diets, etc
…a woman debunking Bodyslims, the Irish ‘Fat Club’ which Carla [https://www.youtube.com/@HalfofCarla ] did, ….and taking a rather negative view of weight loss and dieting generally. In a way, her position is the same as Zoe’s, - ‘don’t even bother’ – except whereas Zoe’s position is that if fat people just ate like she did, their excess weight would magically disappear, this woman (Aoife?) seems to be coming from the ‘body positive’ perspective – ‘don’t be ashamed of being fat; a fat person is who you are’ - needless to say, I don’t agree with either position.
My position on ‘fat clubs’ such as Bodyslims is firstly of course they’re a money-making business; they most likely purvey the mainstream crap (Carla believes in calorie-counting for example, and in the reductionist idea which is the bete-noire of Jason Fung, that food is quantitative, not qualitative, she says things like ‘if I fancy a pizza, I just factor it into my daily calorie allowance’); but there is something in human nature that finds such things useful – like students joining a language class, they think if they pay money and make a time commitment to attend every week, this will motivate them to do things they would never otherwise find it in themselves to do, and perhaps there’s the solidarity factor (although Carla says that in her time at bodyslims she would sit at the back and leave early and never talk to anyone) – even Jason Fung I think has his own fat club, or at least lends his name to one, and in his videos he recommends getting together with other fatties and fasters.
So, Aiofe:
…immediately identifies the ‘age-old technique’ of weight-loss marketing (also used by Jason Fung): the success story – ‘I did it, so you can do it too.’
Reading from the website:
…yeh, looks like standard marketing drivel. (I’m used to seeing similar claims from language schools)…and surprise surprise its founder is just a businessman, an entrepreneur, - just as the owners of language schools frequently are: having no prior interest in expertise in language acquisition or linguistics, or cognitive psychology, (their interest was only in making money) Perhaps Jason Fung is like that too, (trust nobody, told you not to have heroes,) but at least he has a bit of a back-story.
The bodyslims strapline:
From her perusal of the web-site, there is nothing to suggest this strapline is anything more than marketers’ puff: - bodyslims appears to be offering nothing more than the tired old formula of a calorie-controlled diet – re-branded and sexed-up. As Zoe and J Fung and others have pointed out – the calorie- reductionist argument is terribly convenient for the mainstream fake food industry: nothing wrong with the toxic shit they’re pumping out, it’s just that these greedy fatties have been eating too much of it!
As a ‘body-positive’ proponent, Aoife objects to ‘stress eating, eating with guilt, eating with shame’ – to which my reply is that it would be lovely not to do that, but we are living in a world where they are actively trying to poison us through our food (inter alia) and if you are obese, then you can be sure that they have already succeeded. I think the correct mindset is that it may not be your fault that you became obese, but if you want to change it, then that is your responsibility, -nobody else’s. But if you don’t want to change it, then don’t – nobody cares.
According to Aoife, eating is and should be a pleasure – OK, except that I don’t think it always has to be: that’s putting too much expectation and pressure on it, sometimes it can be boring and uninteresting, routine and everyday. ( if eating was supposed to be always a pleasure, every single time, then what is the meaning of a feast, a party, a celebration?) Some of my guru’s, including Jason Fung, seem rather puritanical about getting pleasure from food, as if they actively disapprove of this idea, while I have been increasingly coming to the view that all and any eating is bad for us, and not only because of the efforts of the fake food industry, and the chem-trailing, and all that recent stuff, - it comes back to that evil demiurge of Mark Devlin: it seems to have been designed into the fabric of nature itself – or, you could just put it as eating is necessary, but not cost-free, it comes at a physiological cost, - which is why austerity becomes key – if you want your body-machine to last a long time and in good condition, you use it sparingly.
