A campaigning weight control charity has won major grant aid to develop its worldwide research and support activities.

Manchester, England, UK -- (ReleaseWire) -- 12/05/2006 -- Leading weight control charity The Weight Foundation has been awarded substantial grant aid to spearhead further international development of its drive against weight problems and dieting misery.

The Manchester-UK based nonprofit organization seeks solutions for natural and lasting weight control and already publishes a range of online support resources, including popular problem dieting test The Hardcore Dieting Index.

It has now won a financial support package from UnLtd, the London based and lottery backed social enterprise incubator that seeks to help hothouse social enterprises with the potential for delivering significant social change.

Registered Charity The Weight Foundation's founder and secretary Malcolm Evans says, "This award will allow us to provide a wider and richer array of support to all those who are worried about weight loss and who have only found failure and frustration in the chronic dieting route."

The Weight Foundation also intends to use the funding to expand its research reach and invites participation by long-term dieters worldwide.

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A prominent weight-control charity has declared the inaugural “World Beyond Dieting Week” to strengthen the fight against rising obesity and endemic failed dieting.

Manchester, England, UK -- (ReleaseWire) -- 10/04/2006 -- A prominent weight-control charity has declared the inaugural "World Beyond Dieting Week" to focus attention on what it says are the often-ignored real reasons underlying eating, overweight and self-image crises.

Its researchers are asking all dieters and everyone who is overly weight-fixated to use the time to concentrate on their personal issues and to engage with the charity on its ongoing work to develop solutions for lasting and natural weight control.

The Weight Foundation believes that most dieting misery is caused by a combination of emotional, cultural and commercial pressures and that dieting itself is actually more of a contributory factor in the escalating overweight crisis than a solution.

It has developed a free online problem dieting self-diagnostic tool, The Hardcore Dieting Index, which allows individuals to identify with common patterns of disordered behavior and distressing repeat diets.

Problem dieters are invited to use unique Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and NLP-based exercises to unpack and unpick the personal range of mood and culture factors which trap them in food and dieting misery.

The Manchester-UK based registered charity continues to invite input and research participation from all countries as it seeks to research and accommodate the particular cultural nuances that drive the development of eating problems in different states.

Worl Beyond Dieting Week runs from October 9-15 and is planned to become a major knowledge gathering and sharing event for the international struggle against growing obesity and failed dieting solutions.

It also celebrates the fifth birthday of the fast growing operation, which was founded by 46 year old motivation and behavioral expert Malcolm Evans, who began the organization as a hobby and has developed it along non-commercial lines as an alternative to commercial dieting.

"We are now getting on average over 200 inquiries and contacts every day from many different countries and believe we are at a stage where we can offer a useful free service for problem dieters and eaters everywhere," he says.

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Weight-control charity The Weight Foundation exposes new exploitative food industry tactics and launches a free and collaborative web-based self-help system for problem dieters.

Manchester, England, UK -- (ReleaseWire) -- 08/31/2006 -- A prominent weight-control charity has launched a "Don't Steal Our Meals" campaign against what it says is a disturbing new escalation in the Food Industry's hard sell.

Extra pressure is reported to be piling up on the millions of people already suffering confusion and panic regarding what they should do next about their growing dieting and weight worries.

And the attack on promoting unhealthy habits coincides with the release by The Weight Foundation of its new 3 Small Steps self-help system, designed to be a collaborative solution towards assisting problem dieters worldwide to regain self-control.

"We are used to seeing sex, fashion, love and status being used to sell food and the food companies can and will quite naturally do everything within the law to promote themselves," says Malcolm Evans, secretary of the non-commercial eating behavior organization.

"However, we are now seeing more and more attempts not just to squeeze certain foods on to the menu but also to force themselves further in as major dietary staples."

He points to three areas which illustrate the trend. The first concerns breakfast cereals, the advertising of which has traditionally been about the choice of start-up fuel early in the morning. Recently, however, there have been many advertisements presenting packaged cereal as an all-day food option.

Another example he gives is the attempted re-branding of flavored noodles from being a snack into the status of a traditional food staple.

A third area is that of convenience shopping. He says, "Just last week there was a commercial portraying the multi-role juggling of a modern homemaker. Her late evening eating comprised ice cream, to be bought on special offer from her local convenience store."

The general pattern is reported to be similar both in the US and the UK.

The Weight Foundation does not support suggestions that the law should be changed to clamp down on food advertising, concentrating instead on developing strategies to assist individuals to make more informed choices about their eating lifestyles.

Evans explains that an answer must also be found for what he has identified as "Diet Shock", which is the distressing uncertainty of many persistent dieters whose natural instincts have become paralyzed by an overload of conflicting and frequently bad dieting advice.

