Weight Loss SOS

You don’t need to prepare anything for this programme, but you need 3 things to start: (1) you need to be unhappy with your present situation and want to change it; (2) you need humility; and (3) you need to be open minded (openness).

Firstly, to change for the better, you need acknowledgement and awareness of where you are now, and that you want to change. You need to come to terms with that what you’ve been doing doesn’t work and you need to stop doing it. You can’t change unless you know where you stand.

Secondly, you need humility to do well on the Weight Loss SOS programme. Humility involves taking stock and accepting where you are. It involves facing your flaws and realising where you are now, where you need to be, and what you need to do to get there. During the programme we’ll set tasks that slightly exceed your current competence levels; tasks that you have a reasonable and challenging chance of success.

Changing yourself can feel temporarily humiliating at times, but Weight Loss SOS leads you down the right path to help you accept change for the better. As you progressively change, you’ll realise that small improvements compound and turn into big and permanent improvements over the long term. This is a humbling experience. Humbleness is gained by breaking down habits and changing your thoughts, behaviours, and beliefs related to your health, weight loss, and life-style.

Thirdly, you need to be open to taking on new ideas and implementing them as your new ideal. This in turn builds character, self-development, strength, discipline, and mental flexibility.

Science shows that the most sustainable and safe amount of weekly ‘fat loss’ is 1-2lbs or 0.5-1kg.  Weight Loss SOS supports you in breaking your cycle of:

• Losing heaps of weight in the shortest possible time and then putting it all back on and more
• Never losing weight
• Perpetually gaining weight over the years

Weight Loss SOS is about losing weight and maintaining your new weight (key words here are maintaining lost fat).  We aim to perfect your health and weight so that it positively impacts yourself, your family, your friends, and your community.  You are the inspiration! Personal harmony comes from pursuing long-term meaningful goals. Personal disharmony comes from pursuing short-term impulsive pleasure-seeking goals.

No. Weight Loss SOS is an evidence-based permanent weight loss programme that turns your weight-gaining life-style into a weight-losing life-style. It does this by injecting life-style techniques into different situations to elicit change without using fad diets.

We put plans in place via techniques that improve one of the domains of the 7-key skills. Your road maps create a series of new behaviours, strategies, habits, and goals in your life-style.  These are mapped into your life-style. Achieving these aims and outcomes produce positive emotion. The techniques are evidence-based psychological, nutritional, and exercise techniques.

Joe Smiles has a saying: ‘Foods don’t make you fat, habits do’. It doesn’t matter which of the dozens of fad diets you want to follow; if your habits don’t change, you’ll always resort back to the same old you. You eat because of your habits. Therefore, habits are the underlying cause for you not being able to keep the weight off, and food is the symptom.

This programme shows you how to focus on habits, when to change, and what to change. Fad diets (i.e., diets that cut out nutrients or food groups, focus on only consuming certain foods, or radical dietary- or time-restricted eating) stop you experiencing positive emotion because they’re not sustainable, they produce psychological fatigue over time, and they don’t fit into your dynamic life-style.

Following a fad diet (strict unsustainable rules) as opposed to a life-style change (nuanced rules that are sustainable and practiced over time) leads to hopelessness, disappointment, despair, embarrassment, bitterness, anger, and guilt. You experience negative emotions. It makes you feel like you’re the one at fault. However, the more successful your life-style change, the more successful you become; it’s like a snowball effect. You’ll become a different person that wants different things in life.

If staying slimmer was only about eating less and moving more, everyone would be slim! Weight Loss SOS isn’t just about eating less and moving more, it’s about overcoming obstacles.

Weight Loss SOS has a catch phrase: ‘Weight Loss SOS turns your weight gaining life-style (situations) into weight losing situations’. We’ll help you discover how to function optimally in any given situation, so that no matter where you are, what you do, or who you’re with, you can still lose weight.

To turn your situations, i.e., your life-style, from weight gaining into weight losing, you develop specific skills, challenge obstacles in your way, and move forward for good.

Just focusing on a diet plan isn’t a large enough catalyst for permanent change. It will fizzle out like everything else you’ve tried. You can’t take a diet plan around with you 24/7. What if you’re going to a party and nothing on your diet plan is on the menu? What if you’re surrounded by cake and junk food at work? What if you haven’t got the time, energy, or foods to prep weeks’ worth of lunches and dinners? A diet plan is never going to cut it. You can’t realistically fit it into your dynamic and ever-changing life-style. You need to stop thinking about fitting your life-style into a diet plan and start thinking about fitting a flexible diet into your life-style.

