Fat Chicks Rule

Fighting fat is fighting fat people.

I have mentioned before that soda bans and taxes don’t affect me, since except for the rare root beer, I don't drink soda, diet or regular, large or small. I pretty much drink only water and tea. The only time I buy soda is the two parties I give every year. (And yes, because I love my friends, I even buy diet soda if they want it.) You wouldn't know that from some of the comments on my blog. According to the trolls, I don't exercise and I eat only chips, pizza and burgers. The issue is this. I often hear the statement "Fight fat, not fat people" by “well meaning” people who think that by saying hate the sin, not the sinner it absolves them from the pressure they put on fat people to become thin. However, since fat is genetic and losing it in the long run is near impossible for most people, how do you think fat people feel when they change habits, improve health outcomes and don't get thin? Do you still want to fight their fat? A recent study done by Harvard shows that while the majority of people want interventions in childhood “obesity”, they don't believe fat people should pay a surcharge for health insurance (that's a relief. That makes only food the villain and not health care.) Respondents were much more likely to support less-intrusive measures to curb obesity: 80 percent of those surveyed said the government should require calorie counts to be posted, 75 percent said they'd like the government to prevent the use of food stamps for soda and other sugary beverages, and 88 percent said they'd support requiring public school students to get at least 45 minutes of exercise daily. By contrast, more drastic measures were less widely supported: Nearly two-thirds said they'd oppose a $50 annual surcharge on health insurance premiums for obese people, 80 percent opposed making soda or junk food possession a punishable offense in schools... The issue here isn't healthy eating, the issue is that this is done solely because people are fat. It's our fault that you can't get a pitcher of soda with lunch; or your kids can't have pizza at school, or cupcakes for someone's birthday party. Even if the whole world benefits in the long run, it's done because of us. It's our fault.  The problem is now that the meme of fatness equaling anti-health has been repeated so universally and so often, it might be impossible to separate them. That's not actually the case, though. While "the obesity epidemic" may be a convenient catch-all for the illnesses and health problems related to our food chain, it's a lazy term and an inaccurate one. Are we actually worried about public health? Or are we offended by fat bodies that don't meet our thin ideals? If the issue was that people in this country had horrendous eating and exercise habits but no one was fat, you wouldn’t see this. This is has nothing to do with ill health and everything to do with people being fat. This is why we need to stop associating health with thinness. We need to stop fighting fat and accept that people come in all sizes and that when they eat healthy and exercise they may not become thin.

New England Journal of Medicine - Don't help.

Recently the New England Journal of Medicine came out with a "Study" showing seven myths and six assumptions about "obesity" Although not a single one is a myth or presumption about fatness, say how the obesity epidemic is overblown, how being fat doesn't affect your mortality except for the supersized, or how everyone ignores the rise of dieting came with the rise in fatness. Instead every single one is about weight loss/ dieting. Some of it is fairly harmless like sex only burns about 14 calories compared to 300, or that breast feeding doesn't make your kids thin. Please don't stop having sex or breastfeeding because of this study as both have health benefits. Others aren't as helpful, that gym classes don't make you thin. That's right they don't, regular exercise for most people despite their size makes them healthy, not neccessarily thin. 

Normally I would say this is a positive article because it shows that healthy habits don't actually mean weight loss. 

Until I got to one of the myths.

Within weight-loss trials, more rapid and greater initial weight loss has been associated with lower body weight at the end of long-term follow-up

Essentially the "Myth busted" is that rapid weight loss works better than steady weight loss. The authors point out that some people have been successful at it. Depends how you define success. In 1999-2000, I was a success. I lost 35-40 pounds (I was still fat) in about 6 months and while I never got to a goal weight, I kept the weight loss for another year. But a year after that I was back to my original weight. A number that I've hovered within 10 pounds of for the last 10 years. I never said people can't lose weight, I said they can't keep it off in the long run. Whether they lose it slowly or quickly. 

Rapid weight loss can lead to gallstones, and loss of vitamins and minerals.  Most rapid weight loss comes from very low calorie diets either liquid diets or weight loss surgery which means you aren't eating enough for your body to function properly. 

I think Marion Nestle hits the nail on the head on the reason for this "study".

"I think it’s weird.  I don’t get it," said Marion Nestle of New York University. "I can’t understand the point of the paper unless it’s to say that the only things that work are drugs, bariatric surgery, and meal replacements, all of which are made by companies with financial ties to the authors. " She noted that the researchers who signed the paper also provided a long list of companies they have been paid to work with. 