In short- we need to be careful around eating, we need to be wary, we need to be mindful, we can not just let ourselves go, knock ourselves out, trust in our own impulses, in nature, and in our environment – sorry, it would be lovely if we could, but we just don’t live in that kind of world. Our minds and bodies are prone to trickery (mostly our minds) – let alone the multitude of external enemies out there.
‘Diets don’t work’ says Aoife, in which statement she would be supported by mountains of research, by the great Jason Fung, and by every weight loss program talking about all the others.
I guess she is right in the sense that some temporary period of restriction without more will not change anything long-term. What is key is that you stop doing whatever it was that made you fat in the first place. If after the temporary period of restriction you go back to doing whatever that was, then it is simple logic that you will just get fat again. But I do think you need to do something to get the weight off before you change your habits – which is why I disagree with Zoe, who thinks that all fat people have to do is switch to eating like her. And however you look at it, that something is going to be a temporary period of restriction. Carla talks about ‘weight loss’ vs ‘weight maintenance’ emphasising that nobody is meant to be in ‘weight loss’ for the rest of their life, and once the weight is off, you just need to ensure that you don’t go back to the bad old ways – whatever they were. You need to adopt new and different habits.
So it’s not the ‘diet’ which is at fault, it is the reversion to the old ways after the diet is finished (or abandoned)
Aoife references Carla as bodyslims’ key marketing ‘success story.’ Aoife’s point is that Carla is the outlier: most dieting attempts do not end like this. Most dieters finish with the sense they have failed (I guess because either they give up before ‘reaching their goal weight’ , or they reach it, or approach it, and then revert) - I must admit, watching Carla’s videos, I do find myself thinking at the back of mind, ‘oh god, I hope she doesn’t put it all back on’ - because I do know that this is very common. It’s as if people who have ever been obese have that propensity in them, for whatever reason, whether physiological, or psychological, or both – like ‘recovering alcoholics’ - and I do think there are other people who do not have that propensity, or don’t have it to the same extent (as with any other disease or disorder – we’re not all equal here) I I suspect that Carla has to continually and/or repeatedly go through some kind of restriction of her eating in order to keep her body weight the way it is – but I don’t think that’s such a terrible thing, and it is certainly far preferable to just resigning herself to being obese.
‘it worked for her, therefore it must work for me’ the marketing message goes, and then when it doesn’t work for you like it worked for her, clearly you are the problem here– , not the diet or program - evidently you didn’t have her determination, or willpower, you were doing it wrong, you cheated, etc. Aoife finds this kind of marketing messaging problematic: a kind of ‘victim-blaming, victim-shaming’ – the customer- or patient- is the problem, not the product (or the remedy)
I am not entirely unsympathetic to this viewpoint, don’t get me wrong, - but on the other hand… losing weight isn’t that easy, and does require – how shall I put it- stepping up to the plate. (‘showing up for yourself’ as Carla puts it) I keep coming back to the language school analogy - where any achievement really is down to the student, not the teacher, or the program. At the end of the day, no program or teacher is going to be able to do the work for the student – and I have seen all too often how lazy and deluded students think they can offload their personal responsibility, (and unscrupulous language school owners encourage this delusion) However you achieve your goals, whatever they are, it comes from within – not from without. Carla probably would have lost weight following any other program, following Jason Fung, or whoever - because the key factor here was Carla, not the program. At the end of the day, you don’t need any program, any class, any teacher, any guru – these are at best optional extras, - and at worst, they are outright scams – cynical money-making grifts. (so I guess what I’m saying is – if you don’t succeed in losing weight, then by definition you ARE the problem, just as if you do succeed, all the credit is yours- and if you ever believed that some program was going to deliver weight loss to you without you needing to do all that much by way of stepping up yourself, then I’m sorry, but you were scammed)
According to Aoife, this marketing technique encourages us all to compare our bodies to Carla’s, and hold it up as a standard which for many of us will be impossible to reach.
