It offers solutions to help people break the pattern of weight cycling. Intuitive eating, which I proposed in 1978 and has since been thankfully taken up by many including AnyBody UK and Health at Every Size, involves understanding the psychological and social mechanisms involved in troubled eating. They don’t explore appetite and how to eat when you are hungry, eat the foods that will satisfy that hunger, and the difficulties of stopping when you are full. They don’t explore the difficulties people can experience psychologically with being the size they strive to be, or the dilemmas they encounter emotionally if they reach their goal. They don’t address what food longings are about. Most of the so-called weight management programmes funded by the NHS prescribe some form of dieting or another. It operates by suppressing appetite, which could make a real difference for some people – but that only works for as long as you’re taking the drug, and it doesn’t address crucial related issues. I’m not saying semaglutide (sold under the brandnames Wegovy and Ozempic, though Ozempic isn’t licensed for weight loss) can’t be useful. Only three in a hundred people maintain the weight loss, while the other 97 are there to start subscribing again. But as studies have shown, weight loss through calorie-restricted diets is not sustained. What is the solution? As a parliamentary inquiry discovered in 2012, Weight Watchers’ appeal rests on claims that some evidence shows a modest weight loss of up to 10% of body weight can be achieved.
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