If you read the affliations, you get big food, big pharma, and the diet industry. As mentioned last week, the diet industry is expected to make 66 billion in 2013.

Not surprising that they want you to not eat healthy food and exercise (To be honest they don't actually say that) and instead to take drugs, get surgery, and go on crash diets. 

 

Guess what still doesn't work? Stigma!

I have mentioned repeatedly that stigma  not only does not make you thin but can cause health issues due to stress, fear of exercising and binging. 

I'm not a lone crazy for saying this, even groups that encourage weight loss such as the Rudd Center believe that stigma does not work and is harmful.

Of course you can't tell that to the Hastings Center Daniel Callahan who writes in his article:

It will be no less necessary to find ways to bring strong social pressure to bear on individuals, going beyond anodyne education and low-key ex- hortation. It will be imperative, first, to persuade them that they ought to want a good diet and exercise for themselves and for their neighbor and, second, that excessive weight and outright obesity are not socially acceptable any longer. 

He then continues that more stigma not less will help fat people become super thin. He essentially wants to make being fat unpopular like smoking but being fat isn't a habit. 

It won't work. It won't work because diets, "lifestyle changes", stigma, financial incentives, penalties, and eating less calories than your body needs  does not work for most people in the long run. With 20 million dieters, I'm sure you're going to find some who succeeded but most won't. With almost 40 years of yo-yo dieting, we're aren't getting thinner and dieting is causing a lot of the weight gain. (As I have mentioned before, I estimate about 50 pounds of my weight is from dieting)  And what happens to people who despite Daniel Callahan's whipping and screaming at them to lose weight,  still fail to do so? (Hint: tough shit.)

He says that fat people don't think they are fat. Here's the lowdown, Mr. Callahan, we know we are fat. We know we are fat when people scream at us "Fat Bitch" while trying to exercise, or when we try to find fashionable, affordable, well fitted clothes, or a comfortable seat on the bus, train or plane or we are told for every ailment we have is weight related (Even when thin people get the same fucking diseases) or we are told we are too fat to keep the same job we had for ten years or we are denied health or life insurance because we weight too much. We know when we see billboards that say "Obesity Kills" "Beat Obesity with a stick." or "Save the whales, lose the blubber, go vegetarian." 

That is what it's like to be fat. No amount of stigma, pressure, or flat out hatred will change that. Every fucking morning both and after I accepted my body I knew I was fat. Fat people aren't in denial we just don't want a lecture when we mention our weight.  

In the end the intense pressure to be thin comes from one really place, a 66 billion dollar incentive to make people hate their bodies. 

New diet drug: Bulimia.

No blog post next week as I will be away.

Here on the market is new device to make your fat issues go away. It’s called the SuckIt 3000. In order to you use this device you have to have one criterion: be fat (it doesn't matter if you are healthy or not). If you are slender the SuckIt3000 is not for you. It is socially unacceptable for a thin person to have bulimia (thin people with bulimia get interventions and Lifetime TV specials). It is however social acceptable for fat people to have bulimia. (Fat people don’t worry, instead of a Lifetime special, you get the hit TV show The Biggest Loser!)

What the SuckIt3000 does is stick a tube into your stomach (either through magic or a surgical incision) and after you eat, the tube will suck all the food vaccum cleaner and into your handy dandy vomit purse.

Then all you have to dump those contents in the toilet or nearest trash receptacle. Don't worry you won't feel humiliated. Fat people love to be shamed! 

Think I'm joking? Well last year this very device was approved for use in some EU countries and they are also looking for an approval in the US. No it’s not called the SuckIt3000 but it is in fact a surgical incision into your stomach where a tube is place. That tube sucks up food into a container which you then dump into a toilet.

Rebecca Jane Weinstein covers this horrible device in an article in XOJane. 

I imagine that this aspiration port will be a sexy new accessory with my bikini on the beach, and intimacy will be greatly enhanced by the hole in my stomach where food pours out (what a chuckle we’ll get during a romance accident). I will feel nothing but pride in my new appearance when I have to get up from the table in 20 minutes to aspirate, and everyone will be so enamored by my hot new bod that no one will blink an eye when I carry my aspiration bucket to that new trendy joint while I am wearing the perfect little black dress (which I guess I will have to remove for aspiration purposes –- but who knows, the latest runway fashions may include an aspiration-port-cut-out).  

