Freedom from the Diet Trap: Slim for Life

Freedom from the Diet Trap: Slim for Life Jason Vale A complete physical and psychological guide to the land of the slim and healthy. The Juice Master’s workshops and roadshows contain such antics as the ‘Who Wants to Be a Slimionnaire?’ game. This irreverent but hard-hitting book will ensure people never look at a burger in the same way again!Jason Vale is the ultimate health coach – ‘The Juice Master’ – and in this book he reveals how everyone can get slim, get fit, and get energised – or ‘juiced’. His lively style and irreverent text nonetheless contains clear health messages for everyone:- give up what he calls ‘drug foods’ – those nutritionally worthless addictive substances, such as sugar (‘white trash’) and caffeine – and return to a fresh diet- eat the freshest plant ingredients and feel the fabulous health benefit of raw juice which is full of healthy enzymes- hit out at the food industry and reject its brainwashing advertising- use food combining to help your digestion.The Juice Master, who has been described as a mix between Anthony Robbins, Jamie Oliver and Eddie Izzard, offers a whole new approach to reframing the way you think about food, and offers plenty of surprises along the way. Copyright (#uee617e3a-5600-5bc6-ab7e-c66902988e43) Thorsons An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published by HarperThorsons at Slim for Life in 2002 This updated edition published 2014 © Jason Vale 2002, 2014 A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Jason Vale asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Cover photographs @ Shutterstock.com All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Source ISBN: 9780007284924 Ebook Edition © JUNE 2014 ISBN: 9780007466375 Version 2015-01-12 Contents Cover (#u597d598b-f2dd-50ac-9a68-0475fb7f059d) Title Page (#u23bb7092-7503-5719-9f44-27cf5e4fca87) Copyright ‘The Best Book I Have Read on the Subject for Twenty-five Years’ 1. OH NO! NOT ANOTHER DIET BOOK! 2. THE FLY SYNDROME 3. NEVER GO ON A DIET AGAIN 4. PHARMAGEDDON 5. CHANGE YOUR DIET 6. WE DON’T NEED TO KNOW! 7. WHY DO PEOPLE EAT JUNK FOOD? 8. THE FOOD TRICK 9. OH SUGAR! 10. FAT FREE 11. A PINCH OF SALT 12. THE PLEASURE OF EATING JUNK 13. CHANGE YOUR MOOD BY EATING SOME FOOD 14. CHOCS AWAY! 15. OUT TO LUNCH 16. FAST FOOD 17. A MEATY PROBLEM 18. ‘DAIRY’-ARIANS 19. PASTA LA VISTA BABY 20. LETHAL COMBINATION 21. CON – APPETITE 22. LIQUID ASSET 23. A DIET COKE BREAK 24. COFFEE WAKE UP CALL 25. BLIND DRUNK 26. VERY BIG FAT PROFITS 27. THE MOUSE TRAP 28. THE ADVANTAGES OF EATING JUNK 29. THE SACRIFICES YOU WILL BE MAKING 30. DIET MENTALITY 31. THE FAT CURE 32. PURE JUICE POWER 33. FURNITURE DISEASE 34. THE BEST EXERCISE PROGRAMME IN THE WORLD 35. PEOPLE PHOBIA 36. GET BUSY LIVING OR GET BUSY DYING 37. THE FOOD POLICE 38. GIVE YOUR BRAIN A BREAK 39. BE FLEXIBLE 40. YOU’VE GOT A TICKET TO THE BIG GAME 41. RE-TUNE, RE-TUNE, AND RE-TUNE Appendices 1. THE INSTRUCTIONS 2. SEVEN SIMPLE STEPS TO BE SLIM FOR LIFE 3. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF 4. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS 5. BASIC RULES FOR MAKING JUICES 6. RECIPES 7. GET THE RIGHT JUICER … FOR YOU! Also by Jason Vale... About the Publisher ‘The Best Book I Have Read on the Subject for Twenty-five Years’ (#uee617e3a-5600-5bc6-ab7e-c66902988e43) I sent the manuscript for this book off at 12 noon on a Wednesday, and at 2 p.m. the following day I got a call from the first and only publishers I had sent it to. The first thing the editor from HarperCollins said was, ‘This is the best book I have read on this subject for twenty-five years’, followed by, ‘It’s like a cold glass of water on a hot summer’s day.’ I was flattered, to say the least, but I knew at the same time that the information was pretty groundbreaking. Luckily, the editor at HarperCollins wasn’t the only person to think the book was extremely different to everything else out there and I have received thousands of emails from all corners of globe, saying how the book has completely changed their lives. The problem is there are so many ‘diet’ and ‘health’ books on the market that it’s all too easy to group them together. Luckily, through no press or advertising, Slim For Life has grown through word of mouth alone and is now not only a best-seller, but is even quoted in some medical papers. Don’t Listen To Me My words cannot possibly encapsulate the ways in which this book has helped so many people, so before we begin, here is an extremely short selection of the very genuine unsolicited emails and reviews we receive on a daily basis. Please make a point of taking the time to read them as every aspect of this book is here for a reason. I sincerely hope this small selection helps to inspire you, now that you have bought the book, to actually go on to read it. After you have read this short section I will finish the introduction explaining what you have in store so that you fully understand the nature of my writing and you get the most from the book. A whole new way to look at food ‘Since reading this book twelve months ago I have lost 5 stone [31 kg], my skin and hair looks amazing and I am full of energy! This book is truly life changing. It’s not the sort of “Same old …” diet book which tells you to weigh out 3 oz [368 g] of cottage cheese every day, it actually changes the way you think about food and explains why you’re hooked on certain foods (and un-brainwashes you too!). I started by reading another of Jason’s books – The Simple Way To Stop Eating Chocolate – as I used to eat way too much chocolate. Now it’s been fifteen month since I’ve had any and I’ve not missed it for a second! I’d recommend these books for absolutely everyone, fat or thin (my slim boyfriend has read Slim For Life and it’s changed his views on food too!)’ J. Bramwell 4 stone in 4 months ‘From reading this book in May and adopting most of the principles within it I have gone on to lose 4 stone [25 kg] in as many months and feel better than I have in years. The book is very informative yet easy to read and something about the way it is written makes you want to take heed and actually cut out many foods from your diet (something I never thought I could do!!). I have never written a review before but for this I had to make an exception, this many people can’t be wrong!’ J. Ainley Another one of the converted ‘This book is a life changer. I am a 52-year-old male who has been on a diet for the majority of those years. I have lost 5 stone [31 kg] three times and other large amounts along the way. And every time I’ve put it back on and more besides. I’ve reached goals at Weight Watchers, Slimming World (I was Suffolk’s only male consultant there) and other slimming clubs. I read Jason Vale’s book on the 27th of December (yes in a day) and I’m cured of ever being on a diet again. I will never weigh again. I will never drink diet drinks tea or coffee again. I will not eat cakes, chocolate, or the foods I now know to be damaging. In what amounts to a month (in which I have juiced every day and eaten well) I feel a whole lot better and am sleeping at night (I used to get up to eat), I have so much more energy and my trousers are falling down. If you are thinking about buying this book you would be a fool not to. This book is a godsend. Thank you Jason Vale. If anybody buys this book on my recommendation and reads it from start to finish I will be a happy man because I too will have made a difference. It works!’ M. Howe Buy this book and transform the way you think about health ‘This book isn’t just about what to eat, it’s about the psychology of health, and it’s something everyone should read. ‘I’m not fat and I never have been – but this book has given me more power to improve my health than anything else I’ve read in the last decade. I used to be addicted to certain types of foods – usually those loaded with sugar. Even though I looked healthy to most people I struggled with low blood sugar on a daily basis and I experienced massive mood swings because of the food in my diet. So I was delighted when I read Slim For Life because it helped me understand why I was hooked on all sorts of junk, and it gave me the simple solutions I needed to take my health to a whole new level. ‘If weight loss is your goal, I’m sure Slim For Life will help you get what you want. And if you’re already slim, you should still read this book because it will help you stay in shape for the rest of your life without feeling stressed or under pressure. ‘I’m now free from the food trap, and I owe massive thanks to Jason Vale for writing this terrific book.’ 17-year-old life change ‘Before I read this book I had spots – a lot on my forehead and some on my cheeks and back. But within a few weeks of adopting Jason’s easy ideas ALL my spots disappeared. I’m a 17-year-old who read this book when I was 15 so I’m sure if I can do it anyone can do it. I was never fat but I binged all the time (and I mean all the time!) on crisps, chocolate, McDonald’s, chips, Coke, white bread etc. I don’t eat any of that rubbish any more and I never will again. At first I was scared of giving up these foods but by the time I finished the book I never wanted to touch them again. Thanks a million Jason – you’re so accurate when you say that this book is for people who want to be slim for life and not just for a week. Great book, great advice, great life changer.’ I could print an entire book from the thousands of testimonials I have had from this book alone. These were just a few and I hope they have provided even more reason to read the book. One thing you should know before you get stuck in is that my basic writing style isn’t to everyone’s liking. I fully understand and appreciate this, but my aim is not to win literary awards but to genuinely make a difference in the area of health and addiction. My aim is also to reach as many people as possible. Not only will my sometimes basic style annoy some, at times, but I also repeat myself constantly throughout the book. I do this as a form of hypnosis and re-conditioning and it is all meant for a reason. We have been bombarded for years with emotional messages from what I call BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK in a bid to lure us in and trap us. We have the space of one book to reverse all of that brainwashing and the repetition of key points is one of the best ways to achieve our goal. THIS IS NOT A BOOK ON JUICING! I would also like to make it clear that unlike many of my other books, this is not a book on juicing and smoothie making. In fact, if you don’t want to go near a juicer after you finish this book you don’t have to. Yes I will talk about juicing and yes I think it’s a truly wonderful tool to the land of the slim and super healthy, but it’s not 100 per cent essential. I want people to fully understand that although I am also known as, ‘The Juice Master’, this new version of Slim For Life, Freedom From The Diet Trap, doesn’t rely on juicing as a prerequisite to lifelong slimming and health success. I am hoping that after you read this book you will want to get fresh juicing into your life and use it as a tool to lifelong good health, but if you don’t you will still have success. This version of the book is slightly different to when I first wrote it and there are a couple of new chapters too, but the message and impact is still the same. If you have read the book before the new format and few bits of new information may well make re-reading it easy and worthwhile. It’s like an old film you’ve seen before, many aspects you would have forgotten and it’s good to revisit some aspects again to remain free from the food and diet trap. Read the book with an open mind and read at least a chapter a day until you finish. I realize that it’s hard to imagine how a simple book can make such a massive difference; especially if you have tried God knows how many different methods before. However, after reading thousands of letters from people all over the world, I can guarantee you cannot read this book with an open mind and not make a fundamental change to your diet. You will also never see food or the industry in the same light ever again. I wish you every success and if you get time I would love to hear from you. 1 (#uee617e3a-5600-5bc6-ab7e-c66902988e43) OH NO! NOT ANOTHER DIET BOOK! (#uee617e3a-5600-5bc6-ab7e-c66902988e43) That’s right – what you are holding is not another diet book. In fact, if you’re looking for something that is the complete opposite to the misery, deprivation and ultimate failure of dieting – then you have finally found it. This book is not just for people who are overweight either; it’s for anyone who has ever had the slightest issue with food, which – in today’s processed food and image conscious world – pretty much covers everyone I think. And it’s also not what I call a ‘state the obvious’ book either. What I mean is, I’m not going to spend the time we have together stating the mind-blowingly obvious to you about certain foods or treating you like some kind of moron. That was one of the things I hated about eating the wrong foods, being overweight, feeling tired, lethargic and unhealthy myself – people assuming that just because I was thick physically, it automatically made me thick mentally. My doctor at the time was one of the worst for this and was head of what I call ‘The State The Bloody Obvious Brigade’. He would say things like, ‘You’re eating too much of the wrong types of foods, you don’t exercise enough and you should lose weight. If you changed your eating habits and exercised more you would feel better and be slimmer.’ Well no shit Sherlock! It was the same when I used to smoke 40–60 cigarettes a day; my doctor would say, ‘It’s killing you and costing you a fortune, you’d be richer and healthier if you quit.’ Once again – no really, what a revelation doc, hadn’t figured that one out, now you’ve pointed that out I’ll just extinguish this last one and I’ll call it a day. Some doctors are not the only members of the ‘State The Bloody Obvious Brigade’ either; it appears most health books, diet clubs and people in general are also lifelong members of it. We’ve even got people like Gillian McKeith who, when confronted with a 5 ft (1.5 m) woman weighing in at 20 stone (127 kg), feels the remarkable need to see a sample of their poo before suggesting the appropriate measures. The appropriate measures not surprisingly being to eat less crap, increase fruit and veg intake and exercise more. Information which would hardly come as a surprise to anyone who hasn’t been on another planet all of their lives and information which would hardly be a surprise to the 20 stone (127 kg) woman either. Then you have some members of the ‘diet guru’ world saying you can actually eat anything you like and be ‘thin’ as long as you ‘eat when you are hungry’, and ‘stop eating when you are full’ – as if anyone who is overweight doesn’t try to do this all the time. Is it possible that our compulsion to overeat just may be caused by the type of foods we are eating? Isn’t it also possible that it takes a shed load of food for some people to ever feel full? What all members of the ‘bloody obvious’ fail to realize is we’re not stupid. We all know that things like chocolate, cola, coffee, cakes, crisps, ice cream, alcohol, milkshakes, and things like fast-food burgers and fries are not good for us and make us tired, ill and fat. We are also aware that fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, fish etc. are all good and would keep us slim and healthy. We also know that a good dose of daily exercise makes us feel good and helps to keep us trim. I’m not being funny but who on earth doesn’t know this? However, my point is: does just knowing this help you to actually stop the unhealthy foods and change your eating habits in favour of the good stuff? Does the knowledge that daily exercise is wonderful for you help you actually to get up and do some? No. If it did you wouldn’t be reading this book, you would have already done it. And that’s the problem. The instinctive knowledge that these foods are bad might make you think more about how much of them you are eating and thus make you try to control your intake of them on a consistent basis, but it doesn’t stop you wanting them or, most of the time, having them. It certainly didn’t stop me. That is why I was 30 lb (13 kg) overweight, badly asthmatic (took both the blue and brown inhalers, taking up to sixteen puffs a day), covered from head to toe in a skin disorder called psoriasis (at one stage I didn’t have an area of skin which wasn’t affected in some way) and had all the genuine energy of a comatose dormouse. The only reason I didn’t get even bigger and sicker was because I was always on a diet. The yo-yo king, that was me – always fighting a constant battle not to eat too much of the wrong kinds of foods; always using a degree of willpower, discipline, and control to keep my health under some kind of control; always doing spats of ‘healthy eating’ and exercise to ‘keep the weight off’. I hated it every time and always rewarded myself at the end of the nightmare with the very same stuff that caused the problem in the first place. I was more than fully aware that the foods I was eating were causing my physical problems – fat, lethargy and asthma – but the truth was I was psychologically hooked at the time and simply didn’t know what to do in order to escape. On the surface it appears obvious and logical, but addiction and logic have nothing in common. As already stated, logically we know what to do, but addiction totally transcends any degree of logic. So, if you thought you’d picked up a health/slimming book that was simply going to tell you that you should eat more fresh fruit and veggies, drink their fine juices, do more exercise and cut out the crap from your diet, you are very much mistaken. The reason? You already know you should do this and so does every one else. THE FOOD AND DIET TRAP What you need, therefore, is not a lecture on the bloody obvious, which will get you nowhere, but a full understanding of what I describe as ‘The Food and Diet Trap’. You need a full explanation of why you do eat the foods you eat – even though at times it goes against your rational judgement – not why you shouldn’t. You need to know exactly how the physical effects caused by certain ‘foods’ and drinks affect your thoughts – how they cause cravings and additional hungers and how to rid yourself of them. You need to know exactly what is happening, both physically and mentally, when you eat things like refined sugar, refined fat, cakes, muffins, chocolate, coffee, cola, diet drinks, dairy products, etc. You also need to know precisely how the BIG FOOD companies manipulate and condition you into buying what I describe as ‘drug foods’, yes drug foods. You need to know how these drug-like food and drinks companies will do whatever it takes to get you – and keep you – hooked on their ‘brand’ of junkie foods and drinks. You also need to fully understand that many of the foods which we have been told by those we trust to do the right thing – governments in particular and their ‘food groups’ – are excellent for our health, are in reality causing us harm. You need to realize that BIG FOOD have BIG POCKETS and what is going on in the BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK world will astonish you. Much of what I know I am not even allowed to print and it’s more than a bugbear I can assure you. If I put down half of what I knew I would get hammered (perhaps even literally). But what I can print will give you at least enough incite to make an informed decision as to whether you continue to give BIG FOOD your hard earned money. DIGGING OUR GRAVES WITH OUR FORKS It’s worth knowing that what we put into our mouths in the name of food and refreshment is now the biggest cause of disease and premature death in the Western world. And BIG FOOD, BIG DRINK and BIG PHARMACEUTICALS aren’t really that troubled, as long before you are spent, you have spent … a lot! BIG FOOD makes you sick and BIG PHARMACEUTICALS have plenty of people to sell to, in the name of making you better of course. And that is what this book is about – everything you ever needed to know about The Food and Diet Trap. The manipulation, the con tricks, the addiction, the control, the false advertising and everything you genuinely need to know to break free from it. And when I say free I mean really free: free to move; free to eat what you genuinely choose to (instead of that choice being subconsciously made for you) free from restrictions; free to think for yourself; free to look at people eating junkie foods without any desire to do what they are doing; free from eating a load of crap and then wishing you hadn’t; free never to go on a diet again; free from having to exercise control over certain foods on a constant basis; free from having to use willpower; free to wear what you want; and totally free to live the rest of your life in a slim, sexy, vibrant, and energy-driven body. It’s the kind of freedom no amount of money can buy; it’s the kind of freedom many dream of but never reach. It’s the kind of freedom which can be easy to achieve, but only once the brainwashing and conditioning has been removed and you have a clear route out. The Past Doesn’t Equal The Future It also doesn’t matter what you have tried in the past or what you have been through, anyone – and having dealt with thousands of people of all ages from all over the world – I do mean anyone can find it easy and enjoyable to change what they eat and be slim and healthy for life. All you need is an open mind and the conviction to finish the entire book. Most people who buy books of this nature don’t even finish them and then complain that it was ‘something else that didn’t work for them’. This book really is different from any other food/diet/health book you’ve read on this subject and I am very, very excited to share this information with you and I know it will make a difference. However, the only way it can make a difference is if you do three things: A) Read the book with an open mind B) Finish the book C) Follow the simple set of instructions at the end Many of the points in the book are repeated at various times. This is deliberate. I ran an addiction centre for many years and addiction psychology is what this book is all about. The only reason why I repeat certain points is to help remove the years of brainwashing and conditioning by BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK. It may jar at times, but please have faith in the fact I know what I am doing. The book is a form of hypnosis. I make sure that the key messages are placed at precise intervals in order for you to make the change effortlessly. Many people can’t even pin-point what it was about the book that made the difference, they just know that after reading it they felt completely differently about certain foods and drinks (as the short selection of reviews and testimonials in the introduction to this book shows). So please don’t get caught up with what some in the U.S of A would annoyingly describe as ‘Analysis Paralysis’ – where you get so caught up trying to analyse something that it prevents you from getting the message and thus the result you are looking for. The book has many chapters, most short and punchy and all designed to keep you reading. I am not here to win any awards with the written word and yes plenty will be repeated throughout and my style will bug some for sure; just have faith and all will fall into place. So first things first, before we get into the real juicy aspects of the book it is important to understand fully … 2 (#ulink_bd4bc16d-a9dd-5f29-9100-32ecc36e99c3) THE FLY SYNDROME (#ulink_bd4bc16d-a9dd-5f29-9100-32ecc36e99c3) ‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got’ I don’t know who originally said this now overused saying but they were bang on. I call it The Fly Syndrome. Have you noticed how flies keep banging themselves against the same pane of glass in a desperate attempt to get out? And they continue to do it even when there is an opening just above them. Why don’t they just fly slightly higher and set themselves free? The answer is very simple – they cannot see that there is a simple way out and believe that what they are doing will eventually set them free. And this is exactly the same for the overweight/unhealthy person who keeps going on diets or special exercise programmes that they hate in order to be slim and healthy. They simply cannot see that there is an extremely easy alternative. They honestly think that if they just keep doing the same thing for long enough that this approach will eventually set them free. But, just like the fly, simply doing the same thing over and over again will not produce a different result and will not set them free. I know because I did more or less the same thing over and over again expecting to get a different result. However, what if the fly decided to go to a ‘positive thinking fly seminar’? What if they went on a motivational fire walk to get all … motivated and stuff? What would happen then? Well nothing. All that would happen is you would now have a very excited, determined and positive fly who still couldn’t break the glass. It doesn’t matter how many times the fly repeats a positive mantra to itself along the lines of, ‘I CAN DO ANYTHING I SET MY MIND TO’, unless it sees the gap at the top, physics mean the fly will NEVER break the glass, regardless of what the bloody hell it says to itself and no matter how determined and positive it is. What the fly needs is clear to anyone observing the poor bugger banging its head on the glass over and over again. It simply needs to understand the position it’s in and simply change its approach. It’s not difficult for the fly to get out, it’s only difficult while it tries to escape by thinking it can break through the glass. Exactly the same goes for anyone in the food trap. Whether you know it or not at this stage, the likelihood is you are in the trap yourself (to whatever degree) and you can do all the affirmations, positive thinking and be as determined