With a New Year upon us, it is usually the time to evaluate our lives and set new goals for 2011.  What will they be?  Tone up? Lose weight? Is there a short cut to your weight loss goals?

With 61.4% of Australians classed as obese, our obsession with losing weight has reached epidemic proportions. The latest products saturating the market at the moment include the likes of body gels and wraps. These products are advertised to contain certain minerals and ingredients that make you lose weight in certain areas, but do they work?

A product that has been highly marketed on television lately is ‘Slim Ice’.  It is a gel that claims to give you the figure you always wanted without having to lift a finger. The manufacturers also claim that you can drop up to 3 dress sizes in only 30 minutes.  ‘Slim Ice’ is also said to contain the active ingredient Criovex, but when we did some research into this miracle ingredient, we could find nothing about it – this ‘miracle ingredient’ appears to not exist! At $69.95 per tub it would be great if the so-called ‘active ingredient’ were a real substance!

Another popular miracle ‘weight loss’ product which is offered at many Day Spas and online is the Body Wrap.  Most of these body wrap products instruct you to wrap your ‘problem areas’ in mineral soaked bandages. They claim the minerals work to reduce the size of fat cells and detoxify the body in 45-60 minutes. Some products require you to exercise with the wraps on without drinking any water. In this short time span centimetres are claimed to disappear from your body.  A pack of four of these wraps retail at around $220.00, and they are not re-usable! That’s $55.00 for one wrap!

So the real question is, how can these products actually make your measurements smaller? Firstly, if you read the fine print at the bottom of any miracle weight loss product, it normally says the magic words “use in conjunction with a healthy diet and exercise”. If you need to exercise and eat a healthy diet to get results while using these products, then it will be the healthy eating and exercise that will be what has achieved your results. What these wraps and gels actually do is cause you to sweat profusely, meaning significant water loss from the body. There are no minerals at work to reduce the fat cells, and once you remove the wraps and have a few glasses of water you are right back to square one! Dehydrating your body in this manner simply upsets the balance of electrolytes in your system and is not at all healthy.

Successful weight loss and long-term weight management should address many factors such as your eating habits, how often you exercise, whether you use food to respond to stress or emotional situations, your genetic make-up and your health status.  Body wraps and gels do not promote the changes that are needed to maintain a healthy lifestyle so save your money and buy some healthy food or invest in an excellent training programme that WILL work!