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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!