Aoife puts it bluntly: ‘programs like bodyslims have incredibly poor weight loss outcomes. If they did not, there would be research and data to back them up’ - which is just another way of saying, ‘it’s incredibly hard for fat people to lose weight for the long term, and in fact it seldom happens’
As she says, the success stories are anecdotal, they are isolated cases, and the hard mathematical data tells us they are outliers. Therefore the ‘she did it, so I can too’ message is deception – it’s mind-control programming – from the point of view of this business owner, (Gerard Moran?) the purpose of which is to get you to buy his product, but I always tend to think that there’s some deeper social engineering -and social engineers- going on behind that.
And however much the commenters lash out at her for this (I will get to that) - Aoife is simply speaking the truth.
Aoife acknowledges the power and magnetism of Carla’s videos – but I think she thinks that Carla is being used by this money-making enterprise. She says the more viewers relate to Carla, the more they empathise with her, and feel they know her, the more they will be led to compare their body with hers.
She refers to that much-quoted statistic which says that ex-dieters tend to go beyond regaining the weight they lost to reach a higher point than the previous weight homeostasis – I guess there’s some physiological reason for this, which I’m not that clear about.
She talks about dieters’ obsession with the scales – yeh, well I can’t be accused of that, I don’t possess a set of scales, (and will never possess a set of scales) and don’t know how much I weigh, and don’t care – I think that’s overly left-brained thinking. My mother tells me I should have weighed myself back in January, before I started, so that I could have had the necessary data in place for my own ‘weight loss success story’, like Carla’s - I don’t even have any photographs of myself either, the only thing I have is the trousers which used to fit me snugly and now fall around my ankles – so I could do one of those photos you see of the formerly obese person standing inside their old trousers as if it were a tent.
She is right that I do think about food a lot more now than in the old days, when in fact it barely impinged on my consciousness at all. But again, I don’t think that’s such a terrible thing.
She refers to dieters being always hungry, tired, cold, irritable – well, generally I’m none of those things, and I don’t think you should be or need to be in order to lose weight – if you are, this is a sign that something is not working properly, and you need to re-think it, re-design your plan. (probably you are eating the wrong kind of stuff- your insulin is being kept too high for too long, locking you out of your plentiful sources of fuel and nutrition)
Aoife ends by saying that it is not her intention to take hope away from people. I believe she means this sincerely – I like her, because she seems focused on truth: and desperate people are especially prone to delusion. Even Carla sometimes says, ‘you can only control what you do: you can’t control the outcome: you can’t control the number on the scale’ and I think Aoife is getting at something like this - by all means, try to find a better, healthier way of living and eating if you can, but at the end of the day your body gonna do what it’s gonna do, and you shouldn’t be beating yourself up about that. It’s all a bit of a mystery, which not even the great gurus like Jason Fung really understand fully, ( let alone money-making grifters like Gerard Moran)
But OMG, the comments to this video. Poor Aoife: she doesn’t deserve that, and I wonder if she had any idea what was coming. This fucking body-slims: it’s obviously a fucking cult, and its adherents were furious at this attack on their cherished beliefs.
This commenter answering the question in the title of the video: ‘Does bodyslims actually work?’
I havent watched the video yet. But as a woman who has done Bodyslims, i will have to say yes, it does. It has transformed my mind and my belief in myself. It explained how i got myself into my morbid obesity and it helped me understand that it was my responsibility to get myself out of it. It helped me understand the importance of changing behaviors and staying mindful in the day. It was life changing for me. I didn't follow the recommended 2 week meal. I did my own thing ... i took 3 sessions and now i am doing my own thing. I would encourage anyone to take at least 1 session of body slims. Itll transform your complex relationship with food. You also get weekly seminars, daily videos, emails throughout the week, a daily song, so much info. I wonder has she even purchased the program
Aoife replied to this one, which I think was one of the earlier ones, and one of the least vitriolic, later I suspect she must have simply stopped reading them:
I'm glad you found it beneficial. However, there have been many slimming groups before this which claim similar results. But when you look at the 'success rates' - the numbers are poor. BodySlims falls into this same category - promising great results without out the data to show it.