However, what if you work through skills that can be applied to your entire life-style to help you change the hierarchical priorities in your life? That’s when you change everything about your health and your weight.

A set diet plan is outside of your control. You need to focus on what’s within your control. Changing yourself is an internal process which puts you in the control seat – that’s the biggest catalyst for permanent change. Sustained weight loss is a learning process of continuously evolving thoughts and behaviours that you practice one step at a time. The old part of you must die when you start to think and behave differently in different environments. What you originally thought dies. Your present desires aren’t what your future-self desires. You create new thoughts, possibilities, and outcomes. Over time you change the neurological wiring in your brain to consistently do something different, and thus get better, compounded results.

The 7-key skills are mental skills used in sports psychology to help athletes reach the pinnacle of competition and control of their mind. Lifelong weight loss carries the same principle. It’s about overcoming and controlling yourself, and your surroundings, so you can compete, perform, and function at a higher level with yourself. You are the athlete physically and mentally!

The 7-key skills will become apparent when you start the programme. Just like athletes, you’ll work on motivation, imagining, and task setting. You’ll work on controlling and changing beliefs, habits, stressors, and environments. However, instead of relating it to winning at swinging a tennis racket for example, it’s related to winning at weight loss.

Changing your life-style, yourself, and your identity is a marathon, not a sprint. Life-style change doesn’t happen in 4-8 weeks. It doesn’t mean slimming down for a one-off wedding or holiday, or for 2 weeks every January. Life-style change means looking great for every wedding and holiday in your life and everything in between! For these reasons, the programme is ongoing (12-month blocks). With support and accountability, we build on your resilience and knowledge with every month that passes. Therefore, it’s better if you follow the programme indefinitely, but you can continue for as long as you need it.

You can’t lose weight and keep it off if your head’s not in the game. Everything you do starts inside your head. Your body follows. It’s all about your mindset! Keeping fat off long term (i.e., for the rest of your life) is probably one of the hardest things an individual from a developed country can ever embark on. It’s emotional. It’s mentally challenging. It’s courageous. It’s physically demanding. It’s soul searching. It’s a learning process. Weight Loss SOS makes it easier for you by guiding you through the best psychological algorithm to make your journey possible.

For example, 70% of paying gym members never go to the gym! It’s because people are mentally unaware, ill-informed, and unprepared for the tasks at hand. Unfortunately, this is the norm. Do you want better health and a flat tummy for life? If the answer is yes, you need to become abnormal. That starts with changing your mind! Weight Loss SOS will help you build and apply specific tools to help you lose weight and keep it off no matter what life throws at you.

Losing weight and keeping it off can be akin to hitting the bullseye. An archer doesn’t just hit the bullseye. They must go through a whole heap of psychological and physiological procedures, that they must practice, in order to their target.

Why was British long distance runner Sir Roger Bannister the first person to ever run a sub-4-minute mile? Why was it that only afterwards others were able to follow in his achievement? It’s because he mentally found a way to get his body to achieve what his mind wanted. Furthermore, when others found out how he did it, they were able to believe and apply a new mindset.

After British tennis player Andy Murray lost in three subsequent Grand Slam tennis finals, tennis great Ivan Lendl was hired to coach Murray from 2011. Murray then went on to win 3 Grand Slam titles (the US Open Champion and 2-time Wimbledon Championships), and he reached number 1 in the world rankings. He also won Olympic gold medals at the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics. He won silver in the mixed doubles alongside Laura Robson in the London 2012 Olympics. What did Lendl do differently? He focused Murray on the psychological mind game. He acted like the winner he needed to be in order to achieve the success he wanted. He also worked on the process.

You must also bring together your mental and physical A-game to win at the life-long fit and healthy body weight game.

You can start any time you like. The sooner you start the better. When you sign up for the programme, you can choose a start date that suits you best.

No. Nope. No way. Unless you want to lose a sensible amount of fat and then continue after your big event in 3 months’ time. Weight Loss SOS is a 12-month cycle. Get your mind out of the quick fix gutter, or you’ll be wasting your time, and spinning your wheels, for the rest of your life.

Weight Loss SOS is all about long-term success and not about quick fixes. Quick fixes never work and there are no short cuts. Do you want to spend the rest of your life yo-yoing your body weight up and down? Or do you want to nail this conundrum once and for all? If you want to master your body, you must master your mind. This takes time, practice, and patience as the new you takes form. Also, it’s far healthier physically and emotionally to maintain your weight loss than to fluctuate up and down (or just as unhealthy, to get fatter as the year’s go on).