In the end this means one thing, it's okay to be anorexic or bulimic, tortured with crazy surgeries, but only if you're fat. 

 

Weight watchers is still a diet

Readers of my blog know I have no love for WW. When I first decided I needed to lose weight, I tried doing my own diet. I showed little success of 3 years of diet foods and OTC diet pills, I moved to WW I believe when I was 16. I had no idea that diets didn't work and thought that if you were fat, you went on a diet, lost weight and everything would be fine. WW didn't ask for a permission slip from my parents but my parents did pay my joiner's fee and weekly fee (at least I got a discount of a whole $2 for being a student). We met in the basement of a synagogue, shared our weight loss successes and our challenges. Every week I was given a fresh booklet to check off exchanges. The team leader was a woman name Rosalie who I believe was one of the rare WW team leaders who lost weight and kept it off. She wasn't famous so she never made it into the ads. 

The time I last did WW, I was 24, had done it a number of times over past eight years. Each time it ended with me gaining the weight I loss plus more. This would be my final time because the first week I followed the plan and gained weight. I never went back. 

As far as diets being bad for your health WW seems like it's not as bad as the other. They often have ads touting it as a lifestyle change. One January, their slogan was "Diets are mean." And a recent article cover WW's CEO touts that it's not about dieting but behavior modication. 

The original Weight Watchers program centered around calorie counting which often led participants to initially lose weight but then later gain it back.

I'm not sure which original program he was talking about. I first did Weight Watchers 25 years ago and there no calorie counting. First it was exchanges, then it was point system then pointsplus, now they have something new called 360. Maybe he was talking about the original plan from the 1970's. 

To me WW is the most dangerous plan because it flies under the rader and gets labeled as the "sensible weight loss plan" rather than crash dieting of other plans. WW sneaks into your workplace, your wellness discounts, your insurance plans. 

Laura Beck of Jezebel literally has my almost exact same WW story. (And I swear I wrote the part about WW before I read the article.)

I went to my first Weight Watchers meeting when I was 12*. I attended with my mom because she always wanted to lose weight, and I was a fat kid, so it made sense. Of course, I'd been on other diets before, but this one was different, this time I would succeed through six easy meals a day and a healthy new interest in jogging. The weeklyexercise in terror meeting involved sneaking into their offices in a local mall 

In the end Weight Watchers isn't a lifestyle change or even healthy eating. Whether you count points, exchanges or apples, it still limits the amount of calories you can eat making it a diet.  

Eating season.

In the US, this Thursday week is Thanksgiving and the official start of eating season. This is the season where the halls of Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers are empty. It probably doesn't matter to them because they are planning new ad campaigns to tell you they aren't diets, and that because celebrities can lose weight, so can you.  

Their job isn't to help you be healthy or even really lose weight but to make you feel bad about yourself so they can make a big pot of money at the end of the diet industry rainbow. They want you to fail because tht means that you'll be back every single January.

When I first did Weight Watchers, I didn't restart in January. I was one of the weird folks who would start during eating season. The big rush came in January or right before summer. 

To me it seemed you wanted to diet in the fall. This was the time of the worst temptations. Halloween candy, Thanksgiving Turkey and unlimited Christmas parties. You wanted to go through the holidays without gain.  I also liked the nice small quiet meetings, soon to be shattered by the massive crowds the first week in January. January was also the usually time that my body was pissed over not having enough food and began to rebel with binges. I went to Weight Watchers on Thursday and I became used to Thursday night binge day. 

I will admit that I did pick up some good habits from my dieting years (but it doesn't make up for the bad habits). The first is drinking water, the second is trying to be healthy (in my dieting days to me diet meant health), no matter what part of the year it was.

These two habits stuck with me and became stronger. Right now for the most part, I drink water or tea and that's it. 

The second, the being "good" no matter what said with me, and strengthened with Health at Every Size. You see I did eat Halloween candy, will eat more than I should at Thanksgiving, eat, drink and be merry at the holiday parties but I will continue to eat my vegetables and move. 

You see while dieting during eating season, once I went off the diet that was it. I stopped exercising and eating healthy foods. Because dieting was all or nothing. 