"Seduced away from conventional eating by advertising on the one hand and bamboozled on the other by the ceaseless tide of eating and dieting advice, many people have simply lost a clear picture of how to feed and care for themselves," he says.

The Weight Foundation already publishes online its highly popular The Hardcore Dieting Index free self-test questionnaire, helping dieters to assess their personal behavior. Feedback from many long-term dieters in several countries has allowed the refinement of a fresh methodology to tackle unhealthy obsessions with eating, weight-loss and self-image issues.

"3 Small Steps is designed to loosen the three restricting bands which usually keep dieting fixations in place despite endless failed dieting attempts," says Evans, 46, who has worked with dieters for the last 15 years both as a private counselor and through the Manchester-based charity which he founded to share his work more widely.

These ties are identified as the emotional, the cultural and the commercial pressures which make Hardcore Dieting - Evans' term for persistent and obsessive dieting - so rampant in the West. Many experts now acknowledge that repeatedly failed dieting is a contributory factor to the Obesity Endemic. Evans says that the growing frustration and disillusionment with dieting approaches stems from their inability to address these wide-ranging underlying concerns. Ignoring any one of them will almost certainly condemn a problem eater to weight-control failure.

Dieters are invited to question closely what they are using food for. Is it a substitute or a comfort for other factors in their lives? Emotional over-eating is thought by Evans to be a significant contributory factor in the majority of cases of overweight.

On the cultural front, persistent dieters are asked whether they are unthinkingly buying into a cult of excessive thinness, or following the herd instinct in the stampede from one fad diet to the next.

"Everyone thinks they operate as individuals but, in fact, we are all under great pressure to conform. For many women that can mean aspiring to excessive thinness, which in many cases is bound to lead to a rebound from self-deprivation into overeating and even greater misery," comments Evans.

"Less widely appreciated than the unrealism of waif-thin icons is the need women especially feel to be involved with dieting - the need to fit in with your friends and society generally by being able to talk, live and suffer it. Hardcore Dieting has sadly become for many a rite of passage into womanhood."

The 3 Small Steps approach to the commercial pressures to eat abnormally or diet is to ask "Who's stealing my meals?" and to refuse to be dragged from a natural and normal eating rhythm.

Evans concludes, "All the calorie-counting and all the BMI charts in the world cannot teach what actually matters. The difference between a lighter, happier person and a heavier, unhappy one is that for the latter food is a major and dominating issue.

"Mind-shifts do not happen on paper charts, or through contrived and unnatural diets. Changes of attitude occur in the mind and that is where the battle over dieting and obesity is won."

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Problem eaters and dieters are too readily being pushed into medical categorizations, limiting abilities to self-help and recover.

Manchester, England, UK -- (ReleaseWire) -- 08/16/2006 -- A leading weight-control organization believes that exaggerated claims about the extent of eating disorders are contributing to the general obesity crisis.

The Weight Foundation says that whilst major eating disorders remain dangerous and distressing, over-zealous diagnoses are fanning the flames of food distress.

And the charity claims that much more emphasis needs to be placed on researching dieting, which it argues is a significantly under-recognized epidemic.

Founder Malcolm Evans explains that predictions are now commonplace that 30-50% of women will experience an eating disorder some time within their lifetime.

"This is what is called 'pathologizing' - the categorization of problems or conditions into disease. Once issues become concretized like this, the focus of remedy changes. It goes from being voluntary habit change to becoming treatment by third parties," he says.

"I do not for one minute believe that up to half of women will suffer an eating disorder. However what I believe matters not at all; if people expect themselves to be at risk, then risk automatically increases."

Until recently, definitions of eating disorders have generally comprised Anorexia and Bulimia. The research community is now provisionally exploring 'Binge Eating Disorder' to capture the notion of repeated and out of control overeating. BED as a concept is ring-fenced with a considerable array of necessary anxieties and obsessions to differentiate it from lesser overeating.

Despite the cautious progress of researchers in testing the boundaries of eating disorders, Evans is convinced that a less-sophisticated eating disorders bandwagon is creating a disruptive and destructive momentum.

"Individual issues of self-image anxieties, overeating, continual dieting and obesity concerns are being conflated into broader quasi-medical conditions.

"This is not to downplay for one minute the dangers and distress caused by full-blown eating disorders, including serious binge eating. However people can exercise a far greater control over what is personal and cultural than they can over what is becoming to be seen as endemic and medical," comments the 46 year old social entrepreneur from Manchester, England.

The Weight Foundation is researching the causes and culture of long-term dieting. It believes that dieting, for many people, has become a way of life largely divorced from any useful connexion with weight-loss and weight-control.

"The more the eating disorder zealots push too many people down the road of disease labeling, the lower the chances for lots of them of maintaining a natural and relaxed relationship with food," says Evans.

