"2 words to almost guarantee a personal trainer's brows to furrow....Slimming World.
In an information driven world where so many answers to so many questions are literally at your fingertips it tends to baffle many people working in the fitness industry as to WHY people choose to attend these weight obsessed, confusing, destructive, oppressive shite shows disguised as healthy.
We view this company and many others like it with so much hatred that we could easily go door to door slapping the representatives in the face.
But Why?
Simply put..... Jealousy.
Yup I said it's now time to sit back and let the fireworks go off! I know this statement will piss off many defensive PTs but fuck it this blogs not for them.
As of 2016 Slimming World ltd had a net worth of over £5 million and continues to grow. They have almost unlimited resources in terms of how they reach their audience and target demographic. They know how to sell, who to sell to and how to keep them coming back. The pyramid scheme they use with representatives allows the top of the food chain to do very little work to receive very significant rewards. They are a well oiled BUSINESS.
Now don't get me wrong personal trainers as a whole are gonna jump on the "I don't do this for the money" bullshit. Cool, do it for free then. dare ya.
See despite our best intentions and moral integrity personal training is in fact a business. We need to make money in order to survive, grow and flourish. Most personal trainers I know dream of making enough to sit back and enjoy "online coaching" with automated revenue streams, or cliche sponsorship deals with Muscle Food or Gymshark. Many like myself want to eventually branch out and invest in their own facilities, gyms, studios etc. Money makes the world go round and these companies are better at it so we fucking hate it! Our moral compass denies us the benefit of what these unscrupulous companies can achieve through pedalling garbage and misinformation for financial gain.``
I remember writing this opening to a blog piece in March 2020 with the intention of ripping into narrow minded PTs who jumped on the slimming club shaming bandwagon. Funnily enough I still agree with some of the sentiment. Now after some pretty robust research and doing the diet 1st hand I feel like I can give a much better account.
So the slimming world has always been a strange diet for me to get on board with and as you'll find out later continues to boggle me at times. in order to describe this weight loss club it's probably better for me to quote the founder:
"Slimming World is a weight loss programme like no other. Millions have reached their dream weight with our generous no-hunger plan. Add an activity plan that starts when the time’s right for you, plus unbeatable support, and you’ll soon discover the Slimming World difference..."
Vague non descript language with over blown statements, bold claims and outright hyperbole....3 cheers for the marketing team
So after arming myself with a log in to the app, an audible copy of the founders autobiography, a read through of the website blog posts and my own copy of the coveted SW book I was good to go....
Week 1 was a rough start. I had not planned properly, had a busy weekend planned and really struggled to understand the concepts the diet was promoting. unlimited foods came with the catch of being limited to what you could make or add to them. a bowl of pasta became synful if certain sauce was added. Butter was now less ideal than ultra processed low fat spread. most of the 1st 24hrs was spent googling "can i eat (insert food) on slimming world". By Monday I'd gotten a better idea and also started to incorporate the healthy a and b options you were "allowed". These being a very limited supply of dairy (healthy a) and fibre (healthy b). From a few chats with current and former members I noticed a pattern of people trying to game the system by using healthy a to eat fibre 1 bars so they could enjoy more treats.....
I also dropped into my local iceland which is the sole supplier of a slimming world's range of branded foods. these largely frozen ready meals that have been tweaked to make them low calorie and therefore "syn free". After dropping £50 on a dozen or so items including chips, sausages, noodle pots, burgers, lasagne and a few curries I had all I needed to be slimmer of the week! The upside of these dishes was that they were cheap, convenient and generally aren't disgusting. It was also encouraging to see that each dish had the recipe attached to it so you could make it fresh for the family. a great touch and nice to see this type of service. My problem with the meals was that they played havoc with my gut. frozen ready meals and microwave dinners weren't the greatest idea for a staple diet. I'm sure sw doesn't intend for 80% of someone's diet to come from these meals but when it's marketed as free food it's easy to see why someone may take this route. So I did what I felt most would and paid the price in the name of experience.
