So let’s start with a positive. At least there are some people that want to challenge their issues with food and weight. They have started to look at their overall calorie consumption and the bad foods that they are eating.

Right, here’s the bad parts to my mind:

They are promoting this show as a fast way to drop a dress size in just 2 weeks. I don’t think that’s a very good mind set, how about drop a dress size and keep it off, because I think that the women involved in this show will just put the weight back on afterwards.

Why do I believe this?

Well it has to do with the fact that I think their destroying their metabolism. They have been recommended by a registered dietician to eat only 1200 calories a day.

In Tuesday’s show they did a weigh in after just 4 days of eating 1200 calories. The results varied from 1-6 pounds lost for most of the women, apart from one who gained 2lbs!!

It’s easy to lose weight when you restrict calories…but what sort of weight are they losing. Do these ladies just want to lose weight or do they want to lose FAT.

I guess it’s fat loss that they are really after, but in the scenario where you severely limit caloric intake you end up losing a lot of water and a lot of muscle.

You really don’t want to lose muscle as this is the only place in the body where fat is burnt up.

So it’s easy to drop a dress size in just two weeks but what are the long term consequences. The program recommends that they only do this for 2 weeks, so after 2 weeks they will have lost muscle and then when they revert to a normal (2000 calorie) diet their body will not be able to process all those calories. The net result will be even more weight gain than they lost in the 2 weeks.

Now a bit like not all the women lost weight in the first 4 days, some of the women won’t put the weight back on, but I bet it’s only one at the most.

As for the lady that didn’t lose weight and actually gained weight, this is quite common with these types of diets as the body reverts back to ‘flight or fight’ basic primal response.

Her body is so worried about the lack of calories and possibility of there being a famine that it is storing anything it can as fat and adding weight to deal with the lack of upcoming food. It doesn’t know what she’s doing.

The program didn’t describe this and left the viewers wondering how this happened…poor TV!!

In my opinion this is quite possibly one of the most inappropriate and ill conceived pieces of TV programming that I have ever seen.

Channel 4 should be ashamed for not making more of the fact that this can lead to more harmful results than good. The only place I found any sort of disclaimer about who it is meant for was some small writing on the website.

The next instalment is tonight and I will be watching to see if they actually explain things a little more fully.

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