Ever broken your diet before?
Highly frustrating, isn’t it? Please don’t feel bad; according to research, most people do. In fact, research done by the Medical Nutritional Institute has also shown that people who fanatically stick to their diets for extended periods are actually worse off than those who don’t deprive themselves completely. They seem to cruise along (or so it seems) until something snaps in their head causing them to abandon their diet completely or suddenly devour as much food as they can, undoing all their hard work in a flash.

Why can’t we just behave ourselves and stick to a diet?
The truth is that in order to survive famine, we’ve been genetically programmed to eat more than what we need. This tendency is encoded in the hard-drives of our brains and cannot be erased. Wherever you go, delicious food is shoved in your face. Our social lives revolve around it and it comforts us on days when we feel down in the dumps.

Ever felt an almost animal-like urge to gulp down some delicious food?
Science tells us that this is normal. Hunger and its opposite, satiety, are controlled by two small centres next to each other in the brain. If you electronically stimulate the feeding centre of an animal with an electrode, it immediately causes the animal to start eating voraciously – mind your fingers aren’t in the way! If you stimulate the satiety centre in the same animal, however, it causes instant and total lack of appetite (even if the animal has not eaten for days!). Humans are no different... When glucose levels in the bloodstream fall below a certain level, the feeding centre switches on and compels us to search for food, while the activation of our satiety centre allows us to focus on our favourite TV programme without contemplating the remains of last night’s dinner.

Dealing with hunger is easy. Low blood sugar, however, brings even the bravest among us to their knees.
This is how it works: If a large amount of glucose suddenly enters your system, a large amount of insulin is released to ensure that all glucose molecules are rapidly removed from the bloodstream. Blood insulin levels, however, do not immediately adjust to lowering blood sugar levels, (as the duration of insulin’s action continues for a while longer), even after glucose levels have been normalised. This causes blood sugar levels to drop below normal.

Brain cells contain no energy stores and are totally dependent on a continuous supply of energy (in the form of glucose) from the bloodstream. When low blood sugar sets in, the first symptoms therefore occur in your head. As your neurons begin to misfire, lack of concentration, tiredness and drowsiness set in. Adrenaline, released in response by the adrenal glands, makes you irritable and short tempered. Your knees go wobbly and your brain turns to mush. In order to save your life, a strong primordial urge to eat takes control of your body. Can anybody be blamed for losing control?

What does the latest scientific research say?

“We don’t need another diet trial; we need a change of paradigm.”
Sacks et al.

This comment comes from a landmark study reported in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, where researchers examined the efficacy of different weight-loss diets. What they found was that no real difference exists between diets regarding the amount of weight people lose. Interestingly, they also noted that weight loss achieved with diet resembled a weight loss result that can be achieved with medication. Their observations, however, led them to conclude that behavioural factors (rather than the macronutrient composition of your diet) played the biggest role in the end result. In other words, how much you eat is more important than what you eat.

This leaves us with three options:
a) we can try harder doing the same thing
b) we can throw in the towel and let our bodies go to ruin
c) we can fight back using better tactics

This is where strategy versus effort becomes important. Make peace with the fact that there will be times when you will step outside the boundaries of your meal plan. However, you can compensate for this by using a damage control loophole to prevent you from undoing all your hard work. Accept that you are human and it’s “okay” to enjoy delicious food. Replace the word “cheat” with “damage control loophole”. This seemingly insignificant strategy will change your emotion from one of guilt, to hope - an important step in maintaining the necessary level of motivation to keep you on the road to success.

This, however, does not mean that you can eat as much as you like and expect medication to do the rest! You still have the responsibility of controlling your dietary intake as best you can. On the other hand, wanting to look good and feel healthy does not mean you must torture or deprive yourself. Unless you are somewhat of a fanatic, no one can sustain a depravation-type diet or gruelling exercise programme without the wheels eventually falling off. Even worse, your experience will make you hate the process so much that you’ll give up and lose all interest in weight maintenance - a highly counter-productive strategy!

What can I do besides throwing in the towel?
To combat excess weight gain after a weekend or function when you will be unable to stick to your diet, you can use three different damage control strategies. Two of them involve products. Let’s use a slice of cheesecake as an example. For the fatty component of cheesecake you can use orlistat. This schedule 3 product blocks the effects of a gastric enzyme called lipase, leaving the fat undigested, thereby allowing it to pass through your system without ending up on your hips. i-slim diet RESCUE™ will take care of the carbohydrate component of cheesecake. i-slim diet RESCUE™ works by helping insulin with its gate-keeping duty relating to the movement of glucose. By doing some of insulin's work, less insulin is required and therefore released, resulting in lower blood insulin levels. This means that less fat is produced and stored.

For your convenience, i-slim diet RESCUE™ comes with a small pill-in-your-pocket container. This is included in the package and ensures that you always have a supply ready for those often unpredictable occasions. Besides any starchy meal, it also works for alcohol, thus allowing you to maintain your weight without demolishing all your hard work in a single celebration.

The last damage control loophole is quite simple – just skip the next meal. You frankly don’t need it!

[To read more about i-slim diet RESCUE™]