Mindcraft Therapy in Retford

It’s recently been announced that Alli, made by GlaxoSmithKline, yet another “miracle weight loss pill” will be made available over the counter in this country in the near future. A magic pill that makes you thin – wow that’s wonderful, isn’t it?

Well it’s very amazingly wonderful if you happen to make miracle weight loss pills that’s for sure as the industry is worth over £1 billion a year in the UK. In fact it’s estimated that last year dieters spent £47 million just on pills and diet aids and only last week we were told that we’re now using eight times more slimming tablets than we were seven years ago.

So that’s it then, we’ve cracked it. We have our little magic pills and everyone’s getting thinner. Unfortunately the exact opposite’s happening and by 2010 there’ll be a staggering 13 million obese people in the UK and if you’ll pardon the pun, it really is an expanding market, with many companies fighting to jump on this lucrative bandwagon.

Why then, if we are taking more and more slimming pills are we getting more and more obese? The obvious answer is that the pills do NOT work!! If they did we would be a nation of skinnies but of course we’re not.

The headline for the latest new miracle drug reads “I achieved the impossible” after a woman claimed to have lost 4st in just 18 months. Let’s just examine that for a moment – 4st in 18 months? That’s roughly 3 pound per month, or 11 ounces a week. In modern money that’s 25kg in one and a half years or 1.3kg per month or 311 grams per week. Now, anyone who has spent years dieting knows that it’s possible to lose 3 pound in one week, let alone a month. Impossible would be bringing about world peace and eliminating poverty and disease, NOT losing 3lb a month but the headline makes it sound so amazing.

We all remember John Sergeant competing on the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing. During his time on the show he managed to lose two stone in weight but he didn’t go around claiming divine intervention. He didn’t need drugs, the Atkins diet, Weight Watchers or any other slimming club, he lost the weight because of the exercise he was doing. In fact doctors warn that any weight loss achieved when using these drugs is likely to be small and will occur only if people also make big changes to their lifestyle. Personally I would go further and suggest that any weight loss that occurred whilst taking diet pills was achieved ONLY through lifestyle changes and had nothing to do with the pills.

It’s bad enough that companies are making millions selling useless drugs to vulnerable people but there is an even darker side to these pills. Many of these drugs are addictive; only last week Kelly Osbourne went into rehab for what is believed to be addiction to weight loss pills. And there are other side effects such as diarrhoea.

According to most experts the idea that there’s a pill to make people lose weight is no more than a scam. In an article for the British Medical Journal, Professor Gareth Williams of Bristol University raises his concerns over the claims about drugs such as Alli and suggests that they produce unrealistic expectations leading people to believe that the pill will do all the work.

“All these preparations are peddled as miracle answers to what is an intractable lifelong problem,” he says. “People see them as clever solutions that scientists have come up with, and when they’re available over the counter in chemists, they’re perceived as even more miraculous, more innocuous, sitting alongside the paracetamol.”

The reason that manufacturers are able to get away with what is in effect a multi million pound con is because diet pills are not licensed as medicines and so they do not have to undergo the strict scientific testing that real medicines do. When independently tested most of these pills are shown to have no dietary benefit.

One such “clinically proven” weight loss product made by Goldshield is Lipobind which claims to be a fat binder, helps to decrease food cravings, suppress the appetite and lower blood cholesterol. Yet according to The Times, a panel of experts, which included a dietician, a pharmacist and a doctor, concluded that evidence supporting the claims was thin and that the pills were, in effect, an expensive bulking agent and that Which? who set up the panel advised against taking any of the pills, saying that they could be expensive and could have side-effects such as diarrhoea, reduction of vitamin absorption and increased blood pressure.

These multi million pound companies, whether they sell pills, diets, clubs or whatever, have no interest in helping anyone lose weight permanently. Why would they? Their best interests are served by propagating the belief that you can’t do it without their help. To me that’s the biggest con of all.

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