Golda over at Body Love Wellness gives some good tips for surviving the holiday season, dealing with "Helpful" relatives, enjoying your holiday food, and learning not to stress completely out.

And speaking of diets, every year the Healthy Weight Network has the slim chance awards. Awards for the worst of the worst in dieting. Last years winner was HGC. And they are open for nominations. 

So this season, keep your healthy habits by enjoying your holidays without worry about gain or loss.  

Dieting really doesn't work.

I am a firm believer in what works. When it comes to medicine, I have friends who say alternative medicine doesn't work, and I have friends who believe that regular medicine is worse for you. I have a belief in what works with the least amount of side effects whether it be regular or alt. medicine. 

Dieting is an example of something that doesn't work. It has never worked for me and about 95% of other people who have done it. 

It doesn't help you lose weight. If anything it helps you gain weight. 

... brain scans reveal that weight loss makes it harder for us to exercise self-control and resist tempting food. Worse still, the more people diet, the stronger these effects can become, leaving some almost doomed to being overweight as a result of their attempts to become slim.

Essentially dieting wrecks your body, makes you more hungry, and gives you more of an urge to overeat, slows your metobolism so it's easy to regain. 

And it doesn't work to improve health outcomes in diabetics. 

A large federal study of whether diet and weight loss can prevent heart attacks and strokes in overweight and obese people with Type 2 diabetes has ended two years ahead of schedule because the intensive program did not help.

There is IMHO a belief that if you become fat you will get type 2 diabetic. And yes it is true that many fat people have diabetes. The notion is if you are fat and diabetic you should lose weight to control your diabetes. (Sorry thin diabetics, we can offer you no advice.) Any time Diabetes is mentioned, weight loss advice soons follows. No one things that hey maybe it isn't fatness that causes diabetes but the other way around. Ignored are the fact diabetes is highly genetic. For some people may be able to go on a diabetic diet (small case, i.e. not for weight loss) and increase their physical fitness. While some it won't work for at all.

When it comes to public health policy regarding weight and health, the aphorism that insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result has never seemed more appropriate. -- Paul Campos.

 

Starving

(REPRINTED FROM AN IGIGI COLUMN)

A few years ago I read “The Great Starvation Experiment” by Todd Tucker.  It was about “the Minnesota Starvation Experiment” done in the 1940’s run by Dr. Ancel Keys.  In it 36 conscientious objectors were willing to starve themselves for 24 weeks, so that Dr. Keys could learn more about hunger. How it worked, what is was, and how people who were in the process were more or less likely to behave.

While starving the men invariably became preoccupied with food.  Some men suffered from terrible edemas.  Four men were removed from the study due to their reactions: the first dreamt of cannibalism, then went on a massive eating binge (food, not people).  When confronted with this, he first threatened to kill himself, and then threatened to kill Dr. Keys.  The second failed subject went on a massive eating binge without even being aware of it until after it was over (although he was not removed from the study because of that.  They removed him for peeing blood.) The third subject was caught stealing food and eating out of the garbage, the fourth was accused of cheating when he stopped losing weight.

Those were merely the ones removed for presenting extreme behaviors. Of those who remained, one chopped his finger off and another repeatedly started fights.  They all lost muscle mass, felt depressed, had trouble exercising, and becoming aroused.  After the study was finished, 10 men decided to get involved in a follow up study.  When they were finally allowed to eat freely and unsupervised every one of them went on a massive binge.

Here’s a fun challenge: take a guess as to how many calories these were the men were allowed to consume each day: 500, which would be complete starvation according to the U.N.? 900, which was about what the Nazis thought was enough for slave laborers?  Nope. In Keys’ study the men were consuming about 1,500 calories a day give or take. Scary monsters, huh? If 1,500 calories a day is enough to turn an otherwise healthy happy human male into a slavering zombie, can you imagine what someone taking in only 900 or 500 calories a day must be going through? What must it be like to be really hungry?

After the establishment of the Nuremberg Code (which banned torturous medical experiments), no one thinks that an experiment like this one would be allowed to happen again.

Except that it is still going on today and shows what can only be called full and willing participation by all involved.  I’m talking about commercial diets.  According to Consumer Reports the average amount of a major diet is 1500 calories.  Liquid diets and weight loss surgery can go even lower (about 800 calories); Weight loss surgery is forced starvation because there is a limit to how much food the stomach can take before the body has a bad reaction to so much food. Which is bad enough, but actually paying $20,000 or more to volunteer for this is just plain crazy.

