Keeping it off is the hard part
DO you want to know one sure-fire route to immediate weight loss? It’s easy. You stop eating. Anyone who goes without food for a few weeks or more is guaranteed to lose weight.
The hard thing is keeping the weight off once you go back to normal eating. The problem is that you haven’t adopted any new habits, or changed your lifestyle, which makes it much harder to maintain the weight loss long term.
That is why I was surprised to see Collingwood president and TV and radio presenter Eddie McGuire openly discuss his extreme weight-loss methods.
McGuire drank three cups of herb tonic a day in place of meals for two weeks. By the third week he introduced half a cucumber and a meagre 50g serve of chicken into his daily meal plan.
It’s all part of a “gentle, intuitive approach using Chinese herbs and remedies” practised by Dr Shuquan Liu, but it sounds pretty damn brutal to me. It also flies in the face of accepted weight-loss wisdom.
McGuire has now lost 15kg and says he feels terrific. Good on him.
First up, I want to congratulate him for his efforts.
It’s not the kind of thing prominent figures often talk about, so I applaud McGuire for being so open about the issue.
Too often men in his position with high-powered jobs and busy family lives put themselves last; they’re too consumed with the demands of daily life to watch what they eat.
The result is too often a ticking time bomb and a perfect candidate for a heart attack: a middle-aged man who doesn’t exercise and who carries excess weight around his middle.
But I am less convinced by the way McGuire has lost the weight.
Dr Liu, you might remember, came to national prominence a few years ago after he helped Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull drop 14kg.
He has also treated a whole host of business luminaries such as Aussie Home Loans’ John Symond.
Funnily enough, Dr Liu’s business website mentions McGuire, Turnbull and Symond prominently, but it doesn’t include the fact that he was found guilty of unsatisfactory professional misconduct by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission this year.
The case involved a patient who attended one of Dr Liu’s clinics for treatment for chronic ulcerative colitis in 2014. The patient, who weighed 68kg, subsequently lost 9kg in 11 days on a program of fasting, remedial massage and acupuncture.
The commission didn’t conclude the doctor failed to take into account the patient’s existing medical conditions, but it did find Dr Liu failed to keep proper records, including patient history, treatment plan and his full diagnosis.
The speed of the weight loss advocated by Dr Liu is also highly controversial, particularly given the promise of weight loss of up to 24kg after only 101 days.
Indeed, doctors and dietitians are sceptical, including Dr Geoff Dodd from the Australian Medical Association.
“Any rapid weight loss can be followed by a rebound if people are unable to sustain the program they have entered into,” he said.
Well, fasting is not exactly a longterm weight-loss option, is it?
Conventional wisdom is that the only way to have sustained weight loss over time is to eat less processed, fatty, salty and sugary food and eat more lean meat, fruit and vegetables.
More exercise and less alcohol also helps, but it’s not easy.
There are many examples of prominent figures who have promoted their chosen weight-loss methods, only to have a very public fall from grace when they’ve put it all back on again. Remember Oprah Winfrey, who lost 33kg thanks to protein shakes back in the 1990s?
More recently, Magda Szubanski and Chrissie Swan lost significant amounts of weight through Jenny Craig, only to put most of it back on.
All those figures ended up doing was making their weight a topic of public attention and interest, which no doubt did little to promote positive, long-term weight loss and good self-esteem.
It’s even more reason to admire McGuire for speaking out and doing something about his size.
I wish him good luck in his travels.
TOO OFTEN MEN IN HIS POSITION WITH HIGH-POWERED JOBS AND BUSY FAMILY LIVES PUT THEMSELVES LAST ...