Achieving a short-term goal only changes your life for a moment and then it’s gone. Whereas changing your identity involves achieving goals that change your life forever.

Here’s an example with tidying your room. You get really motivated to clean your room. Your goal this week is to have a clean room. So, you clean it up but only have a clean room for a few days, a week, maybe a month. But if you don’t change the sloppy, messy, bad habits that lead to it becoming a messy room in the first place, you find you turn around 2 weeks later and you have a messy room again. We often think that the thing that needs to change is the result, or the end goal, but it’s not. What really needs to change is the process behind the result. It’s like treating the symptom without treating the cause.

This is so common when people follow a diet and set a goal. They think about the body weight. What they don’t think about is what kind of life-style/process they need to live out to break the cycle of the messy room. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the outcome and not the process.

Weight Loss SOS gets you out of this short-term thinking mindset of forever repeating history, to a long-term thinking mindset of sustained weight loss. Successful weight loss truly is a journey of discovery and not a single destination. It’s more of a train journey across continents rather than a commute from point A to point B and back to point A again.

It takes a person an average of 25 years to give up alcohol, and 15 years to give up smoking. Mark Twain, the famous American humourist, novelist, and travel writer, once said: “giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times”. How many years have you been overweight/gaining weight? How many times have you tried to lose fat but ended back at square one? For many years you’ve been practicing habits that have got you to this current point. Undoing this takes time.

So, you want to build Rome in a day? Nothing worth building/cultivating comes overnight.

To participate in the programme, you must be over 18 years old and have a body mass index (BMI) greater than 24, or above 25% and 20% body fat percentage for women and men respectively.

No. This programme doesn’t involve regression therapy, looking into your childhood, investigating why you’re overweight, trying to dig out past trauma, or prescribe medications. It doesn’t involve having sessions with a psychiatrist and talking about your past. It doesn’t involve analysing or judging your past. Incidentally a lot of these traditional psychology therapies aren’t supported by scientific evidence and are outdated. Human nature is very complex and there are a hundred reasons why we’re like we are. We don’t care – and it doesn’t particularly matter in the great scheme of things – why you’re in the position you’re in.

Weight Loss SOS involves unbiased, up-to-date evidence-based science on nutrition, exercise, and psychology geared towards health and weight loss. The psychology techniques involve cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), sports psychology applied to the mind and body, life-style coaching such as focusing on individualised present and future solutions, and behaviour change. We care about finding solutions to your present and future life-style that prevent you gaining more weight, and encourage keeping it off.

Absolutely not.

In fact, Weight Loss SOS can make you more intelligent.

Although there’s a genetic component to intelligence, increasing knowledge and learning creates more intelligence. Learning increases not only academic achievement, but functional intelligence as well. Weight Loss SOS believes that losing weight and keeping it off in today’s world is a process that must be learned.

It’s common for people to think they’re not intelligent because they can’t keep their weight off. It’s also common for people to feel negative emotions about it, such as a hurt ego, defensiveness, guilt, embarrassment, and depression. Society and the diet industry make us feel this way. However, what people aren’t told is that losing weight and keeping it off is a learning process.

It doesn’t matter how educated you are; almost everyone is struggling to maintain a healthy body weight these days. Losing weight and keeping it off involves a highly complex combination of human nature, biology, habits, behaviour, environment, beliefs, nurture, genetics (personality, mental, physical traits), society, personal interests, motivation, and luck. Mastering it requires a learning process; accumulating skills and knowing how and when to apply them. It’s like collecting new tools for your toolbox. It’s then using your new skills to know which tools to use for which job.

At school no one learns how to navigate the ever-accelerating technological evolution that makes our world smaller, faster, busier, more abundant with food, people, social pressures, and misinformation. These days a healthy body weight and a healthy mind are contradictions to our cultures, life-styles, and reality.

However, once you know what to do, you know. That ah-ha moment! Knowledge is power, and applying knowledge becomes easier the more you practice. There’s no guilt, shame, embarrassment, or harm in that fact.

Think positively about this: to be intelligent you’ll realise it’s in your best interest to learn how to make better decisions for yourself. You’ll realise that something needs to change, and that you must act on this.

Weight Loss SOS helps people with a variety of weight- and obesity-related conditions. The programme can help you reduce your risk of these conditions, as well as reduce their severity. However, it’s recommended that you inform your doctor prior to signing up, and during the programme, in case any medications need to be adjusted.

