The TV Show Katie Hopkins – To Fat and Back was aired a couple of weeks ago. If you don’t know who she is then her colourful history can be found here…..The show was about her ‘journey’ to gain 3-4 stone of body fat and then lose it again.
I was working behind the scenes for the first part of the plan by helping her gain the fat. While it may seem easy to do in theory, the short space of time made it very difficult. We started off on 4000 calories a day and her looking to minimise movement from previous levels which were probably around 20 000 steps/day. As you see in the show she was pretty awful at doing this. She struggled to gain fat at the beginning and it took her probably a full month to understand what eating a lot of food and not moving really meant. By that time we had increased the diet to 6500 calories per day and the only foods she could eat were those with more than 400 calories per 100 grams of food. This means biscuits, crisps, chocolates, nuts and certain cakes were in the diet. Other “bad” food were banned include foods such as cheese, chips, ready meals and cereals because they were not high enough in calorie density. Healthier foods of course were thrown out of the diet way before that.
Note – Biscuits is not in this list as she was already eating them quite well as she liked shortbread.
She eventually gained a lot of body fat and achieved her goal for the weight gain. The second part of the plan and TV show I was not involved with as she lost the body fat on her own. Despite her reputation she was great to work with and is a nice person.
I agree with many aspects of the show and her approach to losing fat such as –
- Anyone can achieve their goals, it is just about the application of needed behaviours and nothing to do with slow metabolisms or health problems that is stopping 99.9% of people achieving their body.
- That most people totally underestimate the effort needed to lose body fat.They eat much more than they think they do and move much less than they need to.
- That you do experience a lesser quality of life the more overweight you become and poorer fitness you have. This was shown when she met the super super sized American woman who could barely walk
Other elements of the show I didn’t really agree with –
- The whole approach of shaming people for being overweight and the emphasis that someone out of shape is a lesser person as she has implied in the past (though not overly in this show). Overweight people just have different behaviour patterns around food and exercise…. nothing more complicated or judgemental than that.
- The fact she decided to stop dieting before returning to her starting weight as she felt it was “healthier”. That may be true or maybe not, it does mean she failed to show people you could get back to your goal weight.
- The lack of emphasis in how bad she was at gaining fat and how that is simply the reverse problem most people have to lose fat. Katie has some great behaviour patterns to stay thin – she likes to move, she is a good runner and naturally forgets to eat. This is of course the total opposite to most people. So for her the challenge was how easy is it to change these patterns. As you can see in the show she more than struggled and had to use various experts (me included) to get her there. To be fair though, this wasn’t helped by the pointless 3 month timeframe for her to get bigger. They could have easily taken longer to do it.
But overall I think the show was good viewing and would benefit anyone looking to get in shape.
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