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A free dieting self-diagnostic tool is now available to help dieters break away from the misery of diet cycles.

Manchester, England, UK -- (ReleaseWire) -- 08/01/2006 -- Anti-dieting charity The Weight Foundation has released a free self-test to help dieters analyze their behavior towards food and eating.

The nonprofit researches long-term dieting and develops strategies for lasting and natural weight control.

Detailed interviews with over 500 persistent dieters has allowed the creation of its Hardcore Dieting Index self-diagnostic questionnaire.

The Manchester UK-based organization has developed its own categorization of what it calls Hardcore Dieters – people whose lives are dominated by eating and self-image issues. Its detailed test, which is a product of 4 years of international research, allows long-term dieters to pinpoint their own habits.

"Far too many people suffer miserable lives divorced from a relaxed relationship with food and eating. The key to lasting weight control is not persistent dieting but rather holding food only as a necessary tool of life, not one's master," says The Weight Foundation's founder and secretary Malcolm Evans, 46.

"By making this new self-test freely available to everyone on our website we hope many dieters will take their first permanent steps to shedding both their eating hang-ups and quite a few unwanted pounds."

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New research is uncovering the disturbing truth of the extent of unhappiness with food, eating and self-image.

Manchester, England, UK -- (ReleaseWire) -- 07/26/2006 -- Research by a weight-control charity suggests that many more women than previously recognized are living their lives dominated by anxieties over eating and dieting.

The Weight Foundation says that obsessive dieting is to blame for great misery and that too little help is on offer for individuals who spend their lives locked into depressing and often unhealthy dieting regimes.

For many women, the panicky run-up to peak holiday time - and also the Thanksgiving period - are triggers for fresh cycles of self-starvation, with the lost weight often creeping back on.

However, The Weight Foundation is discovering that the extent of the worldwide dieting misery is much wider than these weight-loss and regain rituals.

The research being conducted by the charity's founder through the UK's Manchester Metropolitan University is shedding light on the millions of dieters worldwide who suffer long-term distress but do not undergo any dramatic swings in weight.

"The accepted pattern of dieting is what has been called Yo-Yo-ing," explains Evans, a 46 year old Cambridge University social sciences graduate, professional motivational trainer and private therapist.

"Instead, we call this Swinger dieting because we find whether and how quickly weight returns depends on many factors and is not automatic like a Yo-Yo. However, the more you look at what is actually going on in the privacy of people's own homes, this is just the tip of the dieting iceberg."

Flatliner dieting is identified as being a constant battle between "good" and "bad" foods, with people varying between treating and punishing themselves with food. These mini-dieting cycles can be packed within as short a time as a single day. The term "Flatliner" refers both to the lack of any jagged peaks of weight gain and loss and also to the emotional flatness and misery usually experienced with this lifestyle. There is constant tension between overeating and self-denial.

Lifer dieting refers to people who never really come off a diet at all, even though they may swap diets now and then. Lifers fear that breaking their strict eating regime for just a single day might spell disaster. Occasions such as weddings and family gatherings are times of high anxiety.

Evans says, "The majority of research to date on eating and dieting problems has tended to concentrate on the extreme areas of Anorexia and Bulimia. What we are finding, particularly horrible as these conditions are, is that there are potentially huge numbers of dieters experiencing great distress.

"As too little has been explored about the nature of dieting itself, many of these people suffer in silence, without understanding or support. For us, any type of dieting which tends to dominate existence is 'Hardcore Dieting' – and we think it is a terrible drag on peoples' lives."

Inquiries from desperate long-term dieters are already coming in from across the English-speaking World. There is an ongoing invitation for extra research participants to help gain extra insights into Hardcore Dieting.
"For instance, what we are already seeing is that in the U.S, even more than in the UK, is a widespread cultural acceptance that a dieting lifestyle is the morally correct lifestyle. We believe that this is leading a lot of people up a blind alley, nutritionally and emotionally," says Evans.

The nonprofit Weight Foundation, which is four years old, has been granted funding from the Millennium Commission-backed UnLtd social enterprise incubator. This was to develop its new website and to turn itself a charity to handle growth in demand.

It is Evans' goal to develop an international network of committed individuals who can mentor dieters to move away from depressing and destructive habits. The philosophy is that by treating food and eating as mainly just a necessity of life, weight will find its natural – normally lighter – level.

"The key difference between happily slim people and unhappily overweight individuals is that, for the former, food plays a very small part in their lives."

"Dieting can often make people overweight and it will always make them unhappy. The key to lasting weight control is to enjoy a healthy and natural relationship with food." says Evans.

"It is only by developing a thorough understanding of what holds Hardcore Dieting in place that this message will stop falling on deaf ears."

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm