Women who say they have been failed by weightloss programmes sold to them by diet companies are planning a demonstration outside parliament on Monday to hit back at the multimillion-pound industry for "wreaking havoc with appetites and lives while it builds huge profits".
The protest, part of a campaign called Ditching Dieting, has been organised to coincide with representatives of the diet industry giving evidence to an all-party parliamentary group inquiry into the causes and consequences of body image anxiety.
The organisation spearheading the campaign, Endangered Bodies, says its aim is to "expose the role of the diet industry in destabilising women's and girls' appetites and desires". It is calling on women who have been negatively affected by dieting to attend the protest and bring diet plans, slimming magazines, calorie counters or anything else associated with dieting so they can be ditched in a hazardous waste bin at the heart of the demonstration.
The campaign criticises high-profile slimming clubs such as Slimming World and Weight Watchers and expresses concern about diets endorsed by celebrities which often have no proven long-term benefits.
New research published by Mintel in its Dieting Trends UK report, published in November 2011, shows that public interest in weight loss and continuing concern about obesity mean that around one in three people are constantly striving to lose weight. But women remain far more geared towards losing weight than men. Whereas less than a quarter (23%) of men admitted they were trying to lose weight most of the time, two fifths (39%) of women said the same.
Yet according to research from the US, highlighted by Endangered Bodies, only 5% of dieters manage to keep the weight they lose off permanently. That means 95% of diets fail with people putting lost weight back on, and even increasing to more than their pre-diet weight, within five years. The group says diet companies rely on this failure, which leads to repeated attempts at dieting, to make a profit and that if diets worked people would need to do them only once.
Representatives of Weight Watchers and Slimming World will give evidence on Monday to the body image inquiry chaired by the Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson – along with those from the cosmetic surgery industry and the Fat is a Feminist Issue author and psychotherapist Susie Orbach. Future sessions will hear from the media, advertisers and the fitness and fashions sectors. Members of the public are also encouraged to submit evidence. The inquiry's findings are due to be published in May.
Zoe Helman, head of public health at Weight Watchers, who will appear at the inquiry, said: "We have never said Weight Watchers will suit everyone. But we know that what we do works and has been independently verified by scientific evidence."
Slimming World said it focused on building dieters' confidence and tackling feelings of guilt and failure. It said in a statement: "We completely agree that quick-fix, short-term diets that force dieters to go hungry or use complicated counting systems are unsustainable and often condemn those of us who follow them to a cycle of loss and regain."
But the Endangered Bodies spokeswoman Amy Anderson said: "The dieting industry presents itself as a benign force but actually it causes people a lot of misery, so we're highlighting the toxic nature of diets and how they're damaging to our mental and physical health.
"I've spent 10 years pouring my heart and soul into dieting, convinced that my life would be better and that I'd be much happier [if I lost weight] but actually the opposite was true. Not only did the diets not work, at the end of the ten years I was heavier than I've ever been but also I was thoroughly miserable."
The blogger Jenny Jameson, who runs a site called F*ck the Diets, agrees with the group's aims and will be attending the demonstration. She says dieting made her feel worthless and nearly cost her her marriage: "I went to Weight Watchers and started doing their points system and it set me up into this bargaining thing. It got to the point where I was refusing nights out and the only thing that was important was losing the weight," she said.
Nina Bennet, a singer from Croydon, says she ended up in a cycle of dieting, regaining weight and dieting again and that the diet industry didn't help her. "I think for women your appearance is so much sewn up in your worth; if you're not conforming to the thin ideal then the diet industry is just lurking in the background waiting to prey on that insecurity."
source: Guardian
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