Just how difficult is losing?

Just how difficult is it to lose weight? To lose weight and keep it off? For a great many women, losing weight is much harder than diet experts or marketers tend to acknowledge, as hard or harder than giving up smoking, as hard as anything they've ever done. The reasons it's so difficult to lose are many, varied, and almost, but not quite, the same as the reasons we gain weight in the first place.

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* We don't have control over our metabolisms, which determine the rate at which we burn calories. Most women lose their girlish figures and gain weight as they get older, partly because their metabolisms slow down faster than their appetite.

* Tens of millions of Americans have given up smoking, which, they believed, helped them control their weight. Replacing the oral gratification that smoking provides requires a lot of caloric intake. Non-nutritive beverages such as bottled water and diet soft drinks have provided alternative sources of oral gratification, but few consumers find them as fully satisfying as cigarettes. "People who smoke are putting something in their mouths. When they give up smoking, they are looking for that taste, oral fixation and something do to with their hands. If they smoked and drank coffee, they start looking for donuts or food that will go with the coffee to get the same taste and comfort. Going out with friends, the smell of smoke is in the air, and they need something to go with the drink and good times, so they eat. Very few fat free appetizers."

* Weight statistics suggest that many of today's overweight adults were bottle-fed rather than breast-fed. Some doctors and researchers believe that bottle-feeding results in use of different controls and development of different muscles than breast-feeding. "Breast-fed babies are less likely to become obese than bottle-fed babies: they regulate their own intake by how long and vigorously they suck. Bottle-fed infants will often finish a bottle not because they are hungry, but because they love to suck, and the milk flows so easily." It may be children and adults that were bottle-fed seek more oral satisfaction than those who were breast-fed.

* The widespread use of infant pacifiers may be contributing to the global weight gain. In some countries, these "nipples on a stick" are called "dummies." In this country, even the word "pacifier" has a friendly, positive and stress-reducing connotation that may support their usage. Pacifiers are widely used to provide instant gratification and reduce feeding frequency. Babies who express discomfort of any kind are given a pacifier to suck on, and many mothers find that providing a pacifier instead of food can reduce feeding frequency. Cigarettes come very close to doing for adults what pacifiers do for babies. One of our shoppers who is tired of lugging around water bottles says: "What I need is a pacifier for grownups--one that socially acceptable, physiologically satisfying, and won't ruin my teeth."

* High calorie food is placed and promoted everywhere--and everywhere means in every available and potentially profitable venue globally, not just in the U.S. One of our consumers writes: "We need to stop trading our health for junk food. The amount of processed foods that clog up our grocery aisles and our arteries is a disgrace." Art Siemering's Trendwire reports that the World Health Organization coined the phrase "Globesity" to describe what's happening globally and writes like a consumer advocate as he points out that "anyone producing food with even a trace of nutritional value resents the 'junk' designations, but they had better beware. In July, David Byrne, health commissioner for the European Union, proposed new regulations that would prevent companies from marketing food as having any health or nutrition benefit if it is also high in salt, sugar or fat. These new rules, if passed by the European Parliament, would go into effect in 2005."

* Health food is still considered special. Many of our shoppers pointed out to us that healthy food is not only higher priced than more processed, less healthy foods but is treated as the higher-priced exception rather than the rule. "Retailers still treat 'health foods' as specialty items and attach a higher markup to them. Maybe they have slower inventory turns, but for shoppers who are serious about health and weight loss, smaller portion sizes make higher priced health foods more affordable."

* Consumers distrust two-faced food advertising, which promotes high calorie foods in many of the same segments that promote low calorie alternatives and weight loss products and programs. Dr. Phil, famous for his affiliation with Oprah Winfrey and his own talk show, is cashing in on the distrust and on the failure of most marketers to show consumers that they understand how hard it is to lose weight. With lots of empathy, he is promoting his own "Shape Up" supplement line and using 13 human guinea pigs in a reality TV mode to demonstrate the struggle firsthand and add credibility to his products and programs.