The complicated legacy of Slimming World and Margaret Miles-Bramwell

For many people, losing weight is a difficult journey to do alone. There are a great many factors that can affect a person’s ability to maintain a healthy weight, from diet and exercise, to genetics, income status, and mental health. It can all seem like too much to handle all by yourself.

It’s part of the reason why weight loss programmes are so popular all over the world. Millions of people subscribe to guided diet plans, like Weight Watchers and Slimming World, to help them lose weight. Slimming World is the most popular weight loss programme in the UK, with hundreds of thousands of members taking part.

It was founded by Margaret Miles-Bramwell, who has died at the age of 76. Miles-Bramwell created Slimming World in 1969 in a church hall in Alfreton, Derbyshire, and grew it to the nationwide foundation it is today. In 2000, the company worked with the NHS on its first weight management referral scheme that allowed GPs to refer patients to Slimming World.

How Slimming World became the UK's most popular diet plan

The programme offered people guidance on how to lose weight through their diet, as well as a community to do it with. The social aspect is important to members like Hannah Norris, who tells Yahoo UK that the programme is "brilliant".

"On the eve of the Millennium, I was at a New Year’s Eve party and I told my best friend, 'I do not want to feel this fat this time next year. I want to feel much better about my body'," she says.

"So I signed up to Slimming World and my local class was in Shepherd’s Bush, [London]. It was, from the moment I walked through the door, the diet for me. I lost over three stone and I stayed doing it for years, just naturally. It was brilliant."

Norris is one of thousands of patients who praise Slimming World for teaching them how to eat "sensibly". "I never, ever felt hungry on that diet. You can eat loads and if you stick to their guidelines, it really works. You’re also encouraged to stay for meetings and talk about your journey, it’s so inclusive and welcoming and warm."

When Miles-Bramwell was awarded her OBE in 2009 for services to the health of the British public, she spoke of how she wanted Slimming World to be a safe place for people looking to lose weight. Miles-Bramwell said: "In the early days, in the sixties, there was some help around, but it was the sort that used humiliation tactics. I really felt that we needed to treat overweight people with respect and courtesy and as adults and not as children who needed a slap or something. That was really what inspired me."

The other side of the coin

But Slimming World - and other diet programmes like it - has also attracted criticism from former members who were left with a sour taste in their mouths after the programme altered their relationship with food.

For some people, Slimming World’s particular method of categorising food into "Free Foods" and "Syns" changed the way they viewed what they eat for the worse. Psychologists and nutritionists have warned that this division between "good" and "bad" foods can lead to an unhealthy relationship with food.

Dr Lara Zibarras, a psychologist specialising in eating disorders, tells Yahoo UK that the use of the word "Syns" to describe unhealthy foods sounds very close to "sins". This "moralises" food, she says, as people associate the word "sins" with shortcomings, wrongdoings, and disobedience.

Slimming World counts foods that are higher in calories, like biscuits, sweets and alcohol, as "Syns", which it says is short for "synergy". Meanwhile, "Free Foods" cover foods that are "healthy, filling and nutritious", including lean meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, rice, pasta, beans and lentils.

"I’ve seen clients that take many months and years to disassociate from the idea that there are good versus bad foods. When we’re healing our relationship with food and recovering from an eating disorder, we really need to be thinking of food not as a moral thing, but simply as food. All foods fit in a nutritious approach to eating."

Last year, BBC Radio 4 programme File on 4 Investigates highlighted two former members of Slimming World who said Slimming World’s rules around food damaged their health. One member, Sara, said that while she lost the weight she wanted to lose when she first joined the programme, she started putting it back on within a few months of leaving.

On top of "piling all the weight back on, and more", Sara also said she began binge eating. She blamed Slimming World for the onset of this eating disorder, in which a person finds they are unable to control their food intake.

According to psychologist Alya Shakir, of Harley Street Health Centre, says overeating is a common issue people who have joined diet plans struggle with. But many of these programmes don’t address the underlying causes of bingeing or overeating, and the division of good and bad foods can put people in a "cycle of shame".

"There’s a tendency to go, 'I’ve had one biscuit and therefore I’ve failed, I’ve ruined my diet'. What people tend to do in that case is then punish themselves by eating a lot of that forbidden food," she explains.

"The circumstances for each person is really different. Are their parents overweight, is there a genetic factor? Does this person have metabolic syndrome? Are they stressed? Do they have depression? There are so many variables that people may have working against them."

In response to Yahoo UK's reporting, Slimming World said in a statement: "Slimming World's healthy eating plan is based on the science of energy density (the calories per gram in food), satiety (how filling a food is) and a food's propensity to be overeaten. The three elements of the plan are Free Food, Healthy Extras and Syns – so named to represent the synergy of these steps in helping members to achieve a healthy, nutritionally-balanced diet, to create positive and lasting habits around food, and to lose weight effectively without hunger.

"Slimming World’s philosophy is based on a deep understanding of how people who are living with overweight and obesity feel and, as such, we recognise the importance of supportive language in helping people to feel confident in their ability to make positive changes. We’re in the process of reviewing some of our terminology.

"We understand the complexities of eating disorders and that there is no single reason why someone develops an eating disorder. We are not specialists in this area, and have clear processes and policies in place to safeguard members. These have been developed with experts in this field including Professor of Medical Psychology at the University of Leeds, Andy Hill, and direct people who have an eating disorder towards tailored, expert help from their own doctor and/or specialist healthcare professionals.

"Margaret Miles-Bramwell OBE founded Slimming World with a determination to help people shed the burden of excess weight without shame or guilt. Her own experiences of trying to lose weight left her with the passionate belief that people living with obesity needed to be treated with respect and compassion – and she leaves a legacy of creating the UK’s leading evidence-based weight management organisation with 56 years of experience supporting people to reach and maintain the weight and size they want to be.

"She touched the hearts and changed the lives of millions of people, including all of Slimming World’s Consultants, staff and members who will feel her loss deeply, many of whom have shared their own personal stories of Margaret on our social media channels."

Will diet culture ever go out of style?

With millions of people in the UK struggling with their weight and health problems related to it, diet plans aren't going anywhere. As Shakir says, people who turn to these programmes do so with "real hope".

"It probably took a lot of courage and talking themselves into it to even go," she says. "But each time someone tries a weight loss plan and fails, the likelihood of future success decreases. So if someone goes and it doesn't work for them, the psychological impact can last a long time."

However, Zibarras warns that the recent shift towards "wellness culture", rather than diet culture, means that although the language around dieting is changing, the actual methods are not.

"More often now, people say, 'I'm not doing this to lose weight. I'm doing it for my health'. They'll do intermittent fasting or cut gluten or dairy out of their diet, or that they're only going to eat organic. Whatever it is, they're still restricting food in some way, but there's this pushback against the idea that it could be for weight loss.

"I think that becomes much harder to unpack because people don't realise they're dieting. They think they're doing something that is good for their health, but actually it's just a diet in disguise."

While weight loss is an important step in becoming healthier if you are overweight or obese, it's important to do so in a healthy way. It's often the little things that go a long way in helping you lose weight and keep it off in the long-term - something that diet plans are known to fail at.

Read more about weight loss:

• Man loses 14st in one year after being diagnosed with binge eating disorder (Yahoo Life UK, 5-min read)

• Doctor explains exact number of calories to eat for a safe 1lb weekly weight loss (ChronicleLive, 3-min read)

• How to lose weight safely as doctor warns of Ozempic misuse (Yahoo Life UK, 6-min read)