People consuming these low amounts of calories suffer the same symptoms as the men in Keys’ study.  Even if they are fat!  The last time you dieted, don’t you remember that you thought about food all the time or that you were too tired to do anything you enjoyed?  Every diet I was on I remembered that all I thought about was food.  Nothing was more important than my next meal.

Chuck the diet, the diet mentality and weight-based health.  Embrace Health at Every Size (HAES).   Don’t fall for false promises, overnight success stories, celebrities or any BS that the diet companies put out that they aren’t really a diets. (Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig are DIETS).  Dieting or changing your lifestyle plan solely on the purpose of losing weight will only end in failure. 

Stigma against children is even worse.

Last week I wrote about stigma against fat people in general, but this week I want to talk about a more disturbing trend, namely stigma against fat children. I  have a theory that the diet industry sought to get into the untapped market of men and children (With children, it's the ingrained fat=bad message they will take with them to adulthood.) With billions of more dollars at stake, why not have propaganda and fear campaigns? (like OH MY GOD, ALL FAT CHILDREN EVENTUALLY DIE!)

It's not surprising that with this pressure to be thin or else eating disorders have risen.

As obesity in the United States rises, it is little wonder the overall perception about body image is going in the opposite direction. It is estimated that 10 percent of females between the ages of 10 and 20 struggles with bulimia, and 4 percent of women in college have the eating disorder, according to information released by Insight Behavioral Health Centers in Chicago.

A new anti-obesity program in Minnesota is putting pressure not only to become thin but to blame fat parents for encouraging their children to become fat. One of the ads features a fat woman shopping. As she puts food into her cart that looks like she's eating like a college freshman, her young daughter does the same. After all if you are fat, you obviously only eat junk food. And if you are thin you never eat junk food. (Of course in the real world, you fill your cart with healthy foods, while your kids fill their cart with junk food.)

I do not fucking eat chocolate cereal and buckets of ice cream. Here is what I actually do: Pretty much every morning before work I walk 1.1 miles uphill to a coffee shop, which is across the street from the organic co-op where I do all my grocery shopping. I eat normal, human amounts of unprocessed, fresh, largely local foods.

Once upon a time that cart looked like mine. "Really?" The fat haters might say "She's admitting it! She eats like that woman in the ad!" Actually that looked very much like my cart in my dieting/binge days. When on the diet, the cart would be filled with vegetables, fruits, diet soda and weight watchers meals. Off the diet, chips, ice cream, diet soda and weight watchers meals. 

Now my cart is of a person of normal eating, a mixture of all food groups, including OMFG, one bag of cookies. Your see Trader Joe's makes these awesome gluten free cookies. There are 14 in the bag. Which means I eat two cookies a day. OOOHHHHHH Every once in a while I buy ice cream (OMFG again).

I don't have a daughter who I can be a bad influence on with my bag of cookies but I have a niece who lives with me. If anything, none of my eating habits effect her. The whole local food thing my husband and I rant about so much bores her and she calls lectures on healthy eating a  "Narc fest". The one thing I'm grateful for is I was off dieting before my niece got to her self-conscious age and I got her to accept people of all sizes. I'm happy to say she sometimes got self-conscious but it never got bad AND she doesn't judge people on anything but their character. 

Had I still been dieting I worried that I might have made my niece self conscious or made her believed fat can be fixed with dieting. The ad talks about how fat parents are to blame, it doesn't talk about the encouragement of eating disorders. 

The tendency to undereat spins from a cycle that repeats itself in almost every female-to-female relationship, and everything from media to retail companies fuels the problem.

"You say, ‘I'm ugly, I'm fat,' and your friend says, ‘Oh no, you're pretty. I'm fat," McClanahan said. "You hear it from peers and from your parents, and the standard of beauty has gotten thinner and thinner. Now you see size double zero in stores. These negative standards have an effect on self-esteem.

This be thin at all costs is wreaking havoc on children who are being bullied not only by their peers but teachers and parents as well. 

Students report that weight is among the most common reasons that their peers are bullied. In one national study, 84 percent of adolescent students surveyed saw overweight students being called names, being teased in a mean way, and teased during physical activities. Over two-thirds reported observing overweight and obese peers being excluded, ignored, avoided, teased in the cafeteria, and targeted by negative rumors. The majority of students observed verbal threats and physical threats.

