DR JOHN BRIFFA, medical doctor, blogger, author and speaker and BRYN KENNARD, managing director of Body Works Ltd and a teacher of Pilates talk to Marie Benoît about their forthcoming seminar at the Hotel Juliani on

12 November

Says Dr Briffa: “While many of us struggle with our weight, we’re told that the solution is simple: all we need to do is ‘eat less and exercise more’. This advice may make sense, but what’s remarkable is just how few seem to be able to get the ‘calorie principle’ to work for them. Studies, too, show that conventional strategies are a crashing failure for weight loss in the long term.” He continues: “The usual explanation here is that many lack the willpower and self-control required for successful weight control. However, there’s good reason to believe that it’s not so much that diets don’t work, but more that they can’t work. Eating less and exercising more induce changes in the body designed to resist weight loss. Successful weight control depends on bypassing these mechanisms and taking an approach that works with the body, rather than against it.”

Bryn Kennard, who, not surprisingly looks very fit comments: “One fundamental problem with conventional dieting is that when caloric intake is cut, the metabolism tends to stall too. But that’s not all: experiments show that when people eat less, they tend to spontaneously move less too. One way, perhaps, to counter these effects is to step up one’s level of ‘aerobic’ activities such as walking or running. However, studies reveal that such measures are generally ineffective for the purposes of weight loss. Why? Well, as anyone who has ever exercised on a piece of gym equipment that counts calories will attest to, caloric ‘burn’ during aerobic activity is generally depressingly slow. Plus, we have the added complication that exercise can ‘work up an appetite’, and tends to drive us to eat more as a result.”

Another stumbling block associated with the application of the calorie principle, according to Dr Briffa, is that it can shift our focus away from fat and towards carbohydrate, on the basis that a gram of fat contains about twice as many calories as carb. He comments: “The issue here is that carbohydrate is the chief stimulator of insulin secretion, and it is this hormone that, through several known biochemical mechanisms, drives the deposition of fat in our fat cells.”

Says Bryn: “And it gets worse: carbohydrate tends not to be as satisfying to the appetite as, say, protein, and can disrupt blood sugar levels in a way that stimulates hunger, particularly for sugar-charged foods such as chocolate and biscuits. For reasons that have nothing to do with gluttony or lack of self-control, eating a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet dooms most of us to weight loss failure.”

The way out of this trap, Dr Briffa suggests, is, in essence, to eat a diet, which lowers insulin levels. When insulin levels fall, fat is released from the fat cells, which is precisely what we want. But the benefits of this go way beyond weight loss.

He continues: “Fat released from the fat tissues goes first into the bloodstream and then tissues including the muscles can take it up. Here, it can be burned as fuel to generate energy. As far as your body is concerned, fat liberated from fat cells is food, and that means it has less need to drive us to eat. Studies show that when individuals eat right, they automatically eat less, but without hunger. The research shows spontaneous reductions in intake in the order of several hundred calories a day.”

He continues: “The fact is, satisfying, sustainable weight loss is not about eating less, it’s about eating right. Science shows us a path to success here. It’s an approach that has been tried-and-tested with literally thousands of people. Time and again, I’ve seen it liberate people from cycles of yo-yo dieting and fluctuating weight, and allow them to control their weight without anything of the calorie-counting, portion control or hunger typical of conventional diets.”

Dr Briffa, who was in Malta recently, is a renowned specialist in nutrition and weight loss. A practising doctor, journalist and author, he was born to Maltese parents and lives and works in the UK. His latest book Escape the Diet Trap – lose weight for good without calorie counting, extensive exercise or hunger will be published in January in the UK. Dr John is proud of his heritage, and has chosen Malta as the first place in the world to reveal the ground-breaking concepts contained in the book. In partnership with Bryn Kennard from Body Works Ltd in Spinola Bay, he will be revealing the secret to lasting weight loss in the Escape the Diet Trap workshop to be held on 12 November at the Hotel Juliani in St Julian’s.

For more information on this seminar please email [email protected]