Week 2 I decided to give my gassy bowels a break from the pre packed palaver and cook more fresh food that aligned with the ethos.
soups, stews and a big pot of chilli would make life pretty easy as they were easy to prep, cook and reheat when busy. During this week I decided to dig deeper into the mechanics behind the diet and understand how it operates at a nutritional level and what makes the diet work. what was synned most frequently and was there a system to it? By going back through the resources I was able to see patterns in what was being promoted vs what was being bastardised. When looking at the syns and the patterns it was clear to see that sw very evidently would place a large emphasis on cutting as much fat and refined carbs from your diet as possible. It can be said that it encourages high protein and high fibre but I'm not convinced. When looking at how old the diet is we can see that it emerged in the heyday of low fat diets that have since been shown to be no more effective than any other diet. a little disappointing giving its welcome message in its resource pack claims its "like no other". I think it's also important to note that we appreciate that dietary fats are essential for optimal hormone functionality. It worries me that in a demographic where hormone function may be sub optimal or in decline(women age 30 to 50) a diet that limits nutrients that would likely promote healthier endocrine systems are being mismanaged.
BY week 3 I lost most interest in following the diet anymore. It felt clear to me that I was just faking it and had no desire to contribute to something that I knew wasn't for me. With this in mind I decided to apply what I knew about diet and nutrition and try to cross reference it with the diet to have a little fun with things and keep me engaged. For this final week I decided to eat as I normally would and pay attention to eating within a calorie deficit whilst managing my macronutrient balance. id then retrospectively calculate my syns at the end of each day to see where they aligned. unsurprisingly i lost over 1.5lbs in 5 days whilst racking up 100s of syns averaging 2 or 3x my daily allowance.
With all the diets I plan to try, I wanted to go in with an open mind and try to form an opinion without bias. however the deeper i went down the rabbit hole the more my biases were shown to have merit. From listening to Margeret connors autobiography it was pretty obvious that her passions lay in business and psychology. A lot of detail was mentioned of her love of a concept known as transactional analysis.
Transactional Analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social interactions (or “transactions”) are analysed
TA is laced throughout the ethos and training the consultants are instilled with and can be noticed whenever attending the fabled meetings. A great deal of effort is made to analyse and improve behaviours and attitudes towards eating habits. Although i think this is very admirable i can't help but feel it's a little snakey to hide it within the framework.
The other ideology I struggled with was the aspect that sw has its own "system" of syns. If I ran a business where I hold all the cards and make all the rules there is very little stopping me from manipulating the rules for my own financial gain. changes to syn values are done fairly regularly after they are "reviewed" and considered to be less optimal. I can't help but think this is ethically problematic especially when I can manage the market and steer people into buying more of my branded product whilst corrupting similar foods that were fine previously.
To kinda conclude I want to propose an impossible solution. Slimming World has a very faulty system in my opinion but what it does well has almost unlimited potential. Its scale, framework, brand and reach are undeniable. It's a monster in the diet industry. If it was to adopt a more evidence and science based approach to its "system" and dith the syns in favour of calories and macros I believe it would be one if not the most frighteningly brilliant thing that has ever happened to the health and fitness industry. Sound dietary education paired up with well trained consultants who have training in psychoanalytic like transactional analysis and cognitive behavioural therapy on a national level, at an affordable price, with almost unlimited budget and resources to market and scale is something that to me, dreams are made of. imagine the burden that would be lifted from the nhs with this kind of robust service. The issue with this idea is it would involve changing the current system which has been the entire backbone of a company's image for over 50+ years. to change now would be to admit that they got it wrong.....so its a dream i fear we will never see. which is kind of a bummer.
anyway that's it. i hope you enjoyed my review, apologies if it's a bit one sided.....onto the next one. thanks for reading
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