Weight management

If you would like to lose weight, increase your energy levels and gain several other health benefits without:

  • being a slave to counting calories
  • endless sessions at the gym
  • feeling constantly hungry and tired

...then you're in the right place!

This is not about "going on a diet" - something that is often unpleasant to experience with temporary benefits. It's about adopting a new way of eating that is enjoyable and easier to maintain the benefits lifelong.

We are two NHS GPs with 40 years of GP experience between us. We have always been keen to promote healthy lifestyles to help people lose weight and stop feeling tired all the time. Unfortunately, for many years, it was a frustrating experience all round for both us and our patients. We very rarely succeeded.

We used to give our patients the standard NHS advice: "you just need to eat less and exercise more" - reduce the number of calories in by eating less and exercise more to burn more calories. These words would often be met by an eye roll from the patient or at best it was followed by a brave attempt by the patient to "eat less, move more" that may have resulted in weight loss but it seldom lasted long.

When patients fail to succeed following this sort of advice, doctors often blame the patient, "too greedy, too lazy", maybe without saying those actual words, but that's what the patients hear, loud and clear. If patients keep failing to gain success following doctors' advice, maybe the advice needs to change?

The Freshwell change

We started to change the dietary advice that we give our patients in late 2018. We adopted a low carb approach and it was not long before our patients started to come back to us with some spectacular results. For the first 18 months, we counted the total weight loss of the patients who came back to us after the initial advice and they quickly lost over a metric tonne, 1,000kg or the weight of a small car!

The best surprise for our patients who adopted a low carb lifestyle was that they were able to lose weight without feeling hungry and tired all the time.

The current standard NHS advice is still very much focused on a "low fat, calories in - calories out" one size fits all approach. This may work for some people, though not many in our experience. We think that people need alternative choices when the standard advice has not been helpful.

We are not pretending that our approach works for everyone, but we do think that it can potentially help a lot of people.

Why not give our free programme ago?

Freshwell Low Carb Programme

We cover the very basics of our approach on the home page and suggest you read these to start with:

Go to Benefits of low carb lifestyleGo to What is a low carb lifestyle

Our programme comprises of different resources to suit different people’s learning style:

  • structured educational video modules:
  • meal planners
  • low carb recipes
  • Freshwell mobile app
  • low carb information
Go to Freshwell resources

If you are taking prescribed medication, pregnant, breast feeding, have significant mental health problems or an eating disorder, please speak to your doctor before going low carb. See our full medical disclaimer.