Such as this one, for example:
PibrochPonder
@thatirishdietitian I lost 33lb is 10 weeks. It is a solid program that talks about food in a great evidence based way. You should try the program it looks like it would benefit you chubby chops ;)
@angeni2
I LOVE BODYSLIMS. I am someone who has had a lifetime (50 yrs) of disordered eating, has tried practically every diet out, and have been in and out of clinical settings for disordered eating. Bodyslims is the first program that is helping me to rebuild my relationship with myself and by extension, my relationship with food. Even though calories are counted, the focus is not the calories.
@RobertaHenrion-gv7sq
Bodyslims saved me , I had such a hard time losing weight and i felt unhealthy and sad all the time , I signed up I listened to everything Ger was telling me to do and in 6 months I lost a total of 70 Lbs and I will never look back, Say what you want but unless you have tried the program and given it everything you have don’t judge
@hotdog3180
This video is ridiculous. She hasn’t done bodyslims and is reviewing it??????
@sumacarthur2129
It’s a shame you didn’t do the programme. It’s very different to slimming clubs and so much more than diets. You get so much help changing your thoughts around healthier eating and other habits that it almost feels effortless at times. It helps you change your mindset which is everything. I’ve done one cycle. Imperfectly, I might add because I was travelling almost half the time and have some health issues which made the walking difficult for me. However, I still lost half a stone in weight at a time when I normally would put on weight ! I was travelling but still felt motivated to make healthier choices 80% of the time. I am delighted! What is more, the programme has ended and we are nearly at Christmas but I still want to carry on. Just about to meet my daughter in town - for some quality time with her and I’ll get my walk in and have a healthy lunch. AND I’m looking forward to it. How did that happen?! The answer was Bodyslims for me. I will do another cycle as I want to improve my health and losing weight and improving my diet will help me with the underlying health issues. The before and after photos are inspiring for most people. Especially when you do your own.
@teena4rl211
You have no idea what you are talking about. You have not done the program. The "diet" is not the focus of the program. Rather, it is behavioral change. The morning and evening messages, the team talks, the weekly seminars are funny and inspirational. The program really does not much concern itself with food. Before you bash it, try it.
RobertaHenrion-gv7sq
This person makes me so mad she doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about she never even attempted to do the program
deirdrelowry7360
I have done all of the main weightloss programs, while I lost minimal amount of weight on them, I never could maintain that weightloss that was until I did the bodyslims program, losing 32lbs on the bodyslims program and maintaining that weightloss has been life changing. I first started my weightloss journey in 2021 with bodyslims and have maintained since. I find this video very negative around weightloss in fact it is more damaging then good.
You're right in that normally I give a more detailed break down in these videos as to whether or not the diet/ programme I explore is a diet or not. Newer diets tend to pretend not to be diets because they know that the 'success' rates of diets/ weight loss programmes are poor. Body Slims surprised me by the fact that it is quite openly a diet that is about calorie control - which meant I didn't have to focus as much on proving it is a diet.
If BodySlims were to release long term results showing it somehow produces significantly better results than other slimming groups on the market (which all have poor success rates) then I’ll listen.
@oonaghplunkett4623
It worked for me, my husband, my sister in law and 3 of my friend. I did it one year ago and have not put on the weight that I lost.
@andicecook
Woman, the comments on your video proved you wrong. Maybe you should apologize for bashing a program that works or removing the video altogether. The majority of us don't go to dietitians because there are better ways to reach a goal than to pay thousands on "professionals " who dont want to actually help people. Keeping people sick is a money maker
@elaineedwards2530
Oh you've made me mad! BodySlims gives you 10 weeks of incredible motivation, mental health techniques that change your relationship with food, and so so so much more. It is so much bigger than calories counted and steps taken. Don't judge until you actually hear the 10 weeks of videos.
