For the past five years, I can honestly say that an at home weight lose, has changed my life forever.  Prior to that, I can look back on two decades of hundreds of hours spent working out in some gym somewhere.  There were several thousand dollars spent on gym memberships and in all fairness, if I were to add it all up, more than fifty pounds of weight maybe more were lost.  The fact is it doesn’t matter what I lost, because every pound was returned always with that bit extra.  That is not to say the money was wasted. I enjoy workouts, or at least I used to, it made me feel good, it tightened my body and I felt more energetic.  But if my sole aim was to lose weight, my workouts were a waste of time.

I’m sure you wonder, what about diets.  Let’s be real, you do not lose amounts of weight which, over time, adds up to more than fifty pounds by exercise alone. So yes; there were diets, plenty of them.  I became an expert on almost every diet launched from the mid eighties till early 2004.  A couple in particular proved very influential in my life. There was the 66% carbohydrate diet, known as the pyramid.  The rule was simple; three serves of carbohydrates to one serve of protein.  That was my first diet ever and it was the diet that sealed my fate. I was put on that diet by a dietician.  She was recommended to me by my doctor who was concerned about my sudden weight gain. The weight gain was the result of some damage to my thyroid gland, during surgery that had gone wrong.

Much later, I was introduced to the low fat diet which seduced me and most other people into believing that the fat we consume is the same fat that sticks to our body.  Although I knew that was not true, I was dazzled by the simplicity of the pseudo science that said if you stop eating fat you stop getting fat.  Like everyone else, I went along for the ride.  Like most people with a weight problem, I clung to the hope that this diet was the one that would work permanently.  Of course no one really says that word out loud because deep down where logic seems to reside, we know diets never work.

If just one single diet, out of the hundreds of diets recommended during the past twenty to thirty years, had ever proved to work there should be no demand for any other diet.  A diet that works means, at least to me, that it has proved to produce a permanent weight loss.  Why would there then be a need for any other diet?  I mean, once we have a permanent weight loss diets become redundant right?

So let me run this past you: To date no diet has ever existed that has been able to produce a permanent weight loss.  The hard efforts you put into dieting will always fail. That is because the weight always returns. It is not just the weight you lost.  You get additional weight you did not have before you started the diet.  That is your body saying it has protected your metabolism against your next diet experiment with extra insulation to guard against the famine.

Are you beginning to wonder what happened five years ago?  Well, I had a flash of inspiration.  I have always had a great interest and knowledge of history, mostly about the subject of human history. With that background and my vast knowledge and experience with diets, I took a long hard look at my own circumstances and I had what you may call a moment of clarity.  I devised an eating plan, not a diet because a diet would have meant cutting down on food and counting calories, which my body would respond to as a famine.

I decided to forget everything I knew about diets. Instead I drew on what I knew of the past, what I had learned in the present and what I feared for the future. Clearly, something very significant, and very bad, had happened.  It was something which had caused us to change from a majority of slim healthy people, to a majority of fat, unhealthy people in just a few decades.  It had the hallmark of human intervention.

So a little over five years ago, I implemented my own plan.  It was meant just for me because no one else in my family suffers from weight problems and I did not want anyone else to take part in what was then just an experiment.  In a very short time, using an at home weight lose, I went from a little over 80kilos, the biggest I had ever been, to 64 kilos which had been my regular weight before my thyroid problem.  I have hovered between 64 and 65 kilos ever since.  Someone suggested I write down exactly how it happened, what I did, and how I have stayed slim ever since.  If you want to benefit from my experience, or you just want to learn more, all you have to do is follow my link.

http://www.my-own-plan.com/cap/index4.html

Kirsten Plotkin

Author of My Own Plan

Email: kirstenplotkin@my-own-plan.com

I am so tired of misinformation and often complete nonsense when it comes to diets and genuine, permanent weight loss.  Every Diet Expert is self proclaimed and I have yet to see a diet which has been founded on scientific research with evidence of 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 greatest 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 there is the added dimension of risk to our health.  Each time we trustingly embark on some new ‘cannot fail and it’s so good for us’ diet we take a risk.  Most times, all that happens is that within a month, sometimes a year, we find ourselves back to where we started, not just with the weight we had before, we now have extra weight.  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 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 well in step with the growth of the human body.  A coincidence?  I don’t think so!

Human beings were not designed to be overweight, nor were they designed to diet.  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 our body’s ability to deal with the food we eat.  we have simply forgotten the rules about how and what to eat.  What is worse, we have caused damage to our body.

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=20942

Kirsten Plotkin

Author of My Own Plan.