as you like, but it won’t set you truly free – as you’ve no doubt experienced in the past. You may get slimmer and healthier at times using this approach but it won’t stop you wanting junkie foods and therefore having to exercise constant control not to have them. In other words, you will still be mentally locked in the food trap. I used to think that if I was managing to exercise control over my intake of certain foods it meant I was in control. I now see that if you are having to exercise control on a consistent basis it means you are in reality being controlled, and if you are being controlled you are not free. It’s the constant need to exercise control on a daily, weekly or monthly basis that is one of the nightmares of the food trap (more on this later). What you require is an incredibly easy escape route, and the exciting news is you’re reading it. I know it’s hard to believe a book can make such a difference, particularly if in your mind you have tried so many things in the past, but I promise you it can. The truth is it’s actually frighteningly simple to change what you eat and get slim, in the same way it’s simple for the fly to escape. The main problem is not only have we been conditioned and brainwashed to eat certain foods and drinks, it is almost taken as read that the whole business of losing weight is difficult. It isn’t – IT’S EASY! I totally agree that it may be hard to believe at this stage, but again, it’s time to stop being a fly and open your mind to the fact that it’s more than possible when you approach it in a very different way. The reality is it’s feeling sluggish, living with excess fat and ill health and constantly either trying to control your food intake or bingeing that is hard work. BACK TO FRONT This is where most people have got it wrong, as I did for many years. We believe that health is hard work – that we will have to go through some degree of torture to achieve the body of our dreams. Many of us think that it’s just easier to eat junk foods and stay unfit rather than go through the tremendous amounts of willpower, discipline, and dedication – not to mention pain and hard work – we believe are necessary to achieve good health. That’s why we don’t get excited and look forward to getting slim and healthy – we assume that we will have to suffer in some way. We have been conditioned to believe that, and every time we try and fail we simply confirm this false belief. That is exactly what I used to believe too. I now realize that a life of junk food, being unfit, hating the way you look and feel on an ongoing basis, and lacking in confidence is not easier – and it’s certainly nowhere near as enjoyable as feeling alive, clearheaded, healthy, physically and mentally vibrant, and loving the way you look and feel. We have a lot to get through and a lot of subjects need to be covered in order for you to break free. I want you to feel fantastic and live a quality of life, health-wise, that many people simply dream of. This book really is a catalyst to you getting there. There will be points in the book where you will want to stop, where you think you’ve read enough and that you ‘get it’, but please, please … DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CHANGE YOUR EATING HABITS UNTIL YOU HAVE READ THE ENTIRE BOOK Do not go off ‘half cocked’ – you need to be armed with all the correct information and instructions, otherwise in no time at all you could very easily switch to what I call ‘diet’ mentality. You need a full understanding of all junkie foods and drinks first and how they affect your body and mind. Only then will the mental instructions that will guide you out of the food trap make sense and prevent you from having to use your willpower, or as I call it ‘the diet recipe’. That way you will not just be free, but you will feel free from the start and love the journey. So – in case I haven’t yet mentioned it enough – please finish the entire book if you want true freedom from the food trap without having to diet ever again. And while I’m on that subject let me explain why diets (in the long run) do not work, can never work, never will work, so that you can finally feel totally free to … 3 (#ulink_05474b5c-f96d-53b1-8258-06d223c31ef4) NEVER GO ON A DIET AGAIN (#ulink_05474b5c-f96d-53b1-8258-06d223c31ef4) Let me ask you a question. If I told you I had discovered a way to lose weight and gain health, would you be interested? Well, perhaps. However, if I explained that the method involves months of physical and mental torture, that you would have to opt out of life on a regular basis and feel miserable and deprived for months, that it would make you irritable, and involves incredible amounts of willpower, discipline, and control – and, oh yes, I nearly forgot the best bit: The method has a 95 per cent failure rate Would you still be interested in trying it? In fact, would you invest incredible amounts of time, energy, and money in anything that guaranteed a 95 per cent failure rate? I would have thought nobody in their right mind would do such a thing, and that is exactly the problem – many people are not in their right (frame of) mind. That is why millions of highly intelligent people ‘diet’ despite knowing that at the end of their ‘hard work’ and misery there is a 95 per cent chance it will all have been for nothing – and most are fully aware of this fact before they begin. I’m not knocking them either, for I am certainly in no position to do so. After all, I tried many, many diets myself. When I look back, I wonder why? Did it not dawn on me after my second diet that this mental approach to getting slim and healthy for life was not going to work? A definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. ‘But I’ve tried several different diets’ you say. But have you? I thought I had tried many different diets but are they ever really that different? They all involve feelings of sacrifice, misery, and deprivation. They all involve varying degrees of control and willpower. They all make you feel guilty when you’re eating and down when you’re not. They nearly always fail. They usually make you gain more weight than you had to begin with (if you’re on a weight-loss diet). This is not one specific diet that I’m talking about – it’s all of them. All diets are shining examples of the fly syndrome. Despite knowing this, we still think that the next diet will be ‘it’ and seem willing to try anything, no matter how ludicrous or life threatening it may seem in our often desperate need to get to the land of the thin. Since the original F Plan diet (and we all know that the F doesn’t stand for fibre) we have tried eating grapefruits before every meal on the ‘grapefruit diet’ and even reached (or perhaps retched would be a better word) for that delightful smelling and tasting cabbage soup first thing in the morning on ‘the cabbage soup’ diet. Then we had the ‘wedding dress diet’ (but what happens after the big day?), the ‘Champagne and caviar diet’ (you don’t lose any weight, but you’re so plastered you don’t actually care) and the ‘egg diet’ (which involved eating eighteen eggs a day – no I am not kidding). Then, of course, there was the Hay diet (where you should never mix protein and carbohydrates together or you will internally combust) and the numerous ‘eat nothing but protein diets’. This is where we were expected to believe that eggs and bacon swimming around in fat was in some way better for us than a piece of fruit. As mad as it sounds, even some rational thinking people went for this one. Do you lose weight eating nothing but protein? Yes. Is it healthy? NO IT IS NOT. You can often spot a high protein diet follower, they often have a giant head on a twig like body. After the nothing but protein came The South Beach Diet, and once again we were allowed to eat fruit and some carbs, hooray! Then came the hugely popular GI (Glycaemic Index) diets, but keep up because GI is already ‘so last year darling’, and it’s now been replaced by the many GL (Glycaemic Load) diets. It appears GI didn’t work after all and it’s the Glycaemic Load that’s important now. (Hope you’re keeping up with all of this). At least South Beach, GI and GL have some good basis in nutrition, but all sorts of mad ‘quick fixes’ have entered the fray. Have you heard of The Baby Food Diet? Yes we have intelligent grown adults eating baby food to get slim. It appears that whatever a ‘celebrity’ does, we all blindly follow, even if logically it’s completely bonkers. Take the Thumbnail Diet. Of all the ones I have spoken about so far, this perhaps takes the biscuit. This is where you get to eat anything you want (sounds good so far but wait) … providing it is no bigger than your thumbnail and you must eat every fourteen minutes. Who worked out the precise science behind eating a thumbnail of food every fourteen minutes (not fifteen, heaven forbid don’t round it up!), I will never know – but the word crackers springs to mind. And let’s not leave out things like the Cambridge diet, Slim Fast and all the other ‘nutritious’ shakes that promise weight loss in supersonic time. Then we have the many calorie-counting diets; the Kensington diet, the ‘see’ food diet, the Eat Fat Grow Slim diet (where you had to drink oil before each meal – again not joking), the ‘sex diet’ (yes there is one – best of a bad bunch I’d say, and more fun than eating cabbage soup). I could go on and on and on, but all of the above, even the Thumbnail seems incredibly sane compared to, wait for it – the ‘Fresh Air’ diet. Yes, let me repeat that – THE FRESH AIR DIET I wish I was joking, but it is perfectly true. This really is ‘Extreme Dieting’ and I believe the most dangerous ‘food movement’ (or non food movement) on earth. It isn’t actually called ‘The Fresh Air Diet’, but ‘Breatharianism’. It is a lifestyle popularized by an Australian woman called Ellen Greve, or Jasmuheen, as she is better known. Greve claims she hasn’t eaten since 1993; yet, she admits ‘she drinks herbal teas and confesses to the occasional “taste orgasm” involving chocolate or ice cream’. She claims not to eat the food but simply every now and then get the ‘taste’. The fact that three of Greve’s followers have starved to death while adhering to the Breatharian way of life, doesn’t appear to dissuade her. In 1999 the Australian television programme 60 Minutes tested her ability to live on ‘prana’, the ‘Light Of God’. After just four days, Dr Berris Wink – president of the Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association, urged her to stop the test. He wanted to stop the test because, according to Dr Wink, Greve’s pupils were dilated, her speech was slow, she was dehydrated and her pulse had doubled. Funny how when tested she couldn’t live without food or water for four days yet claims not to have eaten anything since 1993! Believe it or not she’s not the only one at it either. One Wiley Brooks, who heads up ‘The Breatharian Institute Of America’, is equally as bats in my opinion and there are many, many more. This is obviously the ultimate diet and I am amazed they haven’t been shut down. How on earth can you encourage people to ‘live on light’ and not be accountable if anything happens to them? In a world where the holy grail appears to be a Size Zero, surely these people need bringing to book. Clearly ‘Breatharianism’ is beyond extreme and obviously mental, but I think we have all been guilty of trying some pretty ludicrous diets over the years. But why do we do it? Why do we jump on one diet after the next, regardless of how irrational they are? In truth, don’t we already know exactly what we need to do in order to drop the weight and get healthy? Wouldn’t it be fair to say that you could write down at least ten different ways to lose weight that – if you followed them – would all work? Could you not also design yourself an exercise programme that – if you followed it – would make you lean and fit? I think that we are intelligent enough to realize that if we ate nothing but cabbage for three weeks we would lose weight (and most of our friends probably) and that if we ate loads of fruit and veg and drank the fine juices they contain, we would all be extremely healthy. I knew exactly what to do to get into shape and get healthy, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t. What I didn’t know was how to stop eating crap and be happy about it. I knew how to stop eating rubbish and be miserable about it – I had a Gold medal in that one – but how the hell do you change what you eat and be happy about it? The problem is, we have all simply been going about it the wrong way. TELL ME WHY I DON’T LIKE MONDAYS When I started any of my diets I would almost immediately suffer, not physically but mentally. I would always start my diet on Monday (when else?). I think if people just stopped going on a diet they would instantly eat less crap anyway. Think about it. When I made the declaration that I was going on a diet on Monday, I would go into ‘food freefall’. I would eat as much rubbish as I could possibly cram in from the Friday onwards declaring to the world, ‘It’s okay, I’m going on a diet on Monday’. So I would always eat a lot more than I would have normally eaten if I hadn’t made the conscious decision to ‘diet’ in the first place. I would then go shopping on the Sunday and buy a trolley full of fruit and veg. Have you noticed how immediately judgemental we become when we have a load of good food in our trolley? We start eyeing up other people’s trolleys and if they have a load of sugar and fat laced ‘foods’ and drinks and they don’t look the picture of health and have a little hyper child with them, we start thinking, ‘well no wonder, what do you expect’. All this and we haven’t even bought the food yet, let alone actually eaten the stuff! I would then wake on the Monday and immediately start to think of all the things I couldn’t have. I would ‘hang on in there’ using all my might and willpower. To be fair I had usually stuffed myself so much over the weekend in preparation for the dreaded day, that I was usually okay most of the first day. But then out of the blue, usually late afternoon, a little voice would start chipping away and my desire for something naughty would kick in. This is when I would use as much resolve as I could to resist temptation, which normally meant going to bed early in an attempt to sleep the craving away. Halfway through Tuesday and the inevitable ‘I’ve picked the wrong time’ would rear its ugly head. This would be rapidly followed by ‘The bomb could go off tomorrow’ and ‘What’s the point of living?’ and I’d be back where I started. Well not quite – usually I’d then eat more than normal to subconsciously make up for lost eating time. On other occasions I would not call it a ‘diet’ but simply say ‘As from Monday, I will start to eat healthily’. Now I am sure that whoever invented the fridge hated fruit and veg. There is that drawer at the bottom to put your veg in so that you can conveniently forget that it’s there – only to rediscover it days later when it’s beginning to make its own way out! You then throw the mouldy veg in the bin with the declaration, ‘I forgot all about that, if I’d have remembered I would have eaten it. Oh well, let’s go get a take-out – it doesn’t matter because I’ve decided to make a fresh start … on Monday.’ Recognize the pattern? I never once got excited about getting a slim physique and gaining health because of the hell I thought I had to go through in order to achieve that goal. I never once looked forward to a change of diet; it was always a feeling of dread. I was defeated before I started. We should all, if we think about it logically, be very excited when we are about to change what we eat in order to get the body of our dreams. But if you are psychologically hooked on certain ‘foods’ and you believe that you gain something from them – pleasure, comfort or whatever – then those foods, even if you know they are also making you fat and ill, do not become less precious if you are forced to do without them. As you have no doubt experienced, they become the most precious thing in the world. Your entire focus is on either eating them or not eating them – as a result you experience the same mental tug-of-war that so many people think they have to go through. The problem with this is there is only so long that anyone can ‘hang on in there’ and experience this often nightmarish mental tug-of-war. No wonder I never succeeded on a diet. No wonder it has such a high failure rate. And that is the real problem with diets – you effectively force yourself to do something which you do not want to do in the hope that you will reach what you do want – i.e. your ideal weight or optimum health. But all the time you are doing something you don’t want to do you are having an internal, and often external, tantrum. One side of your brain wants the fat producing ‘foods’ and the other half doesn’t because you want to look and feel better: ‘Yes I will, no I won’t’ – it’s a constant mental battle. There is only so long any sane person can do this before they say ‘Sod this for a game of soldiers, life’s too flipping short!’ WHEN ARE WE EVER FREE? And at what point do we ever feel free from this mental battle? I use the term ‘free’ to describe not having to worry about the food we eat or having to exercise discipline and control over our intake; I mean truly free to eat what we want, whenever we want, free from guilt and restriction. So, when are we free? The minute the diet is over? I would say no. Because, when the diet is over we then start to eat the same crap which made us miserable in the first place and in no time at all the battle starts all over again. And every time we diet we end up with a bigger battle on our hands. When you have been knocked down just once it’s easy to pick yourself up. If you keep getting knocked down you end up thinking ‘what’s the point in getting back up?’ The answer is to remove the very thing that is knocking you down – this is not simply the type of food itself, but more the conditioning, brainwashing, and misinformation that is the cause of why we put this crap in our mouths. All these factors, as well as the diets themselves, combine to create the belief that life would not be as enjoyable without junk and drug-like foods. That life would be ‘dull’ and ‘boring’ if we ate healthily and did exercise; that people who do this are boring, no-hope health freaks who have forgotten how to really live; that it is a ‘constant battle’ to be healthy and maintain your ideal weight. I used to believe this rubbish too. Two of the main weight loss clubs in the world also perpetuate the belief that it’s a lifetime battle – so much so that you have to attend their meetings every week just to make sure you are still on track, that you haven’t ‘fallen off the food wagon’. Yes I am talking about Weight Watchers and Slimming World. Now, before I go on, I must say that I am fully aware that both of these organizations have helped many, many people throughout the world and if you get a good ‘leader’ at your meeting place, they can be extremely effective. However, I also know that however admirable their motives might be, they are often instilling in the person with a ‘food problem’ the notion that they will have to try and ‘control’ their weight forever. They usually imply that almost no matter what they do, for them, it will be a constant lifelong battle. TOTALLY POINTLESS Weight Watchers used to have a ‘points system’. You were awarded certain points per food and at the time they probably thought it was a revolutionary system. However, did you know that as far back as the late Thirties and early Forties there was a very similar points system used for restricting people’s intake of food? It was called the ‘Rationing’ club! Yes, when food was scarce in the war people were given ration books and were allocated what were literally called ‘Personal Points’ for each day. You were allocated a certain amount of points and each food had a ‘value’ – sound familiar? The big difference was, no one was in the rationing club voluntarily and no one was pleased to be losing weight either. The whole business of counting the ‘points’ value of certain foods and rationing yourself accordingly is nothing short of madness. I bet there was not one single person in the war who ever thought they would see the day when people would actually pay for the privilege of deliberately restricting the amount of food they were allowed by counting ‘points’ – especially in times when food is in abundance. Most diet clubs give the impression that if you don’t do things like count points and attend weekly meetings you will binge and go back to your old ‘habits’. Overeaters Anonymous (yes there is such an organization) take the idea of the ‘constant battle’ even further by suggesting that the ‘problem’ is due to some kind of weakness inherent in you, rather than with the drug-like foods and drinks themselves. They suggest you are born with an ‘overeating gene’ and they have a twelve-step programme to help you ‘cope with’ your disease. Yes, that’s what they call your problem – a disease. The twelve-step programme is to help you cope with, not cure, your disease. For as far as they are concerned the disease is caused by something in your genes and there is no known cure. You were born with it and there is nothing you can do about it. How’s that for setting yourself up for failure? That to me is the same as seeing someone sinking in quicksand and saying that the reason they’re sinking is nothing to do with the quicksand but it’s because they were born with a quicksand sinking gene. Yes people will sink at different rates depending on many factors, but surely if you can get someone out of the quicksand, they are cured? (more on this later). DO AS I SAY … NOT AS I DO Due to our often desperate desire to lose weight, it appears we are willing to take advice from virtually anyone – regardless of whether or not they are ill and fat themselves. Many of the ‘leaders’ running the now over 12,000 slimming clubs in the UK are often ‘yo-yoing’ themselves. They are often still constantly having a battle with food, their health and their weight. One person who actually owns one of the biggest slimming clubs in the UK is reported to be overweight themselves – that’s the founder! It is true that you don’t have to be a great football player to be an excellent football manager, but when it comes to this subject it is extremely important. For example, if you went to a ‘stop-smoking’ therapist to quit smoking and they had a cigarette hanging out of their mouth, would you listen to a word they have to say to you, even if the advice was correct? Clearly not. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not picking on these people (after all, I know what it’s like to be in the food and diet trap and it’s really not that funny to be constantly struggling with your health, weight, and food intake), I just think it’s very hard for anyone to get truly free from this whole diet and food struggle nightmare, when the people teaching haven’t done it themselves. Remember, it’s not about simply losing the weight, it’s about getting slim and free. That way the change is easy and is one for life. The overall position of the ‘diet’ industry seems pretty clear then. When it comes to weight loss and changing eating habits we have only two choices: A) Use willpower, discipline, and exercise control forever, or B) Run out of the will to control, say ‘sod it’, binge – then after the binge go back to trying to control again for a while. What a life! It seems to be a no-win situation – miserable when you are allowed to eat the crap and miserable and deprived when you’re not. However, despite what we have all been conditioned to believe, there actually is an alternative and, as I have said, you are reading it. The best part of all is that when you see it clearly, when you see just how ridiculously easy it can be and indeed how obvious once pointed out, it will be one of the biggest ‘light-bulb’ moments you will ever experience The diet mentality doesn’t just apply to people who are overweight either. There are many slim people who want to change their diet because they want to feel fitter and healthier and have more energy. But they too have the same problem. They want to be healthy, but they also want to eat crap. So they have to force themselves to do something which they do not want to do in order to reach their goal. Many overweight people think all slim people are happy campers, but often they are having the same mental battle with food as they are. They too believe life would be nowhere near as enjoyable if they ate healthily. One of the main reasons for this false belief is often the diet itself. Diets often encourage us to believe that life is a nightmare and boring without our ‘usual’ foods and drinks and wonderful with them. But I feel a touch of amnesia sets in. Obviously when we are not on a diet we are happier than when we are on one; but we are still not happy. That is why we want to change isn’t it? It doesn’t seem to occur to us that even when we are not on a diet we are still more miserable than someone who doesn’t have to worry about their intake of food, their health or their weight. It wasn’t only when I was consciously on a diet that I had this ‘I want to eat, but I wish I didn’t’ mental tug-of-war. The truth is I always had it to some degree. I was constantly trying to control my intake of certain foods. On a diet I just had to try and control it even more than usual – which simply made me much more aware of it. It is having to exercise control over your intake of food on a daily basis that is the problem. You shouldn’t have to control what you eat, you should be free to eat whatever you want, whenever you want, without having to worry about your health or weight. We have all been doing it for so long we have come to accept it as the norm – but it’s not normal to have to exercise enormous amounts of control on a regular basis. For example, non-smokers can smoke whenever they want – they just don’t want to so clearly there is no problem. It is only smokers that have the problem of trying to control their intake that have a smoking problem, non-smokers have their freedom – the freedom of not having to smoke. Even those smokers who have stopped but still crave them all the time aren’t truly free either; they are still exercising control not to smoke. It is only those people who have smoked, stopped and don’t miss them who are truly free. I can overeat whenever I want to, but I just don’t want to anymore. I finally have true freedom around all food. Wild animals have this freedom too. In fact we are the only creatures on the planet that do this control and dieting stuff. Why? Because we have television, radio, and so-called ‘experts’ telling us what we should eat and often when we should eat. Unlike us, wild animals rely purely on their natural instincts. We also instinctively know exactly what to eat and when to eat. Our problem is that we have an intellectual brain that can easily be ‘washed’ by people with all kinds of vested interests, either status or financial. However, if we were left to our own intuitive devices we would all be eating healthily and no one would have a ‘food problem’. DIETS TREAT THE SYMPTOM – NOT THE CAUSE Diets never solve a food problem – they ultimately make it worse for most people. The second you go on a diet you feel deprived. You are usually no longer ‘allowed’ to eat the foods you love or you have to restrict yourself from eating a certain amount of them. The situation is that even if you do manage to ‘hang on in there’ and reach your weight ‘target’ or ‘goal’, what happens? You ‘reward’ yourself … with what? Yes, the very ‘foods’ you have been longing for in the quantity you have been dreaming of. You have been incredibly ‘good’ and you feel you deserve a ‘treat’ for all the effort you have put in for all this time. The problem is the ‘feel good’ time is pretty short lived. In no time at all you soon realize that you are once again packing on the pounds. Once this dawns on you, the no-win situation rears its head again. You either let the food floodgates open, or you try to exercise immense control over your intake once again. The point I am making is simple – you are never truly free. All you have in fact ‘treated’ yourself to are feelings of guilt, self-loathing, lethargy, a body you hate, and a lifetime desperately trying to control your intake of certain foods. And how do we try and solve that problem – another diet! We need to start understanding that excess fat is a physical ‘symptom’ of a psychological problem. The real issue is mental – not physical. Diets aren’t designed to change the way you think, they are simply designed to change either what you eat or how much you eat, not how you see certain foods. Diets are designed to treat the excess fat (the physical symptom) but they do nothing to address the real issue, which can solve the problem for life. Because diets only treat the symptom, inevitably the situation ultimately gets worse. Hit The Roof For example, if I had a leaky roof and rain was falling onto my ceiling tiles, pretty soon it would show. If I simply replaced the ceiling tile, I can feel good for a while, but soon the tile would need replacing again. However, because the cause of the problem hadn’t been addressed (the hole in the roof), the situation would naturally get worse. The hole in the roof would get bigger and more tiles would be affected. I could keep replacing more and more tiles and on the surface all would look good, but in reality far from solving the problem I am always making it worse. All I clearly need to do is fix the roof and I would never have to replace a tile again. Exactly the same principle applies here. Remove the brainwashing, conditioning, and false beliefs about certain foods and drinks while exposing BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK for what it is, and you get to the root cause of the problem. Once you remove the mental cravings, you have removed the need for any willpower, thus removing the cause. Once the cause has gone, the symptoms (excess fat) soon start to disappear and so to does the need ever to go on a diet again. DIETS CAN MAKE YOU FAT! Another major problem with restrictive diets is that they often aren’t nutritionally thought through and many times you literally starve your body. If you deliberately stop yourself eating when your body is genuinely screaming for food, you are fighting against the most powerful instinct in the world: survival. No wonder people find it hard. When you do this, your body’s metabolism slows down; yes down. If it keeps going at the rate it is with such a small amount of food coming in, you will die very quickly. This is why the minute the body senses that there is a severe lack of food coming in, it assumes you have no choice in this decision (after all no other creature on earth would restrict in times of abundance). And rather than let you die, your metabolism slows down considerably to conserve energy. At the same time, the body stores even more of what you do eat as fat as it senses lean times ahead. Because the fat is needed, the body even begins to burn muscle tissue, which is a bit of a bugger as muscle helps to burn excess fat – so a double whammy. In fact, virtually every time you go on a restrictive diet you lose muscle tissue and gain more fat cells. Once you gain fat cells they never die, they simply shrink. This is why it is so much easier for people who have been overweight in the past to gain weight again … rapidly. MORE BIG FAT PROBLEMS When the ‘diet’ is over (which normally happens either when you say ‘sod the diet’ or you somehow manage to reach your physical goal) your metabolism is still working much slower than before you started the diet. It will increase again, but gradually – which is why it is important to build food up again slowly and not overeat. However, as most people are chomping at the bit for the diet to end so they can ‘live normally’ again, any chances of a gradual increase in food is pretty slim. In fact, any ‘end of diet’ period is usually followed by a massive meal – either to celebrate the achievement, or to illustrate the fact that ‘life is too short so sod you all …’ etc. Having acquired a slower metabolism, you now go back to eating exactly the same amount of food you ate before you started the diet. What happens? You put on more weight than before you started the diet – and, it seems, a lot faster than it took to shift it. This is not simply your perception either. A study carried out on a group of rats in 1986 showed that by the time they did their second diet, the weight loss was half of what it was the first time and, wait for it, the weight was put back on THREE TIMES AS FAST. This is happening to millions of people around the world as we speak. The problem is it’s a cause and effect chain reaction, for when you see the weight rapidly piling on again you once again think that it’s time to do something about it – what? Yep the latest DIET. Now I understand why dieting, as well as the addiction to certain foods and drinks, makes people fat. They often contribute to the problem people are trying to solve. It is only in fairly recent times that people have reached over 500 lb (227 kg) in weight. One family in the US – The Woods family – weighed in at 1 tonne – yes ONE TONNE. And if you think we are talking about a large family (so to speak), we are talking a combined weight of just four women. One girl, Terriny Woods, was 41 stone 12lb(over 260 kg) and she was just 15 years old at the time. Yes 15 years old. If you keep going on a diet and then binge directly afterwards, your body will produce more fat cells, your metabolism will not know what the hell it’s doing and your system will store more fat in case you starve it again. This is the cycle people repeat again and again. Physically and mentally diets can be a nightmare. You never break free from the constant mental battle of trying to control your intake of certain foods or certain amounts of food. Nor do you break free from the many physical problems they create – all that happens is you become totally obsessed with food. You’re not happy when you feel you can’t eat and you feel like crap after you do it. It’s time to stop this madness. It’s time to fix the leaking roof once and for all and stop replacing the tiles. The Medical ‘Solution’ There are of course many people who have been through the dieting mill and have realized this is not a long-term solution. At the same time their excess weight, as well as ailments related to their obesity, often cause people to take much more drastic measures than simply trying the latest diet. The increase in weight loss surgery and weight loss pills has exploded over recent years. Big people are big business and there are many people making billions of pounds by preying on their insecurities and desperation – all in the name of ‘medical help’ and ‘genuine care’ you understand. While I am all for some short-term medical intervention in many areas of ‘disease’, I see no place whatsoever for weight loss pills. And when I say no place, I mean no place at all. Even weight loss surgery, in some very desperate cases, can at times be the only solution to save a life and I can see at least a debate for it. However, these all new all-dancing and singing ‘weight loss solution’ pills are never the answer. Weight loss drugs are no longer aimed simply at the morbidly obese and given by GPs only as a last resort to those who really do feel they have tried everything else and would possibly die otherwise. Unfortunately things have got so far out of hand with the weight loss drug industry (as indeed I believe it has with the whole drug industry no matter what the disease) that I think it’s now safe to say we are without any question on the verge of … 4 (#ulink_8e467a3e-9796-518f-b72f-4832ffdb16e8) PHARMAGEDDON (#ulink_8e467a3e-9796-518f-b72f-4832ffdb16e8) Never in history have we seen so many drugs being handed out so willy-nilly to so many people for so many different things. Every pill sold, means more money for BIG PHARMACEUTICALS. And one particular ‘disease’ is now more of the holy grail for BIG DRUGS than almost any other – obesity. With millions of people getting bigger by the day while craving the land of the thin more and more, the desperate need for a ‘quick fix’ is now at an all time high. And what better quick fix than a simple pill? In 1998, the NHS (National Health Service) gave out 20,000 anti-obesity pills. Just seven years later in 2005 that figure rose to 880,000 pills, the figure will almost certainly be over 1 million pills today. This annual cost to the NHS was ?690,000 in the late 1990s and is now nearly ?40 million. Yes FORTY MILLION POUNDS of your tax money going directly into the hands of the pharmaceutical companies, and the figure is growing daily. The government justify the ever increasing costs by claiming, ‘… the benefits to the economy outweigh the cost to the NHS’, they go on to explain, ‘… a lot of illness can be avoided by using these pills to aid weight loss’. Exactly what illnesses have ever been ‘cured’ as a direct result of the introduction of so many weight loss drugs I don’t exactly know, but no doubt there will be some ‘scientific data’ to back up such claims and if there aren’t it wouldn’t be too difficult to get some. I also haven’t seen a reduction of people gaining weight either, which given all you have to do is take a pill, is surprising. If these weight loss drugs are, as they often purport to be, ‘the easy solution to fat and obesity’, and given we are in an obesity epidemic, why don’t they simply give them to everyone so we can all live a ‘fat free’ and disease free life? Well the simple answer is they aren’t exactly the ‘magic bullet’ some purport them to be. What is extraordinary is that each anti-fat drug comes with a little side note explaining something along the lines of ‘can help to lose weight in conjunction with a diet and exercise programme’. Now, stop me if I appear nuts here, but doesn’t that defeat the whole argument of these fat drugs? Aren’t they apparently there as a last resort for those people who have tried everything else and now have no choice but to seek medical help? Aren’t they surely designed for people who have failed on the diet and exercise front? People who, for whatever reason, cannot tap into the right mind set to change their diet and exercise more? If that is the case and they are only meant to be given to such desperate people (after all, drugs should always be the last resort) and if these drugs are only effective with a change in diet and an increase in exercise, how can they possibly work for the group for which they are intended? Do these pills somehow miraculously inspire people to change their diet and get on the treadmill? If so, they really are miracle drugs. I get images of perhaps a three-dimensional tablet acting like a motivational cheerleader/speaker inspiring people to eat well and exercise. Seriously, think about it. If these drugs don’t help people lose excess weight by simply taking them, regardless of any change in diet or physical movement, then what’s the point of them? Even if they did enable an odd few to lose a little weight without changing anything else, are the potential risks of taking any drug and changing the fine chemical balance of the body worth it and what on earth do these pills do to get to the cause of the problem? WONDER DRUGS Coincidentally, as I write this small chapter, yet another ‘weight loss pill’ has come onto the market and only yesterday I was on the radio talking about it. I say coincidentally, but as they are coming out faster than the rate of stealth taxes, it’s not really that much of a coincidence. What’s fascinating about this particular one is the fact that for some reason it has been approved in England, but rejected by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in the US because the safety of the drug was not demonstrated. The first question I have is an obvious one. How can a drug be okay for humans in the UK but not for those in the US? How can it be cleared on a scientific level here and yet not on a scientific level over there? I was always taught that science is ‘fact’, when of course I now know it’s ‘opinion’. In the opinion of the FDA it is, at time of this writing, not demonstrated as being safe and in the opinion of those in England it is fine. When I say fine, it doesn’t seem to matter that this drug – Rimonabant – has noted possible side effects which may include suicidal thoughts. However, as always, the counter drug argument of ‘it does more good than harm’ soon starts after any negative drug press. Dr Ian Campbell, medical director of the charity Weight Concern said, ‘You have to balance the risks with the advantages of quality of life improvement. Rimonabant has a role, it should be used with care but directed towards the right patient it can be effective and safe.’ However, he also goes on to say that the drug should not be used in people being treated for depression or with a recent history of depression. However, unless once again I have lost leave of my senses, the people for whom the pill is directed are more than likely going to be depressed aren’t they? If you are obese and so desperate that you are willing to take a drug which has the potential for suicidal thoughts (even if the chance is extremely small), wouldn’t it be fair to assume there’s a huge chance that person is already depressed? The medical profession will no doubt look to see before prescribing that the individual has no history of depression. But again that would be based purely on their medical records. If so, we need to ask, how many people go to their GP with depression for being overweight? And surely the ones who do are the very people who the drugs are designed for, aren’t they? Yet, it is recommended that this drug should not be taken if you are depressed, which begs the question, who exactly are these pills meant for? Deliriously happy obese people perhaps? But if they were over the moon with their weight, why would they seek medical assistance to lose weight? Can you see how mental the whole thing is when you start to look at it? It’s even more insane when you think the US committee of experts who reviewed studies of Rimonabant from all over the world, told an FDA hearing that the drug is associated with an increased risk of suicidal thoughts – even in those with no history of depression. Studies also highlighted significant increases in anxiety, insomnia, and panic attacks in patients given 20 mg of the drug compared with placebo. This is far from the first time weight loss drugs have been put under the adverse drug reaction (ADR) spotlight. Over the years many of these ‘medically approved’ weight loss drugs have had reports of all sorts of side effects ranging from random anal leakage to even death. But at least up until now you had to see your GP first before you could get hold of them. At least it was down to a professional to make a qualified judgement as to whether you should be given such pills and whether the chance of any adverse drug reaction, in their opinion, would be outweighed by what they hope will be a reduction in the patient’s weight. However, as from the spring of 2009, the way with which people get hold of some weight loss drugs will all change. For the first time in history in the UK you will be able to buy the first ever ‘over the counter’ weight loss drug – Alli. No prescription – no doctor’s appointment – no assessment, just walk into your local chemist and get your drug. Given that we are in a world where thin is the new black, I feel the decision to license this drug as an OTC (Over The Counter), will prove to be one of the most reckless in the history of medicine. The potential for ‘drug’ abuse here is on a scale as yet unknown. After Alli was launched in the US in 2007 it sold 75 million in the first six months alone, which gives us some kind of idea of what’s in store here. I would also bet this will not be the only OTC weight loss drug either; once this comes along the floodgates will open and getting hold of your weight loss drug will become as normal as buying an aspirin (by the time you read this book it may already have happened). The dangers to anyone with a shred of common sense are painfully obvious, especially as you can also buy these pills on the Net too. Teenagers for one will no doubt get hold of these and chances are, with no one checking to see how many people are buying and taking, will take much more than the recommended dose in the delusion they will lose more by taking more (no doubt many adults will also do the same!). Losing weight is one of the biggest obsessions teenagers and many adults have and to produce a drug that anyone can easily buy without any checks with a promise of weight loss is unwise to say the least. What’s crazy is both the FDA in the US and now the FSA (Food Standards Agency) in the UK, gave the drug the all clear to be sold over the counter, expressing the benefits far outweigh any possible risk to health. But in order for this drug to be cleared the FDA and FSA would have had to come to the conclusion that the drug is both safe and effective – the criteria all approved drugs have to pass. But, ignoring the moral issue of having a weight loss drug as an OTC and God knows how many people who may well abuse it, I question it on both the other fronts. Firstly it stops the absorption of some fat soluble vitamins like A, D, E, and K. The body is such a finely tuned machine that you simply cannot brush aside the effects this will have on the overall health of the body; effects which may not become apparent for many years. On top of this, the drug works by stopping the body from absorbing some of the fat you eat in food. This sounds like good news, but a) it’s not necessarily fat that makes you fat (as I will illustrate a little later) and b) it is essential the body does absorb fat. (They aren’t called ‘essential fatty acids’ for nothing after all). Also the actual weight loss effectiveness of the drug has been brought into question too. There was even one report that showed an average of just one pound of weight loss in an entire month. A loss hardly worth risking a bit of random anal leakage for, which, just so you know, is one of the potential side effects of this particular weight loss drug. In fact, GlaxoSmithKline recommends that Alli users wear dark pants and keep spare clothes available at work until they ‘have a sense of any treatment effects’. Yes, such are the chances of ‘steatorrhea’ – oily, loose stools – and fecal incontinence, frequent or urgent bowel movements and flatulence, that the makers suggest you wear some dark pants just in case something happens unexpectedly. Seriously, is it me or has the world gone completely bonkers? Clearly there have also been many studies with Alli that have shown significantly more weight loss than the 1 lb (0.45 kg) in a month I quoted a second ago, but is having to wear dark pants just in case something foul unexpectedly comes out of your bum really worth it? I could write an entire book on just weight loss drugs alone, but the point I want to illustrate is once again what on earth do any of these pills do to get to the cause of the excess weight problem? What can they possibly do to stop someone’s desire for certain foods? It may stop someone eating certain amounts of fat through fear of a sudden ‘soiling of their pants’, but what on earth does it do to stop the excess consumption of refined sugar – the biggest cause of excess bodily fat there is? What does it do to stop them even wanting fatty foods but just not having them through fear? Even if someone does lose weight taking any weight loss drug, if nothing has been done to change the way that person perceives what they eat or the way they eat, then what on earth stops them piling the weight back on when they stop taking the pill? Doesn’t this work in exactly the same way as the ‘fad diets’ many in the dietetic and medical profession slag off so readily? Aren’t these over the counter diet pills a ‘quick fix’ solution? Once the ‘quick fix’ is over, it’s back to the same pattern of behaviour which caused the problem in the first place. Once again, excess bodily fat is a physical symptom of addictivepsychological problem. With that in mind, please rest assured that in my opinion there will never be a weight loss pill that can possibly send you to the utopia of a Food Freedom mentality and so the land of the thin. Shortly before going to press the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) recommended the suspension of the marketing authorization of Accomplia, as Rimonabant is known as in Europe, because its ‘benefits no longer outweigh its risks’. This despite the fact that the drug was cleared by NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) for use as a last resort on the NHS only four months earlier. Under The Knife People’s desperation to get to grips with their weight and health doesn’t simply stop at radical, nutritionally unsound, diets or suspect diet pills. Going under the surgeon’s knife is getting more and more popular. In the United States alone, 177,600 operations were performed in 2007, according to the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery. One of the most common operations and now probably the most widely talked about is gastric bypass surgery. This works by making your stomach smaller and removing part of your bowel to make your digestive system shorter. This was also the operation Fern Britton famously had and it’s not for the faint hearted. Personally I feel Fern Britton was given a hard time when it came out her dramatic weight loss was not simply down to diet and exercise, as she had apparently claimed, but rather surgery. I don’t think some realize how low and desperate someone has to get to even contemplate surgery for weight loss. Gastric bypass surgery can be potentially life threatening and is usually used in extreme cases only. However, due to what they deem as the ‘success’ of such operations, the plan is to extend this ‘opportunity’ to those who aren’t necessarily morbidly obese (large chance of dying as a result of their weight), but just obese. Please understand that the way obesity and morbid obesity is measured at the moment is using an antiquated system known as BMI (Body Mass Index). This ridiculous system doesn’t take into account muscle mass and is completely inaccurate in many cases. This system even shows the extremely muscular and well-toned rugby player Jonny Wilkinson as obese! Pretty soon you will have slightly overweight people (who according to the BMI scale are obese) getting this surgery. It’s also worth knowing that we are already in a position where many children are now going under the knife for obesity, yes kids. Once again though I have the same question – does this treat the cause or the symptom? Unlike drug pills I can actually see an argument for some types of weight loss surgery. There would, I believe without question, be some people who would be dead now without it. However, this type of treatment is getting more and more popular and for some, far from being the last resort, it can be seen as the ‘easy’ solution and one of the first things they try. Easy is not the word I would use for this operation, stomach bypass or any similar procedures. Remember, these operations don’t stop you wanting certain foods; you just can’t eat as much of them. So you still want to, but you can’t. This, for many, is a form of living mental torture. Many get around the problem by simply blending a load of junk food with some liquid and drinking it instead. So they are still often having their sugar and refined fat fix, just in a different form or chewing the same crap very slowly. This is why there are some people who despite operations like this, still have problems losing weight. One lady lost just 1 lb (0.45 kg) in the seven weeks following her stomach bypass op. She spent ?6,000, went through the nightmare of being under the surgeon’s knife to have her stomach strangled, yet still has exactly the same problem as before. She still battles every day with the