Who Knows Best About Weight Loss?

Did anyone see that programme in the series "Who Knows Best"?  I couldn't  believe the professionals in the programme. One alternative practitioner working with the "thinking" versus a boot camp exerciser defined as "two of the UK's leading experts in weight loss". Hello?

What we saw of the "thinking" approach was some visualisations based, I believe, on NLP and a great deal of tapping using Thought Field Therapy. The so-called Experts were less interested in their clients than they were in their own performance. By the end of the six week experiment they were basically telling their clients, please do this for ME so that I won't lose the contest. It may be good television but where are the ethics in this for these unfortunate subjects?

Short term weight change is very easy to achieve and I would have expected the boot camp expert to win the contest because he managed to get the client on her feet, buring calories every day. But this was not a moral victory for the alternative therapist who claimed that she was working with the obesity mindset. I would have liked to see where these clients are two years down the line.

Working with obesity is complex. Helping someone to move around more consistently and helping them to think and relate differently to food and exercise needs a great deal more expert help. People with serious weight problems who don't like their situation need a much more intelligent approach.

They need a practitioner who understands and can apply the models of health behaviour change, cognitive behaviour therapy, motivational therapy, EFT (not Thought Field Therapy which is old-hat) and even some of the techniques of NLP. Really digging down into the issue of emotional eating would be the icing on the cake. Why didn't the programme advisors come to me?

Fat - to coin a phrase, is a financial issue. There are lots of treatments out there making people very rich but very few experts know what they are doing. For the ultimate look at what really can work for people with weight problems, come along to my Essential Obesity - Psychological Interventions training - for details visit http://www.eating-disorders.org.uk/