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Weight loss centers

Weight Loss Centers Are Popular, But Do They Really Work?

Friday, August 06, 2004
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
Tags: weight loss centers, weight loss, losing weight


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There's a tremendous amount of money to be made in helping people lose weight and fight obesity. Accordingly, all sorts of franchises are expanding across America and attempting to help people lose weight by pursuing a variety of strategies, including calorie control, hypnosis, weight loss supplements, and physical fitness.

One of the most popular franchises is, of course, Weight Watchers, which now holds 44,000 meetings a week in 30 countries. Americans are spending $40 billion a year on weight loss products and services. Many weight loss franchises, however, don't do very well in the long run. The Jenny Craig franchise, for example, saw its sales plummet after hiring Monica Lewinsky as a spokesperson.

The bigger question in all this is, of course, do any of these really work? Do they really help people lose weight, and if so, which ones work the best?

It's not such a simple answer, it turns out. My belief is that all of these approaches work if people are willing to work them. You can lose weight by altering your belief systems through hypnosis or neurolinguistic programming, You can lose weight by greatly increasing the amount of physical exercise you pursue. You can lose some weight by taking certain nutritional supplements, and you can lose weight by controlling your calories and managing your meals. So there is a winning strategy in all these weight loss centers. The problem with weight-loss centers and these franchises, however, is not that their plans don't work, but rather that most people aren't willing to work the plans.

As a writer of educational material that is made freely available to the public on topics like weight loss and disease prevention, I've often thought about ways to get groups together and hold meetings that would offer strategies for preventing chronic disease and losing weight. But each time I brainstorm this issue with knowledgeable people, I've come to the same frustrating conclusion: that most people may be motivated briefly to attend a meeting or alter their behavior for a couple of days, but in the long run, people will generally return to their old habits, and those old habits, of course, are the habits that made them overweight or diseased in the first place.

The fact is, most people aren't willing to do what it takes to change. And it takes quite a bit to change -- to cast away the standard American diet and the belief system that everything should be easy and effortless. In fact, being healthy is not easy and effortless, even though it certainly can be straightforward once you acquire the knowledge necessary to guide your lifestyle choices.

The fact is, it's much easier to get a customer to pay $2000 in the hope of losing weight than it is to actually get them to change their life in a way that produces weight loss. There's also a widespread belief, especially among Americans, that they should be able to pay a certain amount of money and have other people or services or products "fix them." That is, they shouldn't really have to do anything on their own, they should just be able to hire out these services that will make them healthy or thin. It's the mindset of hiring a cleaning company to clean your house, or hiring a car mechanic to fix your car. People mistakenly apply this thinking to their own health. They think they can hire professionals to fix their health problems without requiring any real effort or changes on their part. And that's where diets and disease prevention efforts ultimately fail, no matter which franchise we're talking about.

So it is ultimately the customer who decides whether these programs are going to be successful, not necessarily the franchise strategy itself. As I've said, I believe all of these franchises offer workable solutions, but relatively few people will actually work the solutions. One more interesting note to all of this is that you really don't need a franchise at all to lose weight if you're willing to do the work from the get-go. All you need to do is educate yourself by reading articles like this one and come to understand the true causes of health (and the relationships between foods and the level of health you currently express).

You can learn just about everything you need to know about being healthy on the internet, and if you take steps to apply that information in your own life, you can radically transform your health relatively quickly without paying a single fee to any health professional or weight loss expert.

Of course, sometimes it helps to get guidance from a professional, or to be part of a group effort where you are more strongly motivated to lose weight. And I think that these franchise weight loss centers can be quite helpful in that regard -- they can give you structure where otherwise it might be difficult to find that structure on your own. They can also help answer your questions so that you can clear up any confusion you might have about the relationship between foods and body fat.

But the bottom line to all of this is that your best success is your internal success. You can have the most outstanding weight loss plans in the world, but if you don't follow them, you're not going to get the results you hope for. On the other hand, if you are willing to put in the investment -- the thousands of hours of cardiovascular training, and the near-complete avoidance of many popular foods and drinks -- you will indeed achieve the results you hope for and be able to live the rest of your life with a healthy, fit, and happy body and mind. Simple, huh?


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About the author:Mike Adams (aka the "Health Ranger") is a best selling author (#1 best selling science book on Amazon.com) and a globally recognized scientific researcher in clean foods. He serves as the founding editor of NaturalNews.com and the lab science director of an internationally accredited (ISO 17025) analytical laboratory known as CWC Labs. There, he was awarded a Certificate of Excellence for achieving extremely high accuracy in the analysis of toxic elements in unknown water samples using ICP-MS instrumentation. Adams is also highly proficient in running liquid chromatography, ion chromatography and mass spectrometry time-of-flight analytical instrumentation.

Adams is a person of color whose ancestors include Africans and Native American Indians. He's also of Native American heritage, which he credits as inspiring his "Health Ranger" passion for protecting life and nature against the destruction caused by chemicals, heavy metals and other forms of pollution.

Adams is the founder and publisher of the open source science journal Natural Science Journal, the author of numerous peer-reviewed science papers published by the journal, and the author of the world's first book that published ICP-MS heavy metals analysis results for foods, dietary supplements, pet food, spices and fast food. The book is entitled Food Forensics and is published by BenBella Books.

In his laboratory research, Adams has made numerous food safety breakthroughs such as revealing rice protein products imported from Asia to be contaminated with toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium and tungsten. Adams was the first food science researcher to document high levels of tungsten in superfoods. He also discovered over 11 ppm lead in imported mangosteen powder, and led an industry-wide voluntary agreement to limit heavy metals in rice protein products.

In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Through the non-profit CWC, Adams also launched Nutrition Rescue, a program that donates essential vitamins to people in need. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories.

With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software. Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com, a massive research resource featuring over 10 million scientific studies.

Adams is well known for his incredibly popular consumer activism video blowing the lid on fake blueberries used throughout the food supply. He has also exposed "strange fibers" found in Chicken McNuggets, fake academic credentials of so-called health "gurus," dangerous "detox" products imported as battery acid and sold for oral consumption, fake acai berry scams, the California raw milk raids, the vaccine research fraud revealed by industry whistleblowers and many other topics.

Adams has also helped defend the rights of home gardeners and protect the medical freedom rights of parents. Adams is widely recognized to have made a remarkable global impact on issues like GMOs, vaccines, nutrition therapies, human consciousness.

In addition to his activism, Adams is an accomplished musician who has released over a dozen popular songs covering a variety of activism topics.

Click here to read a more detailed bio on Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, at HealthRanger.com.

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