While peers are the most common perpetrators, teachers and parents also contribute to stigmatizing obese and overweight children. Teachers, including physical education teachers, report lower expectations for overweight students compared to thinner students, endorse negative stereotypes or believe that overweight and obese children have family problems. Even at home, children may face critical and negative comments, with significant numbers of overweight and obese children reporting weight-related teasing and criticism from their parents.

Pressure the parents that they are bad if they let their kids have junk food, pressure the children that they are bad for being fat and you will see an epidemic of kids with low self esteem, body and food hatred, eating disorders. Perhaps even easily influenced by the next new diet plan. 

There are better ways. First off we need to stop spreading the message fat=bad. When a fat kid does everything right but never gets into the thin ideal? What then? We need to accept that people, even children come in all shapes and sizes. We can encourage our children to be active, enjoy nutritious foods without worry and to accept their body.

One stupid diet, OMG!

No blog post next week, I will be on vacation swimming and hiking. 

When I was in college,  I took a course on Anthropology and discovered that hunter/ gatherers were lazy. They did not work 40 hour weeks. 

"Experts" often give us their opinion that Our Great American Obesity Epidemic is caused by too little activity. We are not moving the way our hunter/gather ancestors did. Except that the activity levels of Hunter/Gatherers and westerners  use are apparently the same.

Despite spending their days trekking long distances to forage for wild plants and game, the Hadza burned no more calories each day than adults in the U.S. and Europe. The team ran several analyses accounting for the effects of body weight, body fat percentage, age, and gender. In all analyses, daily energy expenditure among the Hadza hunter-gatherers was indistinguishable from that of Westerners. 

Meanwhile Lancet is saying the exact opposite, people aren't exercising enough in the Americas and Europe and it's spreading. Soon people in third world countries might become fat. Oh nos! Maybe they even start having a higher life expectancy. We don't want that to happen!

Despite mentioning both studies, I am not advocating decreasing anyone's activity level. I am merely trying to show two things: one is that the OMG obesity alarmists don't necessarily know what is good or bad for you. To them all fat people are the same regardless of their health or fittness. The second is they don't really know how much exercise is good for you. When I took a class with Ragen Chastain she mentioned how some days you have a lot of energy for exercise and some days you don't. And it's true. Some days I like to walk from the subway (anywhere from 1-3 mile trek depending on the stop) and I can cover those three miles like it's nothing, other days, even the one mile can give me trouble (For me activity later depends a lot of the weather and the amount of sleep).  I mentioned a few weeks ago that a small percent of the population doesn't benefit from exercise.

According to an article on Alternet focusing on fitness may be no better than focusing on impossible beauty ideals and may be a class issue (i.e. fitness is for the rich only.)

Beyond body image, there’s also the issue of class and money. Within the pages of fitness publications are hundreds of advertisements for products that we’re told will solve our body woes and make us instantly healthier. The imagery is familiar: the woman who’s ever-so-lightly tanned, blonde-ponytailed, free of body hair, and toting an expensive gym bag full of color-coordinated gear, her legs and abs tightened by hours of private training sessions, Zumba and Pilates. Above all, you know she is upper-class.

I have mentioned before about the victimization of fat people especially poor fat people as people who are too stupid to understand fitness and nutrition. I have also mentioned that I eat fresh organic local vegetables because I can afford them and I get in my most activity during vacation. Everyone has been given a different body and can has their own limit. Not everyone's limits the same. But if we can't exchange body acceptance for healthism. 

Oh, and speaking of OMG, I saw a sign on the subway about a new revolution in dieting. It's everything the experts don't want you to know. You should take cold baths, drink black coffee, skip breakfast and in six weeks you will lose 20 lbs.

I'm sure if you follow this diet, you will lose weight. Just as I and 95% of other dieters lose weight in the beginning. Losing weight was never a problem. The first twenty pounds came off quickly until my body said "What the fuck are you doing?"

Even the author of these book has claimed this is not life style changes but merely just to lose weight quick. (BTW, I am not mentioning this book by name because I don't want to give it publicity).

It will be quick and as will the weight regain plus more.  

To me and anyone who accepts their size big or small, we will look at this and say it's another crappy fad diet, the same as all the others, but the book is marketed to teens and young adults who have the highest rates of eating disorders which makes it not just a piece of crap but dangerous.