Here 'tis x
Dr. Stephen Kreitzman,
Howard Foundation Research Ltd
Downing Park,
Station Road,
Swaffham Bulbeck,
Cambridgeshire,
CB5 0NB.
Dear Dr. Kreitzman,
Thank you for your speedy response and apologies for my slow one. I was away when your letter arrived.
You have put considerable effort into communicating a selection of data and scientific information irrelevant to my points. Your response reads as defensive and irritated and you seem not to have taken the letter in the spirit it was written, which I was at pains to point out. You also chose to completely ignore the positive feedback in the very first paragraph.
You obviously have an issue with on-line forums. While I completely understand and accept that not all of the people using them will necessarily have the same agenda, please credit us with a little common sense. I have not heard of the forum you mention. I was very fortunate to stumble across minimins.co.uk when looking for the support which, you state yourself you do not provide.
None of us are disputing the efficacy of the programme. As I stated in my last letter we are all big fans of it. However, if you don’t provide the emotional & psychological support so absolutely necessary to anybody on a weight loss regime but even more vital to anyone on a VLCD, you cannot judge people who try to provide it for each other. I mean you MUST know that success or failure begins and ends in the individual’s head! In these high-tech days that support is always going to be sought on-line and in the absence of an official or approved forum what are we to do?
With the best will in the world, pharmacies & their staff cannot provide the support that people in the same situation can provide for each other. Nor can they be there at all hours of the day & night ready to reassure, encourage, sympathise or do whatever else might be needed to help an individual through a difficult moment – no matter how long that ‘moment’ may last.
The forum I belong to is sensible, extremely well regulated and you will not find any ‘dangerous’ advice on there. As I said previously, our bottom line is always “ring the helpline”. I believe it to be the best that there can be until such times as there is a definitive ‘official’ one overseen by someone employed to do just that. (Let me know when you’re considering this – I’ll send my CV .)
It would be a pointless exercise to go over items from the last letter, even though it really would be nice to know just what is included in fluid intake and to know whether the list of refeed days 4-7 foods is correct, or is it the sample day which includes an extra carbohydrate serving that’s right? I managed to lose my 50lbs and do 2 weeks of refeed without knowing the answers, sensible people muddle through. I just genuinely thought that you would be interested in issues people were having and perhaps even want to help them. I have to turn one of your sentences back to you – “Many comments are based on prejudice, bias or simply hearsay” Yes, I think some of yours are.
We do not argue with any of the facts. Your information is based on over 30 years of scientific, nutritional and medical experience and 23 years of medical use of Lipotrim in the UK. Your maintenance programme is the first physiologically based innovation for this purpose available anywhere in the world – and that’s marvellous! That’s truly fantastic and we love it!
It’s just such a pity that we get different answers when we try to find out – for example - how much fluid we’re supposed to drink and what exactly we can include in that total. And that constructive criticism is met with defensive high-handedness.
The bottom line is – you talk of science and products, research and nutrition, information and innovation, standard operating procedures etc. and you even provide an acknowledgement as to the validity of your studies.
I’m talking about people
Yours truly
xxxx