This is the comment I would have made:
@trishhegarty1884
Thank you for this info but what is the answer if we need to lose weight for our health if not to diet ? I’m m asking this respectfully
@shonarosemarybaker9211
Hi, respectfully I would like to say that I disagree with the "diets don't work" view. Not dieting = eating whatever, whenever and in however huge a quanties I want which = my weight going up and up, me being tired and not nourished properly. I haven't seen your other videos, but i'm guessing you might me a proponent of "intuitive eating". It may work for some, but for me, my "intuition" tells me to eat giant portions and include lots of junk.
And if anyone makes a comment supportive of Aoife, the cult members pile in, attacking them too:
@deliahanne
Thank you for raising awareness on this topic! The stories we can see in the comments basically show how anecdotes of one's success can be used to deny possible flaws in the system. And if anyone missed it: this video is not about this program specifically but rather about restrictive diets in general while leaning on the example. And as far as what I read about the program being the motivator to keep going by checking in daily (I'm guessing by automated messages?)... Doesn't that mean they kind of tie you to their 'product' to keep you paying?
@oilBongu
Have you missed the load of comments from people who did it years ago and have made lasting changed to their habits?
@deliahanne
@oilBongu that is exactly the anecdotal evidence that she critiqued. So no, I am not convinced to change my stands. Good for everyone who succeeded but that is not scientific evidence which is what I always prefer over opinions or experience.
@AislingW
You haven't a clue about Bodyslims. I have 4 stone off and maintained for 2 years. Maybe do the program before reviewing it! But more importantly, I've gone from being depressed for years to a happy, hopeful human. This is a ridiculous review based on someone who has never done it. How can you justify that?
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Now that the most I eat in one day is 1 meal, I wonder how anyone finds the time to ever eat more than that- it seems quite a big event, taking up a rather large chunk of the day – not only the preparation, and the clearing up, but just the whole ‘post-prandial somnolence’ – it can take me a few hours to ‘get over’ a meal, and I don’t understand how I ever managed before with all that snacking- it was kind of strange, because I didn’t think about food at all really, it somehow barely impinged on me, as for hunger, I never allowed myself to feel more than ‘a bit peckish’ before I would go to the kitchen and find ‘something to eat’, the only qualification for which was that it didn’t require any preparation or cooking (I was a kind of scavenger) satiety was something I never experienced (except on Christmas Day), also the only occasion when I ever before experienced this somnolence thing.
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I sometimes like to give little speeches about how my Downs syndrome nephew [age 19] is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met – like many dogs are, he seems to be innately in tune with nature and the universe – I put it down to him being unreachable by the mind-control and indoctrination that those of us without learning difficulties are subject to. And yet this is itself a symptom of our satanically inverted clown-world: shouldn’t he rather be one of the least intelligent? Shouldn’t the unimpaired human mind have promoted new heights of consciousness and greater affinity with God, the universe and nature? Instead, it has served only as a portal for the demonic to enter, and it has proven to be our undoing, like a delicate instrument in the hands of a primitive animal. My daughter replies to my speeches, ‘don’t be silly mum, he can’t even wipe his own ass’ – but aside from the fact that I attribute this inability wholly to molly-coddling from his mother and grandmother, (if I were in charge, I can tell you he would be wiping his own ass) even if it were true that he does not have enough practical intellect to survive for very long if left to himself – so bloody what? What does it matter how intelligent you are if you are disconnected from God and nature, if you manage to live 100 years and want for nothing – except the first idea about anything that actually matters? Better to live for only a few hours, but live it in full contact with your true nature, in full consciousness, a brilliant and fleeting flame of light.
