Dear Reader,

Having a quick coffee at a friend’s house today I was drawn to a book on her shelf entitled ‘Rethinking Thin’. When my friend excused herself to answer a phone call at one point, I quickly availed myself of the situation and had a furtive flick through.

This, I discovered, was a very different kind of weight loss book - especially compared to all the new fad and celebrity diets that do the rounds at the this time of year.

In fact, the message of this book could even be summed up as this: if you’re thin, you’ll always be thin… if you’re fat you’ll always be fat.

Examining study after study - and following one two-year study in particular that compared the results of the Atkins diet to a low-calorie diet - Gina Kolata comes to the conclusion that few people lose much weight on any kind of diet. And especially not permanently.

Studies show no better results for diets than normal eating

When she tells thin friends about the results of these different studies they invariably and predictably start stating that obviously these people just weren’t trying hard enough.

But no she says, they really really were. Some of the people on the studies report back how great it has been to change the way they eat and how much healthier they feel for it. But they are still obese.

In one study sponsored by the Women’s Health Initiative of the National Institutes of Health, nearly 49,000 women followed either a low-fat diet or their normal diet for eight years. At the end of the study, the two groups weighed the same and there were no differences in health between the two diet groups.

A radical theory for the obesity epidemic

So what is going on here? One very interesting hypothesis discussed in the book is that the recent obesity epidemic is not due to the huge amounts that people are eating.

Instead, some experts think, we may just be becoming a new, heavier human race built for office life rather than the field. Of course, being heavily obese is not healthy - but perhaps it isn’t such a bad thing that we are all becoming a little bigger on average, and we should start getting used to it?

How your fat/thin hard-wiring CAN be changed - take action now

Nobody will deny that weight is a tricky one. Yes, some people seem to be able to eat what they want and stay thin - while others simply have to look at a KitKat to gain half a stone.

From my own personal studies and research into the issue I would agree that yes, a lot of people are hard-wired to be thin while others are hard-wired to be bigger. The good news, however, is that for many people this hard-wiring can be changed.

The key to permanent change for most, however, is NOT to simply follow a diet (although some people are lucky enough to find their solution through this route).

The key is to find out what that hard-wiring is in your particular case and change the hard-wiring. For a large number of people, for example, the answer is actually a medical - or sub-medical condition, a nutritional imbalance or a nutritional state of confusion.

For other people the answer is to look at their baseline eating habits, their relationship with food, their relationship with their bodies or their emotional reasons for over-eating. Only when these issues are addressed can any change become permanent.

Find out what your own hard-wiring is and stay thin forever!!