Weight loss could be harmful

With the increasing craze by young people and some elderly to lose weight, Medinat Kanabe speaks to experts on how this can affect health of people.

JOKE Robinson is the last child and only daughter of her parents. She was pampered as a child and allowed to eat all kinds of snacks and junk. Her parents fancied her beauty and her chubby body so they kept feeding her with more junk foods. Soon Joke left for the university and graduated in flying colours and of course she kept eating her kind of food and began to weigh 90kg.

At 26 she felt she was ripe for marriage but no man had approached her once, not even for a date so she became worried and decided to do something about it.

Joke was unemployed at the time and was always in her mother’s shop assisting with sales. This gave her the opportunity to meet with many men, “but they all wanted to sleep with me; they didn’t want to marry me,” she told The Nation.

All this while there had been hints and hearsays about her weight and ‘plus-size’, but all this were usually out of her ear shots. She began to get worried about her size especially when most of her friends who are considered as being of average weight or size have got hooked. She later heard of a company called Guarapad and its slimming products so she joined and bought all their products.

“I bought the Guarapad slim after I was told that it is 100 per cent natural and how it absorbs fat from my body without me knowing that it is there. It is like a tape that you stick on your shoulder or belly button.

“I did it for two years without any change. I even used the one for tummy reduction but it didn’t work. Before I knew it I had spent more than N500, 000 in search of weight loss but didn’t get any result so I stopped “

Joke is still fat and not in a serious relationship.

Adesola Ashade’s story is different. She realised she was overweight while in her final year in secondary school and decided to lose some weight.

She asked friends in her class what she could do and was told that drinking lime mixed with raw eggs every morning would do the magic, especially if she skips dinner.

So Adesola started her journey to weight loss and for eight months she kept taking lime and raw eggs every morning and never ate dinner. “But I ate anything I wanted to eat at breakfast and lunch.”

She attained her desired size but right now she is married without children and blaming the lime she consumed for her ordeal.

Another weight loss adventurer, Anthonia said there is nothing she has not tried. “I am registered with FLP, Swiss health, Kedi, and even Guarapad and I have used their entire slim product but nothing worked for me so I stopped searching for weight loss.”

After trying the above, many young ladies have started to embrace a form of diet called Ketogenic Diet. Those who practise the diet believe that carbohydrate should be reduced drastically if not totally eliminated from their diet.

They also believe that to fight fat, fat is needed hence they embrace olive oil, coconut oil, macadamia nuts, butter and some other fatty foods they call good fat.

To be progressive on the plan, people are advised never to cheat as it will hamper their progress.

Some of the ketosis – as they are called who spoke with The Nation gave their experience

Rita Ohai said some of the things they use include almond flour, milled flaxseed meal, coconut flour erythritol, liquid Stevia, cauliflower rice, bulletproof coffee and instead of water they are advised to drink ginger, lemon and mint leave drink.

“These things are not what we see in shops around us so when we are able to get them we have to buy them in bulk so that we don’t cheat. For example I have not been able to make the Tuna Fish Salad, or Hamburger Patties, instead I make moi moi with blended chicken, make my swallow with pumpkin leave hardened with Psyllium husk, I also eat a lot of cabbage and eggs instead of the other foods we have around.”

Nutritionist’s view

A nutritionist, Amina Umaru who spoke with The Nation said there are a lot of diets out there that people are adhering to these days that is not beneficial to the healthy development of the body “and for young people it is dangerous to just get on diet because your body needs enough protein for growth and for wear and tear. Unlike elderly people that only daily need to maintain body weight and also repair of body tissue.”

Saying there are some diets in recent times that have focused on just fat (keto), she said, the way the body is made is such that the best source of sugar for the body is still carbohydrates “and so if you put yourself on just a fat diet you have the tendency of building up certain compounds that are toxins to the body.”

She said if you put yourself on a keto diet you are going to have issues, because carbohydrates have a protective effect on the liver to make it function very well.

“So what I tell people when they come to me is that if you want to lose weight it is actually 70% diet and 30% exercise. What exercise does is to make sure that whatever fat you have already in your body can easily be moved out and you now cut down on your diet.

“The correct diet to eat to lose weight is still a balanced diet. You have enough protein, carbohydrate, a little bit of fat and you have your vitamins and minerals; portion reduction is what works. If you are an office worker and you do a sedentary work, you don’t need a lot of carbohydrates but if you are a physical worker, like an architect, engineer or a farmer who is very physically active, then you need a lot of carbohydrates. The amount of carbohydrates that these two set need differs because of the high energy demand that the person who is mobile needs more than the person that is sedentary.”