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Another change, besides the post-prandial somnolence (any chance to use that noun phrase) is now after eating I MUST HAVE a cup of tea. Nothing else will do – not water, not coffee, not even any of the other drinks which needless to say I am not allowed – alcohol, sugary drinks. And it can’t be green tea, or mint tea, or any of that nonsense – it must be a traditional cup of British tea, like my grandmother would have made, black tea brewed strong, with milk (OK- lactose- but fuck it, it’s a meal-time anyway)
Another change: - most of that visceral fat has gone, completely gone – that mid-abdominal fat which is supposed to be the stuff coating the internal organs and therefore the most dangerous to health. Interesting the body should have burned that first. Perhaps it just knows where to prioritise, or perhaps I have been eating the right kind of food to do it, or perhaps just not eating the wrong kind.
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I keep wanting to write in more detail about the absolute fuck-up which was my life. But I have to do it without being self-pitying, or maudlin, or too ‘mea culpa, mea maxima culpa’ - which essentially means write it without ego, just capture the truth. A faithful snapshot of the truth – the only truth I could possibly know anything about, to be honest. It seems almost impossible, but perhaps one day I will manage it. The way to do it is probably to put aside any ‘narrative’ and just describe details, if you describe them truthfully enough, they will fit together themselves, and the narrative will start to form itself, like the picture of a jigsaw puzzle. The problem is that the only details really available to our mind are those of the present, which includes the immediate past (like yesterday or the day before) but not much further back than that. All we have left of the more distant past are the narratives, all of which are almost certainly fake.
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My problem is that I have remained psychologically stuck 2 decades in the past. For all that time, I have been yearning to go back there, and as time went on, I barely noticed that ‘there’ no longer even exists- there is nowhere to go back to any more. Every moment I have lived since then has been crippled by the terrible sense that I should be somewhere else. ‘I can not be here, yet I AM here, WTF am I doing HERE’- that is more or less the existential summary of my life. and in this terribly distorted and distorting condition, the periods when the suffering was less were somehow the worst: - I had to dismantle precisely those situations, above all others, because I couldn’t allow myself the delusion that perhaps after all the place where I was in fact was the place I should be. I held on to my sense of exile and alienation, I cherished it and nurtured it, because that was the most precious thing in my life, that was my truth, it was THE truth – that empty place, where something should be but wasn’t, that place of torment – and the last 6 years, the years which included the convid, although I had 2 years prior to that reached the point of complete physical and mental exhaustion with it all – it was as if I was already in place, waiting for convid to catch up with me.
Being obese was a fairly minor symptom, an outward manifestation, one of them, of a much deeper and darker and more complex psychological turmoil. It is as if faced with some scene of a catastrophe that needed to be cleaned up, and not knowing where to begin, I chose some small rather insignificant corner, and thought, ‘oh well, let’s start with that, that should be fairly easy to deal with, compared with the rest’ – and it’s been like a little project for me, a kind of game, as if deep down I don’t even really care that much about it, - if I’m obese or not, sick or not, if I die shortly or not (I’ll probably get taken out by the depopulationists whatever I do) but it gives me something to chew on, in heart and mind – and yes, in a way, the last 3 months ( I tend to date it from 20th January, which was the date I drank my last glass of wine) have been the happiest I have had for a long time. Even reaching my goal (which I haven’t, btw, I’ve simply reached some milestones) will not yield me the satisfaction that the ‘project’ did, in fact I will probably sink into apathy as I see my most recent simulacrum of meaning and purpose is suddenly receding into the distance.
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One thing I am beginning to get: perfection is the enemy of the good, and consistency is key. So – the daily walk: can just be a quick 20 minute circuit of the village. Totally unexciting. I don’t have to find someone to give me a lift to any of the local beauty spots that are at least a 10 minute drive away; I don’t have to extend my exploration of the outskirts of the village and walk for longer on hitherto untrodden pathways – that’s great if I can do those things some days, but if I can’t – oh, well. Never mind. The routine circuit will do (think of it like walking to work) The same with the OMAD – I don’t have to cook some fantastic dish every day: some days it can just be scrambled egg and cheese. I’m in this for the long-haul, which means that most of the time it should be plodding and boring, and completely unexceptional.