'Pauline lost 7 stone without cheating - no empty diets or expensive surgery'.... 'Linda loses without cheating'... 'Dawn lost without cheating'... 'Lose 3 stone of belly fat in 10 days without cheating but just following these few simple rules'... Well that last one is frankly hilarious.
As both Pauline and Linda were on the LighterLife liquid diet (since when is LighterLife not a diet?), reducing calorie intake to around 800 a day, they lost a lot of weight over a fairly short period. Trouble is, once you start eating normally again, the weight returns. Jon lost over 3 stone on DietChef, then over November to January ate everything he wanted and - surprise, surprise - put over a stone in weight back on. Now he's going for another round and hopes to maintain eventually by moderating what he eats - but it will be a battle. There is no easy solution to wanting to consume more than you need...
So what is cheating? Certainly not being on a diet; if you lost weight without taking any action on your part it would be a cause for medical concern and probably the indication of some underlying serious health problem. It is possible for men to lose weight through exercise alone as they generally have a high muscle mass, but for women it's hardly ever the case. So is exercise or dieting cheating? How can it be, it's bloody difficult.
Of course I know what these articles are referring to - Bariatric surgery. Having surgery in order to lose weight permanently is seen by many as 'cheating'. WHY? Cheating what? Cheating who? Is it contravening some rule or regulation for life? Not in any religion or creed I've ever heard of. Is it achieving something without cost? No, certainly not if you do it privately and regardless of financial cost it's costly on time, effort and commitment. Is it easy and painless? No, it's a major operation and the process of recovery, and recovering normal eating, is a long one. You are advised you can never again drink alcohol or fizzy drinks. Is it a quick fix? No, it's a lifetime commitment to seeing food differently, keeping adequate and appropriate nutrition and taking supplements - and it takes 4-6 weeks just to recover from the surgery; some aspects take a lot longer. So if bariatric surgery is cheating, then I have cheated. Here I am in my recent staff photo - taken 4-5 months after surgery - feeling and looking like a normal person again. I can trot happily around the campus after previously struggling with joint pain, fatigue and breathlessness. If I cheated to obtain that, I can live with it.It's not only explicit suggestions that you're 'cheating' if you opt for surgery - there are the subtle criticisms: 'Isn't it a bit extreme?' 'Couldn't you just diet like everyone else?' Extreme. Well I consider dieting for 30 years, constantly worrying about what you're eating, or not eating, or shouldn't eat, or mustn't eat, or crave eating, pretty extreme actually. For me it was more like nearly 40 years of fighting my body and brain's investment in storing energy from my food consumption for a rainy day. I was a lively skinny kid, but when I hit puberty my body said "WOMAN!" and went all out for voluptuous storage.
Here's an interesting excerpt from Blogger Stephan Guyenet in 2011 regarding a possible mechanism for why a gastric bypass can mean a long term change in weight, over and above the effect of nutrient absorption:
"When it comes in contact with nutrients, the small intestine sends messages to the brain via hormones and nerve signals that communicate the calorie content and macronutrient composition of the food (4), so the brain can respond appropriately. The brain then causes you to feel full, and coordinates activities in various tissues to make sure the nutrients get handled appropriately."
He speculates that after a gastric bypass:
"the body fat "setpoint" has been reduced, meaning that the body "wants" to be leaner rather than obese. Another strange thing about gastric bypass surgery is that it doesn't work on everyone. A case report of a person who lacks a functional melanocortin-4 receptor, a protein critically involved in body fat regulation in the brain, shows that he scarcely lost any weight after gastric bypass surgery (7). This suggests that the system in the brain that regulates body fatness has to be intact for gastric bypass to be effective.
One of the important things the small intestine does is communicate information to the brain that is used to determine the reward value of food (8). The small intestine, especially the duodenum and jejunum, is critical for assigning food reward (8). One might guess that bypassing the upper small intestine would have a major impact on this process. Well, apparently a few clever folks have already thought of this, because it has been studied and published. Roux-en-Y bypass changes food reward in obese rats, making them relate to food more like lean rats, and several studies in humans are consistent with that idea as well (9, 10, 11, 12).
Although there are probably other contributing factors, the effectiveness of gastric bypass surgery is likely to be related to its ability to dampen food reward, and thus lower the "defended" level of fat mass, by interfering with the intestinal signals that the brain uses to assign reward to foods. The two most effective fat loss strategies I've encountered, gastric bypass surgery and drinking bland liquid food through a straw (13, 14), both seem to rely on reducing food reward."
Interesting stuff! It's certainly true that I'm eating less - I have to - and I'm not starving and desperate for food, which is what has always brought a halt to dieting before (the grehlin effect). But maybe in addition the body's desperate attempt to restore fat stores is circumvented. Otherwise although you eat less further weight loss becomes impossible and an intense fatigue settles in as energy levels plummet. I've been there. In the end you have to give up. One route is through exercise of course; high energy exercise combined with a return to more acceptable levels of food intake can make the difference but I have a sedentary occupation and I'm post menopausal, so the odds are against me.
Here are a couple of selfies from my work web-cam. I can tell you which one I see as me - it's the one on the right, taken last week. See, I said I'd be back :-)
I know I'm lucky. Lucky to have been able to save up for this before I qualified through the NHS because of ill health. Lucky to have had a wonderful and inspiring role-model in my daughter who had been there before me and could advise me of what (and what not) to do. Lucky to have not had any real issues other than constipation with the iron supplements (oops, too much information). Lucky to be able to tolerate nearly everything I've eaten with time - even the occasional chocolate - except milk products. Lucky to not have lost the weight so fast that I've been left with yards of loose skin or my hair falling out or turning to straw. Lucky not to have thrown up once since the op... although I got close a couple of times. But I'm careful. Now after 7 months I eat good food with a few treats and my metabolic age on my Tanita scales is 32, my BMI normal and my cholesterol has reduced from 7.8 to 3.5. I've been given a whole new lease of life. It's up to me to make it work for the long term.