According to her, the saying that one is fighting fat with fat does not exist. “There is nothing like fighting fat with fat. In fact, there is a recent article by the America Institute of Health which shows that cholesterol is not as harmful to the body as we believe.

“People who have been diagnosed as having too much cholesterol are usually told to cut down on their cholesterol intake but what they have found out is that if you cut down on your cholesterol intake, your body makes cholesterol naturally so the body will begin to make more cholesterol which is harmful to the body.

“So cutting cholesterol in diet is now being questioned; so before you go on any diet, you should read about it. We only have one body, when something happens to the body; you cannot go into the market and buy another body so you need to take proper care of your body and the only way to sustain some of these things is to have proper diet.”

She noted that the diet doesn’t have to be expensive but within what we are earning. “For adolescent who have weight problem, their approach to dieting will be different from elderly people who are obese. So when you talk about weight problem, you have to look at what are the physiological needs at that age before you can prescribe a diet.

“One thing I will recommend is that they should visit specialist hospitals out there, even our general hospitals have nutritionist who can guide you on how best you can lose weight and they are not going to put you on fat diet.

“They are not going to give you fake diet, they are not going to give you diet that you cannot afford but diet that you can work with because ideally when you want to give someone diet you sit with the person and find out the person’s history, what the person likes consuming, and then develop the diet that is not too restricted because if you develop a diet that is restrictive for a person, the person might adhere for a while and go back to his former lifestyle.”

On how lime and lemon helps the body in losing weight, she said it is just one of those fads out there that lime burns fat. “First and foremost, lime is acidic, so taking lime on an empty stomach is not for your benefit, for people who have existing ulcers; it can have a devastating effect on their body system.

“There is not too much difference between lime and lemon because both of them are citrus and both of them are acidic. It is completely different from putting like a drop or two of lemon inside water and drink.”

According to her, “In the morning because of the way people are structured you should take a heavier food than what you take in the afternoon and in the night, take a heavier food than what you take in the evening because the bulk of the work we do for most people in Nigeria is in the morning and afternoon so you need to supply energy in your system in the morning.”

On skipping meals, she said it is not okay. “The most important meal you are supposed to take in a day is your breakfast and it should be carbohydrates. I will advise adults not to eat after 6 pm every day because you need like four hours for your body to break down the food and for it to digest.”

A doctor’s view

Speaking on how people go under the knife to lose weight, Dr Akinkunmi Olukayode, Medical Director, Life Font Hospital, Igando said “if you talk about surgery in terms of losing weight, the only thing we talk about is liposuction and I am not sure it is done anywhere in Nigeria. Usually we achieve weight loss by adjusting the patient’s nutrition and increasing exercise.

 “If you look at weight gain as a form of equation, in put should be equal to output. The amount of calories you acquire when you eat should be equal to the amount of calorie you exchange either by form of exercise so the moment your input is greater than your output then the person begins to accumulate weight.

“Fat is like a store of energy and the main fuel that the body uses is carbohydrate or glucose so once there is a rapid utilization of glucose and the amount of glucose in the body is running low, what happens is that the body begins to convert fat in the body to glucose. That is why for people who go on a long term fasting, they lose weight after a while because the body keeps converting fat into glucose for the body to be able to maintain its normal activities.

“The idea is to increase output and reduce input by increasing your level of exercise and I advise people to do something that are sustainable and they can do for a long period of time and my example is walking round a big building 100 times a day. On the input; cut down on fat, so you will eat less carbohydrates and more proteins to reduce fat.”

A word of caution

On diet pills supplements, a recent research shows that they contain toxic chemicals that can wreak havoc on teenager’s hormones growth and mental health, while their body is still developing.

The study shows that diet pills are unsafe for people of all ages especially teenagers because the pills interfere with their systems and result in nutritional deficiencies particularly of iron and calcium. The study revealed that diet pills often contain ingredients such as phentermine, orlistat and sibutramine substances that may keep the pounds away by messing with the body’s natural regulations but they come with a host of side effects including increased heart rate, fainting, unusual bleeding and heart attack. Another research shows that some of the pills contain substance that could cause seizures and strokes.

first published in The Nation of December 9, 2017