Upon joining, you’ll take full responsibility as the programme isn’t able to provide specific medical advice. It’s recommended that you visit your doctor or relevant health professional for detailed individual advice regarding your medical conditions.

Weight Loss SOS is suitable for you if you currently suffer from mild-moderate depression or anxiety, and your condition is managed with a doctor or health professional. However, if you’re currently receiving treatment for severe depression or anxiety, you should focus on improving your wellbeing first.

If you have, or believe you have an eating disorder, such as binge eating disorder (BED), it would be best for you to be supported by trained professionals in this field. However, with medical permission, you may be able to participate in Weight Loss SOS alongside your medical input.

Nutritional requirements may vary during cancer treatments, gastrointestinal disease, surgical, or other medical procedures. Therefore, once treatments have finished, Weight Loss SOS can be a beneficial way to build new habits and maintain healthier life-style choices.

If you’re still unsure about whether the programme is right for you, please email Joe Smiles.

It’s not recommended to take part in a weight loss programme while pregnant or breastfeeding. This is because different nutritional requirements are needed to support the development and growth of a baby. However, it’s acceptable to participate in the programme prior to, and after pregnancy.

The exercise component of Weight Loss SOS is designed to be flexible and adaptable to suit your life-style. The physical fitness components that are encouraged include cardiovascular and strength-based exercises suited to your fitness level. Training becomes increasingly important as you lose fat and keep it off.

No. No. And no. Time to think differently…

There’re thousands of cookbooks and recipes out there. The book shops, TV, and Internet are filled with them! If they worked, why is almost everyone (7/10 women and men) overweight or obese, and why is every nation getting fatter every year? If you think weight loss comes down to deciding which recipe book adds the best herbs to your Cajun chicken, you’re barking up the wrong shrubbery. You’re not a full-time restaurant dining connoisseur, waiting to be entertained by new dishes and recipes. The last thing you need distracting you from the task at hand is to be given more options on food dishes. Recipe books for weight loss are like window shopping for clothes buying; not getting it done.

Choosing recipes in the hope you’ll sustain weight loss is like treating the symptoms and not the cause. Recipes only help when you’re in your own kitchen, at your own stove, cooking on your own, for yourself, in your own time, when you’re in control. The last time we checked, life doesn’t often work like that.

You can eat whatever you want on Weight Loss SOS. There are no recipes here. Make your own recipes and investigate how you want to eat. We don’t tell you what to eat because what you eat must fit into your life-style, not the other way around. Stop trying to fit your life-style around strict recipes, cookbooks, and popular fad diets, and start fitting a flexible diet around your life-style.

But: there are universal laws of nature that apply to exercise, nutrition, and psychology that must be followed in Weight Loss SOS. You can’t break the laws of physics, and something must give. However, you’re treated like an adult who will be empowered to build your responsibility to make better decisions and actions with your eating (and training). You’ll stop chasing the no-low carb, high protein, high fat, intermittent starving, grapefruit only, etc., nonsensical recipes, and start putting yourself in the driving seat.

Joe Smiles has written an eBook on everything you need to know about your mind and body in relation to the science of weight loss. It accompanies and complements your Weight Loss SOS journey. The detailed recommendations and guidelines are unbiased, with up-to-date scientific evidence on diets, truths, myths, exercise, and nutrition for common health conditions and healthy populations (including athletic/exercising populations).

The complementary eBook offers unbiased knowledge because it’s not based on the personal diet and nutritional ideologies of Joe Smiles, Weight Loss SOS, or so-called diet and doctor gurus. It’s independent and free from agenda. We’re in the business of selling sustained fat loss, healthy life-styles, and the truth; not another faddy diet. There’re no hidden agendas, no fad diets to sell, no strict food rules, no diet cults, no diet or food wars, no food or nutrient shaming, no macro nutrient vilifying, no biased interpretations, no ideologies, quick fixes, and no spinning of dietary politics.

You’ll be educated on the most recent nutrition research, as this helps you to form the best outcomes for your health. In addition, this information can simply be discussed when needed during your personal meetings, emails, and social group discussions.

Joe Smiles. His main priority is to support and coach you throughout your Weight Loss SOS journey. Daily (Mon-Fri) he’ll be in contact with your social support group. You’ll also be able to discuss each other’s questions and support each other. He’ll answer any questions you have, provide guidance, and motivation. You can also email him privately. Every four weeks you can book a follow-up meeting with him, working on your personal techniques.