Happy New Year
With regular headlines from the
Newcastle University DIRECT study in 2017 waxing lyrical on how they have found weight loss can be used to “cure” type 2 diabetes, we should all be hoping for great things in 2018.
The over-indulgence during the Christmas period will have focussed many of us to take a serious look at our weight, whether we are type 2 diabetic or not. The steady rise in levels of obesity and weight related diabetes across the UK and Ireland should be sending a shudder down our backs. Both come with consequences, from increased risk of heart and blood pressure problems, even cancer, to impaired fertility, plus the often-ignored high-risk of amputations and many other serious long-term health conditions. The list would take an entire blog (look out for it).
Improving our own health through stopping smoking, reducing alcohol intake and losing weight is noble, even life-saving, yet unfortunately new year resolutions are rarely successful. The multitude of delicious food and drinks left over from our yearly hype and overspend, coupled with the inevitable family and friends catch-up to brighten up the dismal month of January, plays havoc with our resolve.
Food and drink are great. January sees us paying off the credit cards and the cold winter days back at work generally do not live up to the fun-packed, food-fuelled latter weeks of December.
So what do we do? We tread the same boards, and try and tackle our vices at possibly the single most difficult time of the year, through the same mantra of eating less and exercising more.
Do we need to learn how to eat?
Can we just suddenly choose to eat a little less every day and find the time to exercise more?
Why didn’t we do that in 2010 or 2013 or 2017?
The dieting questions that should really be asked are:
•
Eat less of what?
•
How much exercise should I do?
•
How long will I realistically have to keep this up for?
Firstly obesity is a chronic disease, as stated by the World Health Organisation (WHO). You cannot simply lose weight once and expect to never have to do anything else about it again. We all have to eat and drink fluids to sustain life. There is not just one food group to blame. It is not “just the chocolate or soft drink that I knew I shouldn’t have had last night”.
To sustain meaningful weight loss, that is an amount that significantly reduces the medical risk associated with excess weight, you will need to eat less of everything. There is no “FREE food”, carbohydrates are not evil foodstuffs, fat intake is essential to life, and protein will be converted to a carbohydrate by the body anyway if too much is consumed.
Exercise plays a big part in the potential to maintain your weight long term but is not as essential as you’d think. Taking around 35 miles of exercise to use up the same number of calories contained in a single pound of body fat, the regular level of exercise required to reduce body weight in any meaningful way is beyond most of us.
Either way, the traditional dieting methods employed by many of us can work. However, those small changes to our intake, with or without the help of slimming clubs, will require more dedication than the few weeks given over to our new year resolutions. Inevitably many dieters give up a long time before true health benefits have been realised.
It is time to rethink our strategy when trying to deal with losing weight.
Weight loss is not benign. Losing excess body weight fundamentally alters a person’s medical trajectory, so much so that if an obese person was to lose 10% body weight:
- High blood pressure would see a fall of 10mm HG in both systolic and diastolic measurements
- A newly diagnosed type 2 diabetic would see abnormal fasting blood glucose levels fall by 50% (at least)
- Impaired glucose tolerance would see more than a 30% rise in insulin sensitivity & up to a 60% reduction in the progression rate to overt diabetes
- An improvement to blood fats would also occur: a 10% fall in total cholesterol, 15% fall in Low Density Cholesterol (LDC) and 8% rise in High Density Cholesterol (HDC)
- Mortality improves, showing a greater than 20% fall in total mortality rate, a 30% reduction in diabetes related deaths and greater than 40% reduction in obesity related deaths
Moreover, if a person develops a condition that requires surgery, which would not be unusual, obesity itself makes the diagnosis more difficult, also increasing the chance of contracting almost any of the likely postoperative complications.
With these rather disturbing facts in mind it is evident that the sooner we can shed the excess weight the better our medical status is likely to be. The DIRECT study has shown that diabetes can be forced into remission by rapid weight loss just as we at Lipotrim have shown for over 30 years through our network of GPs, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals.
Lipotrim allows you to eat substantially less of everything. It is a total food replacement programme with only nutritionally complete, formula foods allowed as the daily intake of food throughout the whole dieting phase. The formula foods deliver just the right amount of nutrition to maintain the dieter’s health status in the minimum number of calories, giving them confidence through simplicity. At a predictable rate of 1 stone loss per month for females, and 1.5 stone for men per month, the timescale required to fulfil a meaningful weight loss can be easily calculated.
The rate of weight loss on Lipotrim is almost entirely independent of exercise levels. The dieter not only knows how long they are on the programme for, but are able to build up their exercise levels in a way comfortable to them as they successfully lose weight. Remember that obesity comes with its barriers to the exercise often cited as useful. Some will be out of breath just getting out of bed in the morning.
So 2018 will be a happy, healthier new year for many of us.
Let’s take our weight issues more seriously.
Do not leave it to chance that you will finally manage to lose weight the hard, slow way.
Lipotrim allows for safe, comfortable, rapid and potentially life-changing weight loss.
Contact our team to learn more and see how you can get involved whether you are a person who needs to lose weight or a healthcare professional fed up with outdated diet ideas.
0800 413 735 Lipotrim
UK
01525 56 36
Lipotrim ROI
Ref Obesity in adults. Obesity facts and causes Patient.co.uk
Both Type 2 diabetes and the subsequent amputations are mostly preventable.
It is very important to note that weight loss is not benign. Many medical conditions benefit from losing excess weight, especially Type 2 Diabetes. It is now well known that the second most preventable cause of cancer, behind smoking, is obesity. Weight loss matters and should not be underestimated in its role in the prevention and treatment of many medical conditions.
Once diagnosed
with type 2 diabetes, the individual will likely be prescribed increasing
amounts of medication, over time, to help the struggling body regulate the
blood glucose levels. Eventual reliance on injecting insulin or using newer,
more powerful drugs persists until the body finally gives up. 
Movement
It is important
to reduce the amount of "screen-time" before bed and to keep to good
sleep routine, with reduced caffeine and alcohol levels especially in the
evenings.
It is scandalous to see the undervalued network of pharmacies, with their highly trained pharmacists, have not been used to deliver this programme. The extended opening hours of pharmacies and the expertise of their pharmacists could have been utilised to enhance the availability and effectiveness of any national weight management programme. The recruiting and educating of new DPP trainers, coupled with the need for premises is unnecessary and frivolous. 
We had a 19 year old man who was about to start teaching and wanted to make massive changes to avoid any difficulties at school with pupils teasing him. Over a 2 year period he went from 21 stone to 11 stone. He continued to come in for weigh-ins for a couple of years. He changed his life dramatically.
Robert Cousins, Superintendent Pharmacist and manager at Insync Healthcare
Pharmacy
