the best for the New Year - let's hope this is a great one for all of us.

Cheers.

Sue

The Food Philosophy will show you how to lose weight, feel genuine choice and control around food and set yourself free from overeating for the rest of your life.

www.foodphilosophy.co.uk

The Food Philosophy members only forum is about to come alive again after a bit of a sleep. There have been some regular posters but I have to admit that I've let it slide a bit while working hard on version 3 of the course, which is all done by email.

The good news is that many of the old friendly and supportive people who once made the FP forum the friendliest place on the net are still around and they can't wait for things to get back to normal.

For anyone considering joining The Food Philosophy - you'll be joining a real community.

Sx

The Food Philosophy will show you how to lose weight, feel genuine choice and control around food and set yourself free from overeating for the rest of your life.

www.foodphilosophy.co.uk

The conversation about VLCD s continues as I answer another message posted by a reader. WannabeTVChef has his own fabulous foodie blog which I read regularly and highly recommend - find it here

Dear Sue,
I applaud your well reasoned arguments.
As you say a very high rate of diets don’t work on their own.
Only a combination of exercise and perhaps a more thoughtful plan of what you are going to eat will make a difference.

Hi WannabeTVChef
Thanks very much for your contribution to this blog. I try to argue as reasonably as I can! You appear to have a half enlightened view, which is very good for the times we live in! I'm not being patronising but so few people understand the problem that it's thoroughly amazing that you hold the opinion that you do.

You say that a very high rate of diets don't work on their own.

The truth is that ALL diets fail for 98 per cent of users - whether they're used on their own or with any other assistance, including exercise.

And also a more thoughtful plan of what you are going to eat sounds like a sensible and rational alternative to a diet, but when you examine this concept carefully and consider the reason that diets fail (the psychological reaction to food restriction) you can begin to see that any plan - even a more thoughtful one - will mean that you will react in the same way as you would with a diet.

Sensible eating, healthy eating, a change in lifestyle, or 'a more thoughtful plan of what you are going to eat' are all just other ways of saying 'diet'.

Any of the millions of people out there who have 'given up' dieting because of the bad press it has got over recent years and turned to sensible or healthy eating can tell you, I'm sure, that they have reacted in the same way to their new way of eating as they did when dieting and many have now become the modern alternative to the yo-yo dieter and joined the rising tide of yo-yo healthy eaters.

That's millions and millions of people who believe the healthy eating message who, armed with enough 'knowledge' from consumer magazines and TV propaganda to gain a degree in nutrition, pledge themselves to the path of fruit, veg and wholegrain only to find themselves unable to stop themselves from stuffing down chips, chocolate and family bags of crisps or any of the other foods they're told are bad. Feeling bad about themselves for their lack of willpower, their eating (and their happiness) frantically spiralling downwards into disordered eating.

Even those who have tried what seems the most intelligent solution ever - don't ban any food but eat 'unhealthy' food in moderation - find themselves headfirst in the fridge in the middle of the night stuffing down the very foods they've been trying to moderate.

This is a natural and normal reaction to food restriction and it is exactly why more and more people are becoming overeaters.

Dieting, healthy eating, sensible eating and even eating in moderation are obviously not the answer - and VLCDs most definitely aren't! - if any of these were viable solutions then the problem would be solved right now.

Wouldn't it?

The Food Philosophy will show you how to lose weight, feel genuine choice and control around food and set yourself free from overeating for the rest of your life.

www.foodphilosophy.co.uk

I've had a message from a lady called Fiona in response to my post in June about very low calorie diets. It was titled: VLCDs - Don't do it! While I respect all subjective views, I feel very strongly about these diets and would like to post my reply so that others can read it and decide for themselves - or even be prompted to do their own research, which would be the most sensible approach to becoming informed on any subject.

Fiona's message

As someone who has lost almost 6 stones on a VLCD and maintained that weight loss with optimum nutrition and a healthy low GL diet, I find your response both ill informed and inappropriate. VLCD diets offer a solution to many obese people who would otherwise die prematurely from illnesses related to their excessicve weight. I have gone on to change my career and now 'sell' this product to the community, although I see it as a service that is needed and not 'a sale'. I am entitled to be paid for it as I have to live, but it will never make me a millionaire and I certainly do not deliver the Program to people irresponsibly or without medical supervision. Infact, I see the Program as being preferable to being obese, having major surgery or taking drugs with horrendous side effects which only aggrivate the problems of the obese (and also line the pockets of the drug companies / private surgreons engaged in the delivery thereof). I have to ask what your motive is and where your allegiances lie - because ill informed criticism of a medically approved obesity treatment that works where others have failed is not a clever pursuit for anyone.

