There is a surefire way to melt away 30lbs of ugly fat while eating as much as you possibly can, never mind as much as you want. But an attachment that sends an electric current to those unsightly bulges is not it. If the current is too low to do more than accidentally flex the odd muscle while you eat chocolate and watch television, it will achieve nothing. And if it really is strong enough to melt away fat, then you will be experiencing what Amnesty International calls torture.
Whatever happens, you won't be spending surplus stored energy (aka fat) because the energy is being supplied from outside the body, so the energy inside the body won't go anywhere just because muscles are being toned. The laws of thermodynamics say that energy is always conserved, either as hard work or shivering or the perspiration of sheer effort, or as fat.
Those slimming pills that "melt away fat effortlessly without the need to diet" will not do anything either. They may indeed be natural. They may indeed be used by thousands of men and women all over the world "including the rich and famous, athletes, armed forces and people just like you and me". But they still cannot interfere with the inexorable accounting of the energy budget: to get thin, what goes out must exceed what goes in. A Derbyshire county council research group recently sent a selection of miracle slimming tablets, capsules and supplements to the public analyst's laboratory. The message came back loud and clear: most claims made by the advertisers were false.
Fifty years ago, people shivered in winter, worried about the grocer's bill, stoked up on bread and jam or (even better) bread and beef dripping, and stayed thin. Times have changed. People now drive rather than walk, watch television rather than dance, drink rather than swim, turn up the central heating rather than rub their hands and stamp their feet, and eat sweets rather than pick berries. Obesity is inevitable. Human hunter-gatherers evolved with a useful capacity for storing fat: the ones who could not were liable to perish during the lean seasons.
So rich, comfortable dieters simply have to make their own lean seasons. They should not pin faith on this month's latest piece of magic, the "ultrasound flab-buster", even if it is trailed as "the holy grail of dieting" and a "non-surgical alternative to liposuction". To be fair, the ultrasound flab-buster is not presented as a machine to banish weight. It will, however, "revolutionise body sculpting" by allowing you to target those unsightly lumps and bumps, thus breaking down the fat without damaging the skin, muscle, bones and nerves. The fat cells get absorbed into your system and burned up by the body. "It is an office treatment. You walk in, you get it and you walk out," says its co-inventor, Dr Ami Glicksman.
The catch is that you must walk out with just as much fat as you walk in. "It may be possible to break down adipose tissue in this way and therefore reduce localised fat, but the problem is what then happens to the broken down fat?" says Nancy Rothwell, a physiologist at the University of Manchester. "Basically even the best anti-fat treatments can't beat the laws of thermodynamics. The energy stored in fat (whether as triglycerides in adipose tissue or fatty acids) has to be transferred to heat that is 'burnt off', and this happens only when we burn more than we eat."
The fantasy of instant, painless weight loss while reaching for the toasted tea cakes is an old one. A short story by H G Wells - The Truth About Pyecraft - ends with a luckless but corpulent Pyecraft stuck on the ceiling of his flat like a helium balloon, because, foolishly, he procured a disgusting naturopathic weight-loss potion from someone's Indian grandmother when he should have asked for the fat-loss recipe instead.
There is, however, a wonderful recipe for fat loss as well as weight loss, while simultaneously feasting on salami, peanut butter, pasta, plates of suet flavoured with melted butter, and chocolate bars washed down with chocolate Horlicks. In fact, obsessive compulsives and bulimics are ideal candidates. Anorexics are certainly welcome fellow travellers because that leaves more food for the over-eaters. And, however greedily you gorge yourself, you are certain to lose weight.
It's simple. Go to the edge of the Siberian coastline in late winter, step on to the sea ice and walk towards the North Pole for 10 hours a day in temperatures of -50 C, hauling a 200kg sledge with your tent, provisions, a collapsible kayak and a large gun to scare away the polar bears. A doctor friend did just that. He set himself the target of 6,200 calories a day, made up of 60% fat, 30% carbohydrates and a trifling 10% protein. At the middle of the trip, with a bit of practice, he managed to stoke up with 7,000 calories a day. And did he gain weight? No, he lost it. He said goodbye to 33lbs in the course of 92 days and he could easily have lost a few more pounds in frostbitten fingers and toes as well. "It pays to be overweight at the start," he advises.
Such a solution sounds drastic, but it might be more memorable than liposuction (upon which, US women spend more each year than the British government spends on medical research). Best of all would be never to get fat in the first place, if possible. People who have started to deposit fat simply become more efficient at depositing it with every additional mouthful. When they go on a crash diet, their metabolisms pick up a signal from Ice Age adaptation, go into survival mode and part with the triglycerides only very grudgingly. Fat is easy to gain and hard to lose because nature arranged it that way.
The mistake, though, is to think that fat is bad. Humans need some fat to stay healthy and active. And anyway, each age decides what it needs most. At the close of the second world war, health authorities gave the approving nod to a poster of a slim, agile happy family, bounding across the countryside. The legend said: "They are healthy because they eat lard."
