Shape-up courses not worth the weight
Weight-conscious people are prepared to spend up to half their salaries on dietary products - but most give up the programmes without losing the weight they want to.
More than 80 per cent of 400 buyers of weight-reducing products said they spent at least $800 a month on the products, while 16 per cent said they spent half their monthly salaries in pursuit of a better body.
Seventy per cent gave up the programmes within one or two months, more than half of them because they were not losing enough weight or because it was costing too much.
Researchers found that only 40 per cent of customers surveyed actually needed to lose weight.
Among the bizarre methods 20 to 30 per cent of respondents admitted trying were programmes involving pinching and pushing fat to other parts of the body and burning fat off by eating hot chillis.
Twenty per cent paid for a method by which fatty parts of the body are wrapped in bandages.
Dr Francis Chow Chun Chung, clinical director of the diabetes and endocrine centre at Prince of Wales Hospital, who helped conduct the survey by the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies at Chinese University, said such methods were clinically unproven.
'The best keys to weight loss are dietary control, exercising and medical prescription,' he said. 'The main cause of obesity is fat accumulation. Do not trust products that claim exercise and dietary control are unnecessary.'