My response

Hi Fiona,

While I'm very happy for you and your perceived success, and I wish you every happiness, I have an understanding of compulsive overeating that is a gift and I spend my life helping people to recover. My motives are always to help make people's lives better and to end the great suffering that comes with eating disorders - including what is called by our society 'obesity' but which would be more correctly labelled compulsive overeating and binge eating disorder. Obesity is just one physical side effect of an eating disorder but because it is physical we call it THE PROBLEM and try to treat it using diets, which have a proven 95 to 98 per cent failure rate - and VLCDs have an even higher failure rate than this and are as close to 100 per cent as you can get! This is official and proven and unless you can give me some real statistics that prove otherwise, I will have to stick to my subjective view of these diets.

You can't successfully treat a psychological disorder by attempting to control one of the physical side effects of that disorder, which is what you have done by using a VLCD to lose weight.

Anyone can lose weight (or manage one physical side effect of their problem) temporarily on a diet (including a VLCD) but long-term or permanent weight loss is a very different matter. It all boils down to how the pay off (weight loss and approval from others) balances out with the daily struggle and suffering against the overwhelming compulsion to overeat. For most mentally healthy people this very difficult and constant exhausting daily battle is not an option.

You say:
As someone who has lost almost 6 stones on a VLCD and maintained that weight loss with optimum nutrition and a healthy low GL diet, I find your response both ill informed and inappropriate.

My response is:
As someone who went on her first diet at the age of 10 and spent a great majority of her years as a compulsive overeater/bulimic and who no longer worries about food and body image and as someone who has now spent around 18 years obsessively researching the subject of dieting and eating disorders and the last three years helping people to overcome the problem as a full-time professional, I uphold my opinion and dispute with authority your claim that my opinion is ill informed and inappropriate.

My opinion about VLCDs is both very well informed and wholly appropriate.

You said:
VLCD diets offer a solution to many obese people who would otherwise die prematurely from illnesses related to their excessicve weight.

My response is:
Diets are PROVEN (outside the media and only in medical and scientific circles not connected to the diet industry) to be more harmful to health than obesity ever can be and researchers are now close to working out that yoyo dieting might be the cause of many of the illnesses now associated with obesity. You only have to do a google search for medical papers and trial results on the subject to find this out for yourself.

You said:
I have gone on to change my career and now 'sell' this product to the community, although I see it as a service that is needed and not 'a sale'.

My response is:
Your career choice is your business and I can understand that if you were to do some real research and find out the full and dangerous truth about VLCDs this might mean major upheaval and change for you as well as some remorse and back pedalling, so I can understand why your immediate reaction might be to rebel against any new and enlightening information that isn't heavily biased against what you currently and comfortably believe to be true.

If I were to find out that my career choice was causing people great suffering, I too would react with resistance at first.

I would then have to go on and look at the truth and face it though.

You said:
I am entitled to be paid for it as I have to live, but it will never make me a millionaire and I certainly do not deliver the Program to people irresponsibly or without medical supervision.

My response is:
No, I know - you get your clients to go to a doctor to have a form signed saying they're healthy enough to use your diet. You then sell them the meal replacements along with 'counselling' - which you've learned from weekend seminars provided by the company that sells YOU the meal replacements.

You might also keep an eye out for the usual malnutrition side effects and make sure your customers go to the doctor when their hair begins to fall out or they get skin rashes or pains in their arms or depression.

You said:
In fact, I see the Program as being preferable to being obese, having major surgery or taking drugs with horrendous side effects which only aggrivate the problems of the obese (and also line the pockets of the drug companies / private surgreons engaged in the delivery thereof).

My repsonse is:
Being on a VLCD has as many horrendous side effects for the great majority of users as any weight loss drug or surgery and it lines the pockets of the diet industry worth billions of pounds each year - with a failure rate so high that it makes it the most successful failed business in the world. It also only treats one physical side effect of what everyone will have to agree is a psychological problem - uncontrolled compulsive overeating or binge eating disorder.

VLCDs are not a healthy or viable answer for anyone's eating disorder.

You said:
I have to ask what your motive is and where your allegiances lie - because ill informed criticism of a medically approved obesity treatment that works where others have failed is not a clever pursuit for anyone.

My response is:
VLCDs are medically approved, yes, but so are the dangerous drugs and surgery that you mention. And as ALL three of these methods have such dire side effects and very high long-term failure rates, as they fail to address the real problem, medical approval is really no indication of efficiency.

I've already said that my motives are to help people with eating disorders and I do it on a daily basis and very successfully at that. I feel very humble and grateful for the gift that I have in my ability to assist people in changing their lives for the better. On this last count, my conscience is very definitely as clear as crystal!