I have insulin resistant PCOS but I’m not diabetic, I just want to share my experience of asking for weight loss help.
I have (obviously) tried every diet, way of eating etc etc going, so in desperation I went to my GP and asked for some help to lose weight. I was referred to a weight loss service provided by an external supplier and was reassured they cater for people with diabetes and metabolic health issues like PCOS etc.
Anyway, I attended a few meetings and alarm bells started to ring when I was presented with a work book and turned to the ‘what to eat’ page to find the NHS healthy plate which is a diet made up of 30-40% carbohydrate, very little fat and moderate protein.
In the next meeting, I asked the dietician how this advice worked for people who were metabolically buggered and a guy with T2 diabetes also chirped up and asked the same. The response was ‘well we suggest eating low GI foods for carbs’…. So I asked ‘low Glycemic index or low glycemic load? Because those 2 things are different and for people with insulin resistant conditions, it’s a very important distinction?’. She didn’t answer the question and then proceeded to say the advice on the course was for the general population and she’d put me in touch with her supervisor for these specific questions and I could talk to her.
Losing faith at this point, I emailed the supervisor as instructed and along with specific diet questions I also asked for the statistics on how many people reach A 10% weight loss during the 12 week course, and how many people go on to maintain that weight loss for 2 and 5 years. That I would have thought, is a very simple question. The email I got back was ‘we don’t keep those statistics and why are you asking please?’… eh?? This is a course being prescribed by the NHS and you don’t actually have any statistics or proof points that it’s effective??
So I emailed back, thanked her for her response and withdrew myself from the course.
Why on earth are the NHS paying external companies to provide a treatment with no proven track record in successfully delivering adequate care?? It’s WILD. The way I see it, if you approached your GP for help with an infection and they said ‘here! Try this tablet. It’s never been clinically reviewed or tested, it’s not really designed for people with your specific problem and we have absolutely no clinical evidence that it works but we’re paying this company a fortune to supply it to you’ it would be a national scandal.
We have an obesity epidemic costing the NHS billions and yet absolutely no proper treatment available beyond dietary advice that has seen an explosion in weight related health issues over the last 50 years, which incidentally is based on junky science in the first place and fails to achieve and sustain weight loss in 97% of cases. NHS healthy plate is basically the food pyramid, which in turn is based on research that’s been totally and thoroughly debunked for over 2 decades now. Even ‘body reducing’ advice from the early 50’s focused on reducing carbohydrate, why on earth are we still pretending high carb low fat diets are the answer for a population that is rife with insulin resistant conditions?
The other fun bit is I’d have access to much more tailored advice is I was diabetic. I’m not, and instead because I’m female and my insulin resistance has resulted in PCOS and not diabetes, there is no specific dietary advice available for me despite a low carb diet being the single most impactful way to treat PCOS long term (it’s standard practice across much of the rest of the world now).
We’re here because we treat obesity like a moral failing and actually have no interest in helping fat people, just in berating them and treating them like they’re idiots with no self control. It should be a national scandal and at the very least, we should be calling out external suppliers who have somehow managed to secure massive NHS contracts with zero proof their treatment plan is in any way successful for the patient.