I am so tired of misinformation and often complete nonsense when it comes to diets and weight problems.  Every diet expert is self proclaimed and I have yet to see a diet which has been founded on scientific research and has published, properly conducted human trials.

It’s as if we suspend our common sense when we respond to advice about any product remotely linked to our vanity.  Beauty products and weight loss products are probably the best examples.  We want to believe they work, we kid ourselves that they work and we blame ourselves when we realize they haven’t worked.

In the case of diets it is worse because each time we trustingly embark on some new ‘cannot fail and it’s so good for you’ diet,  we soon find ourselves not only back to square one, we discover we have been saddled with extra weight we never had before.  Have you ever stopped to wonder why?

Everything has at least one reason.  Thirty to Forty years ago weight problems and particularly obesity were very rare.  People with medical conditions like an underactive thyroid or diabetes were practicably the only people who were permanently overweight, and type2 diabetes was unheard of.

What happened forty years ago, was the birth of the diet food industry and the new professions of nutritionist and dietician.  All these groups will tell you that over time, they have made an enormous contribution to the health and weight of us all.  I think it’s time we analyze that contribution.  How?  By taking a good look at the people we pass in the mall.  Are you seeing an increase in slim people? I don’t think so!

Forty years ago, we still relied on our body’s mechanism to control our weight as we had done for centuries.  An obesity Epidemic would have been a ridicules notion.  We knew by instinct what was good and what was bad for us to eat.  The percentage of overweight people was very small and obesity was almost unheard of.  When present, it was usually a medical condition not a food problem.

Unlike now, there was no need to seek a way to get permanent weight loss, we already had it and practiced it daily.

Today, sixty percent of our population is overweight, and the numbers are growing daily.  Many of these people are, or will go on to become obese.  Yet, never before, were there so many experts or products available to assist us to lose weight and to ‘get healthy’.  The diet industry is one of the biggest most lucrative industries on the planet and the most amazing thing about that?  The fact they virtually didn’t exist until forty years ago.

What is the second most amazing thing?  Not one of the diets that have been so aggressively promoted for the past thirty years, have had to undergo scientific scrutiny.  No genuine data has been published and no trials have been conducted with human participants. Not for a single diet.

Like me, you might now realize that the growth of the diet industry originates at the same time and has kept in exact step with the growth of our bodies.  A coincidence?  I don’t think so!

Human beings were not designed to be overweight.  Nature had its own way to deal with the food we used to eat.  But like so often, we had to go one better than nature.  The price we have paid is to lose touch with our time worn instincts and we have simply forgotten the rules about how and what to eat.  What is is worse, we have caused damage to the body’s natural functions.

My Own Plan was written specifically to reverse the damage before it is too late and to get back to permanent weight loss…Forever!

http://thenpn.com/at/?id=20846

Kirsten Plotkin

Author of My Own Plan.