Part II - Is Paul McKenna’s "I Can Make You Thin" a Scam?

Last entry I touched on the new TLC program “I Can Make You Thin”, hosted by Paul McKenna.

As I mentioned last time, I always encourage a healthy dose of skepticism when someone makes tantalizing claims of effortless weight-loss.

Mr. McKenna states that this is possible by following his four simple steps. In this series of upcoming posts I will summarize each step, and then give my verdict on as to whether the information is great, okay, flawed, or just plain awful.

Step 1: If you are hungry, EAT!

Paul McKenna’s Reasoning: By starving yourself and restricting calories, you are ultimately lowering your metabolism. Your body thinks that it is going into starvation mode and starts holding on to body fat for dear life and lowers the amount of calories your burn.

Rylan’s Verdict:

Great Advice: This is actually one of the biggest problems I see with my client’s nutritional plans (or lack thereof). Most are simply trying to starve themselves into losing weight, and this never, I repeat - NEVER works! Your metabolism drops, and when you go off the diet, you gain ALL the weight back plus some. Thus you end up in the all-to-common cycle of crash diets followed by weight gain.

By eating when you are hungry, and eating frequently, you keep your body burning calories throughout the day – you don’t give your metabolism the opportunity to slow down.

Rylan’s Recommendation:

This doesn’t mean you now have a cart blanche for pigging out. Keep the meals conservatively sized (portion size is probably the biggest nutritional problem - no pun intended – that I see) and spaced out to every 2-3 hours at most. By feeding yourself frequently, you don’t allow your metabolism to bite the dust, and you don’t let your hunger get out of control either.

Note: The biggest trick to this step is knowing when you are actually hungry, and not just using food to boost your mood. More on that later…

Is Paul McKenna's "I Can Make You Thin" a SCAM?

If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a new show on TLC called “I Can Make You Thin”.

It’s hosted by professional hypnotherapist and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) specialist Paul McKenna.

Mr. McKenna promises that he can teach you how to lose weight without will power. He accomplishes this by teaching four simple steps that he states will fundamentally change the way you view and eat food.

Now that’s a pretty big statement.

I’m usually VERY skeptical about anyone that comes up with some new and fantastic weight loss method.

99% of the time it’s snake oil.

But I have to admit, after watching the first episode of this program I was actually pretty impressed. There are some similarities between myself and Mr. McKenna in our approaches to weight loss.

The four steps that Mr. McKenna’s method contains do consist of some very valuable information. However, there are certain things he preaches that I do take exception to.

In case you missed this program, or you don’t have access to it, you will want to check back here often over the coming days.

In the next few posts I am going to review each of Mr. McKenna’s steps, and give my unbiased review as to whether they are something that you should consider implementing into your life, or better off left alone.

RD

Viagra vs. Fat Loss? pssst viagra wins

Due to the ever increasing aggressiveness of spam filters, I have been getting a lot of emails from clients complaining that they haven’t been receiving my monthly newsletters.

I’m not sure why some people get them, others don’t, and some people get every second one.

What really perplexes me is no matter how hard I try to block unsolicited emails, I’m still geting woken up at 3:00am with my blackberry going off because I’ve received yet another email trying to guilt me into feeling like an inadequate lover.

Actually I often imagine a group of computer geeks sitting in front of big screens screens in the ‘Spam division’ of the internet companies, scanning incoming emails. “Viagra at $2.99 per bottle, ok I got no problem with that….wait a minute…. this guy is trying to help people lose fat?!…where does he get off?! Block that jerk!

That’s how it works, right?

Anyway, I’ve decided to start posting my articles on my blog. This way, even if you aren’t receiving my monthly notifications, you can simply check back to my blog to see if anything new is posted.

I am also making a concerted effort to try and post more frequently, hopefully at least every few days. So keep checking back for updates.

By the way… Is $2.99 a good deal?

RD

Don't Let The Easter Bunny Get You!

If the easter bunny looked like this I don't think we, as a society, would have the problems with chocolate that we do.

With the long weekend arriving tomorrow, there is every excuse in the book not to exercise and not to stay on your diet.

It might start with one little chocolate egg...

Then a nibble off the kid's chocolate bunny...

Then a 'sliver' of pie after dinner....

All those calories add up, and just because you might not gorge yourself all in one sitting, doesn't mean that it won't be disastrous to your progress.

It's a slippery slope, so before you peel back that foil wrapper on that waxy chocolate egg, ask yourself a question.

Are you willing to spend all of next week working to get back to where you are right now?

RD

PS. Did anyone else notice that there were a lot less bunnies running around in Kelowna today? weird....