mental cravings she has for the chocolates, cola, cakes, and all the other artificial sweet things that are causing the problem – and she still consumes them. She is still on a permanent mental diet – still constantly trying to fight a desire to eat and drink certain foods. And exactly the same can happen with jaw wiring, the stomach ‘pacemaker’ (yes there is one) or any of the other drastic surgical methods used to try and shift the fat. When In Doubt – Suck It Out! Then we have those who don’t fancy the idea of their stomach being stapled and having to restrict what they eat, and opt for a bit of liposuction. No willpower, discipline, and control needed here, simply let them knock you out and suck the fat out. You then leave hospital so battered and bruised you feel like you have just gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson – but at least you’re thinner! Your skin is the biggest organ of the body and when you start cutting it open and sucking fat out, it simply cannot be a good thing to do. And, like all the other weight loss methods I have mentioned here, liposuction again does absolutely nothing to remove the psychological addiction to certain foods and drinks and desire for them. All it does is treat the physical symptoms of being mentally locked in what I describe as ‘the food trap’. Set Yourself Free What’s required is a very different approach. The irony is, as I will keep mentioning throughout this book, that the whole process of changing what you eat in order to get slim and healthy and to stay slim and healthy is ridiculously simple. The problem is we have all been going about it the wrong way for so long we are all totally convinced that there isn’t an easy way. We all strongly believe losing weight will require tremendous amounts of willpower, discipline, and self-control for life. We think if we don’t possess such strengths, we will need to seek out pills, patches (yes there is a weight loss patch!), or the fat hoover to help us get thin. However, just because we believe something is difficult to virtually impossible – and even if that belief is backed up by 99 per cent of the population – it doesn’t make it so. If I can simply a) change this false belief and b) show you an extremely easy way of thinking that will set you free around food in a way you possibly haven’t felt in years, freedom is yours. This process cannot only be easy, but also enjoyable. The answer is not to starve yourself, cut yourself open, pop a pill or staple your stomach, but to change the way you think about the ‘foods’ in order to successfully, not go on a diet, but … 5 (#ulink_5715163c-c3ad-58e4-b865-6a836ae39066) CHANGE YOUR DIET (#ulink_5715163c-c3ad-58e4-b865-6a836ae39066) When I was unhealthy, tired, lethargic, and fat, I knew, as we all do, that if I ate plenty of fruit, vegetables, and salads I would be slim and healthy. The problem was I actually hated vegetables and salads. I had fruit every now and again – summer mainly – and even then only the odd orange. As for salads, somehow I don’t think the token side salad, which I hardly touched, really counted. The main difficulty I had was that I simply didn’t like the taste of vegetables and salads and they just never seemed to satisfy. Even the fruits I did eat didn’t seem to satisfy me the same way as steak and chips. Besides which, I had always been conditioned to believe that if you ate that ‘rabbit food’ you were being boring. No, my regular diet was comprised of steak and chips; McDonald’s; Burger King; chocolate; crisps; a big ‘hearty’ breakfast; tons of tea and coffee; loads of white bread and butter; big helpings of white pasta; egg or beans on toast; hot dogs; Sunday roast. In fact, you name it I ate it – as long as it wasn’t green! I often looked at well-prepared, beautiful-looking salads and thought, ‘I really wish I liked that, but I just don’t’. If I could get as much pleasure and satisfaction from eating fruit, salad, vegetables, and drinking carrot juice as I do eating steak and chips and drinking Coke, then I would do it – who wouldn’t? Well it transpires you can and the change really is simple. I know at this stage that may sound like rubbish, especially for those who have tried ‘everything’ in the past, but I did say at the start that an open mind is vital for success here. Not only will you get just as much pleasure and satisfaction from your new way of eating, but infinitely more so. These days I wouldn’t even let you pay me to eat a McDonald’s or Burger King, yet for years these were my ‘brand’ of food and I ate them daily. When I wake up in the morning now and head straight for my juicer and blender, I do so not because I ‘have to’ or because I need to lose weight due to some restrictive diet. I do so because I wouldn’t dream of doing anything else now, it has bizarrely become my choice; I actually want to do it. When I choose a meal at a restaurant now I actually look for tasty salad! I am writing this with some surprise because a few years ago, the first thing I ‘had’ to do in the morning was stick the kettle on to give myself a caffeine ‘boost’. I now know this was to try and get me over my junkie food hangover (more about that later). I would then eat a big bowl of cereal, several rounds of toast and maybe a couple of boiled eggs. At the weekends my breakfast consisted of everything that was on offer at JJ’s caf?. The great British breakfast – the bedrock of a good heart attack as they say. I used to have images of people who owned a juicer, drank carrot juice and ate leaves. One which perhaps you have at the moment. I would think ‘What sad, boring people – what on earth do they do for fun?’ But how deluded was I? As if I was having enormous amounts of fun being a fat, tired, and lethargic person, hating the way I felt and looked on an almost daily basis. As if I was enjoying a life where I was constantly battling with my intake of food or the latest ‘diet’. I believe this is where we all have got it wrong. I always thought that if I stopped eating the junk I would be making a sacrifice and if I did eat overeat and/or eat junk it was somehow a wonderful life. I thought if I drank fresh juice, ate good food, created the body I wanted, felt light, and had the energy I required to live my dreams that I would somehow be missing out, I would be making massive sacrifices to get what I wanted. But the question is, what sacrifices? I don’t think we ever stop to actually ask that very important question. Whenever I overate it would always be followed by thoughts of, ‘I wish I hadn’t done that’ or ‘why did I do that’. I never really enjoyed the food either as it would be gone in seconds. I was eyeing up the next mouthful before I had eaten the one on my fork! I was setting myself up for a lifetime of misery, lethargy, and being overweight all for literally seconds of what I thought was genuine pleasure – even though I hated myself soon afterwards. I would hardly call that a fair trade off. I often felt bloated after eating a pile of what I deemed as ‘the most pleasurable food on earth’. My physical problems were clearly caused by the amount of the foods I was eating and the quantities I consumed. These foods would always seem nice in my mind before I ate them, but as soon as I did, I wished I hadn’t. That’s not true satisfaction; it’s the complete opposite. Since changing my diet I now see the truth – there was nothing special about these foods at all, it was one incredibly clever illusion, one which I believe has deluded millions around the world. Like any illusion, it appears extremely real until it gets shattered. That is precisely what this book is about; page by page it will gradually chip away at the illusion until it is completely shattered and that ‘light-bulb’ moment will be yours for the taking. Contrary to what we have been conditioned to believe it is extremely easy to switch your diet as opposed to going on one, we have all simply been looking at the wrong way for so many years we find it hard to believe it can be ridiculously easy. A Sweet Change For The Better For example, I know many people who used to love sugar in their tea and at the time would never drink it without, but now wouldn’t pay you for a cup with even a grain in it. Why not? What has changed? The tea and the sugar have always remained exactly the same. The difference is they have simply trained themselves to like tea and coffee without sugar. The process is not hard; in fact it usually takes all of a week to get used to any new taste. The week is not painful, just a bit strange at first like any change. The coffee without sugar does not taste wonderful at first but after a while it soon starts to taste better to the person than it did with sugar in. The point that I am making is that the vast majority of people who make this change, would now never drink tea or coffee with sugar in it again. Not because they can’t, or because they are being forced not to, but because they have no desire to any more. This is an extremely important point to understand in order to reach ‘Food Freedom’ mentality. They aren’t on a ‘no sugar in tea diet’. In other words they don’t stare longingly at people adding sugar to their tea and feel envious because they can’t have it. The reason for this is simple. They can have sugar in their tea, but are now choosing not to. Diet mentality is one of, ‘I want, but I can’t have’ (which is enough to drive anyone of strong will, crazy. Yes strong will, I will expand on this later) but when you change your diet you have a, ‘I can, but I don’t actually want to’ mentality. When you have this mentality and have changed your diet as opposed to gone on a diet, there is no need to use any form of willpower, discipline, or self-control. In fact, those who do stop sugar in their tea and have done so for a little while, act as if you have poisoned them if you put some in (which in a way you have). The point is clear and simple: by changing their brand they will never have to use willpower, discipline, or self-control not to have sugar in their tea again. In other words – they are genuinely free to choose. YOU CANNOT HAVE FREEDOM OF CHOICE WITHOUT THE FREEDOM TO REFUSE This is a theme I will be repeating throughout the book – ‘you cannot have freedom of genuine choice, without the freedom also to be able to refuse’. It is interesting to observe that people who are mentally on a diet detest it so much because they feel their genuine freedom of choice has been removed. What they don’t seem to realize is that in many cases they aren’t actually genuinely choosing to eat the foods causing the health and excess fat problems anyway. They often want to stop the diet in order to get back to the freedom of choice they believed they enjoyed. This is an illusion for, as I will repeat, you simply cannot have genuine freedom of choice without genuine freedom to refuse. If people could simply choose to refuse, then diets would be obsolete and no one on earth would have a weight problem. People would simply exercise their genuine freedom of choice to refuse. If you could genuinely choose to have or not to have, then you wouldn’t be reading this book. The reality is our choices are being made for us. BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK – just like the tobacco companies over forty years ago – are adding chemicals to our ‘food’ and ‘drinks’ in order to make us feel hungrier faster. Haven’t you ever wondered why logically you just couldn’t simply stop eating certain things, even when it has gone completely against your intelligent rational judgement? Addiction and logic don’t go together, if they did no intelligent person would have ever smoked after it became clear it causes cancer and nobody would continue overeating and/or eating rubbish knowing it makes them fat, ill, miserable and can cause premature death. Logically, if this type of eating made people happy, everyone who is overweight would all be leading blissfully happy lives. BRITAIN’S FATTEST TEEN Coincidentally as I write this book a teenager has made front page headlines in the Sun newspaper in the UK. Georgia Davis has the unenviable title of being ‘Britain’s Fattest Teen’ weighing it at 33 stone (209 kg) at only 15 years of age. Consuming between eight to twelve thousand calories a day it’s easy to see how she got to be that big. The big mistake people make, including Georgia herself, is that it is not her choice to eat like this. There is no way on earth this poor and desperate girl genuinely chooses to eat the amount she does and be the size she is. If she had genuine freedom of choice she would simply stop eating so much rubbish and switch to fruit, veggies, and salads. Doctors have told her ‘she could drop dead at any moment’, no doubt believing a touch of ‘stating the bloody obvious’ would somehow help her. If anything, trying to scare any kind of addict off their drug rarely if ever works, in fact it usually has the opposite effect. For example one of the times a smoker will reach for a cigarette is when they are stressed and uptight. I remember my doctor telling me that if I continued smoking my lungs would collapse. I was so scared and stressed when I came out what do you think was the first thing I did? Yes – light a fag to help calm me down! The same principle applies to drug food. You tell someone like Georgia that she will die unless she changes, it won’t help her. She will simply find somewhere to cut off from the world and eat. Why? Because, as I will repeat, addiction and logic have no place together. Georgia said, ‘I can’t walk any more than a few steps without getting out of breath and a few months ago I developed type 2 diabetes. When I look in the mirror I feel sad and go to my bedroom and cry. I know it’s partly my fault. But it’s so hard to stop eating.’ But it’s not hard to stop eating apples, bananas, grapes, cucumber, sardines, or spinach – even when people love these foods. Why? Because they are not drug-like foods and they don’t create a hole, they genuinely feed the body. Georgia went on to say, ‘Food is like a drug. Some people choose heroin but I’ve chosen food and it’s killing me.’ But that’s the point; no one actually chooses to be a heroin addict any more than they choose to get hooked on certain foods. The more you try to fill the hole with the substances creating the hole the bigger the hole gets. All that has happened to 33 stone (209 kg) Georgia is the hole has got out of all proportion and the only thing which appears to give any degree of satisfaction is an enormous amount of the same. This poor girl knows it’s killing her, knows it has caused her to have diabetes and even knows she could drop down dead at any moment, yet she still continues to struggle. This is because telling her what she is doing is killing her is the same as telling someone in quicksand they are in fact in quicksand and should get out. SHE KNOWS! This girl knows all the reasons why she shouldn’t eat all this rubbish daily, what she doesn’t know is what compels her to do so against her rational judgement. And that is precisely what makes this book so very different to any ‘diet’ book you have ever read and is precisely what will enable you to break totally free. It is interesting to see that Georgia Davis said that eating is ‘like a drug’ to her. What I am saying is that it’s not simply ‘like a drug to her’, it is a drug and it is a drug to millions of people all over the world. This is due not to some inherent weakness in those millions of individuals, but the addictive nature of the drug-food itself. It is true that not everyone who smokes cigarettes becomes heavily addicted, but nearly all are addicted to some degree. The same applies to drug-like foods and drinks. Not everyone is this heavily addicted, but millions are certainly addicted to some degree. This is not the nature of the people but the nature of the substances themselves. And it’s not ‘food’ per se that they are overeating and ‘using’ as an emotional crutch, it’s drug-like food that people become addicted to and use to try and feed an emotion. After all I don’t see too many people attending Apple Anonymous or going to weekly meetings to try to stop eating broccoli do you? This is why I disagree so vehemently with people like Paul McKenna. While I admire much of his work in other areas, I cannot agree with his ‘I Can Make You Thin’ principles due to the addictive nature of the foods themselves. Paul suggests you can eat whatever you like as long as you eat only when you are hungry and stop eating when you are genuinely full. But that’s like saying to a smoker on twenty cigarettes a day that all they have to do to avoid cancer is to cut down to one cigarette a day. While the advice itself is correct – after all I don’t believe anyone would actually get cancer smoking one a day – if you have ever smoked you will know that actually trying to smoke just one a day when you have been on twenty is virtually impossible. And if you did manage it, you wouldn’t be happy, you would just be wishing your life away waiting for that one cigarette. It’s the same with drug-like food. Anyone who is already hooked on a certain amount can’t just ‘cut down’ or ‘eat slowly’ and ‘stop when they feel full’. In fact these drug-like foods often trigger an almost uncontrollable urge to binge and overeat. How many times have you thought ‘just the one’ chocolate or biscuit and before you know where you are you have polished off a great deal more? Georgia Davis cannot stop eating when she is full because she never feels full. In the same way your body builds up an immunity and tolerance to a drug, it does the same with drug-like food and drink. You end up needing more and more in order to try and fill the hole and void the drug itself has created. Georgia’s problem is she does eat when she feels hungry, the problem is she feels hungry most of the time due to the addictive nature of these foods and drinks. What Georgia ultimately needs is to starve the false hungers and create a genuine one. Once that happens then and only then can the advice of ‘eat when hungry’ and ‘stop when full’ be effective. MILLIONS TRAPPED I need you to realize that the trap you find yourself in, the one I found myself in and the one millions are in all over the world is simply a result of clever marketing and chemicals designed to make you feel ultimately dissatisfied. They create a hole, which appears to be filled with more of the same, yet in reality the hole gets bigger till in the end you don’t ever truly appear to be able to fill it. The irony is we believe this empty feeling can only be filled with more of the same rubbish, which is perhaps the biggest aspect of the illusion – as you will discover. The ‘food’ business is the same as any other and BIG FOOD simply wants to sell more. They will only do this by removing genuine nutrients (to create a malnourished body which always demands more in a desperate need for the right nutritional requirements) and adding chemicals, which compel an otherwise intelligent person to eat certain things and eat more than they would ever do in their rational mind. Despite 15-year-old Georgia’s immense size, the main reason for her insatiable hunger is malnutrition. She, like millions, is overfed but undernourished. If you change your diet and don’t go on a diet – in the same way as when a person gets used not to having sugar in their tea and coffee – you never have to think about your diet again. You will be free to genuinely choose what you put into your body and you won’t be a slave to, or victim of, the BIG FOOD system. I want to make this point clear: I am not being ‘good’ drinking freshly extracted vegetable juice daily and skipping the junkie food in favour of good wholesome foods, I choose to do it – it’s my regular diet now. The people who no longer take sugar in their tea have no desire to go back and I have no desire to go back either. This whole ‘being good’ is a nonsense way of thinking anyway and is part of the ‘diet trap’. For example, are you being good for not taking heroin? Do you feel proud of yourself because you haven’t sniffed glue today? If you did feel proud then it would mean that you indeed have a glue problem. I am not proud of myself for not stuffing myself with crap today, I just don’t want to eat this stuff as my main diet any more. Unlike a conventional diet (in the restrictive sense), I can eat and drink whatever I want, whenever I want, I no longer have to put restrictions on myself. The difference is that I just do not want them any more. I am not being ‘good’ for eating what I do, it is now my genuine choice to. I am not continuing to do what I do to lose weight, because I’m already slim, and I’m not doing it to stay slim – I’m doing it because it is now my brand and I love it! YOU WILL LEARN TO ENJOY ANY FOOD OR DRINK YOU HAVE ON A REGULAR BASIS A few years ago I would never have believed that I could literally train myself to love fruits, salads, vegetables, and their juices. I even love avocados now, a fruit I absolutely detested before. However, as macrobiotics has been teaching for years, you will adapt and learn to love any food or drink you have on a regular basis (I am unsure if Brussel sprouts are included in that mind you). That is something I would have dismissed in an instant a few years ago, but there is a great deal of truth in it. Years back I tried some Chinese herbal medicine in an attempt to clear my skin of psoriasis. The best way I can describe the medicine is tree bark. I had to boil what looked like bits of tree and forest detritus in water twice every day. To say this stuff stank would be putting it mildly and it tasted as bitter as a winter’s night in Halifax. I hated it to say the least, but I drank it as I was willing to try anything. As I drank this warm muddy-looking water, I would hold my nose and try not to be sick – it really was that bad. Here’s my point: within one month, not only did I get used to the smell and taste – I actually began to like it. This is why changing your diet of food is going to be a breeze, once we remove the brainwashing, conditioning, and trickery of BIG FOOD that is. Nothing you switch to will taste and smell anything like tree bark so the adjustment won’t take anything like a month and you certainly won’t be holding your nose and trying not to be sick during it. In fact, most of the things many of you will already love. But it really doesn’t matter if at this stage a main course salad and some vegetable juice sounds about as appealing as a fortnight’s holiday in Afghanistan. Once all the brainwashing, conditioning, and misinformation regarding your diet of foods and drinks has been removed, and you have the correct mental tools on exactly how to change your diet easily, you will be amazed at what will happen and how easy and enjoyable it can be. You Health Freak! This doesn’t mean for one second that once you change your diet all you will be able to eat is salad and fruit – so don’t panic. Halfway through the book you could well start to think it’s all about eating grass, which is why it’s so important to finish the entire book. Trust me, at the end you will be about to eat ANYTHING you want, whenever you want to eat it. The key here is to remove the brainwashing and conditioning and expose BIG FOOD for what it is, so that your genuine choice will be not to have the rubbish nor give your hard earned money to BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK. I never dreamt that one day I would go out for a meal and actually want a main course of fish or avocado salad – that I would choose it over everything else. I never thought that I would be in a position where I would have vegetable juice daily, seriously, vegetable juice – you would never have thought it. I never imagined that I would go out of my way and actually pass by McDonald’s or Pizza Hut to get to a juice bar or find something healthy. I certainly never thought that I would look at people eating crap with genuine pity as opposed to total envy, as I used to when on a diet. I just feel very lucky that I changed my diet when I did. I often seriously wonder where I would be now if I hadn’t. CHANGING YOUR EATING HABITS Just as important as your diet is the way you eat. In order to get and stay ‘Slim for Life’ and to increase your chance of a longer life, it is vital to learn the process of eating just to the point of being almost full. It has been shown many times over that the lighter the burden put on the digestive system, the longer – on average – a person lives. This principle is key to lifelong slimness. It takes about twenty to thirty minutes for the body to acknowledge it has all of its nutritional requirements, so if you eat until you are full you have overeaten. This is also why it is so important to chew your food thoroughly, as it gives the body a chance to acknowledge it is going to be fed. The enzymes in your mouth are more powerful than those in your stomach, and it is essential to use your ‘natural blender’ (your mouth) before swallowing to signal the right digestive juices in your stomach. It seems odd that people say they love their food so much, and that is why they find it hard to change, yet it’s the very thing they miss out on every time. Think about it. Most people are on the next forkful as they gulp down the previous unchewed mouthful. They are completely missing their food already! A study carried out by the University of Osaka, Japan, and published on the website of the British Medical Journal, illustrated that people who eat quickly and eat until they are full are three times as likely to be overweight than those who eat slowly and leave the table without feeling completely full. The study, led by Professor Hiroyasu Iso, suggests that the manner of eating too quickly – and until absolutely full – is a significant factor in the obesity epidemic, as it overrides signals in the brain which would normally tell the person to stop eating. Dr David Haslam, GP and clinical director for the National Obesity Forum, said, ‘The great dietary gurus of a century ago stressed the importance of chewing food for a long time and eating slowly, and these messages are even more important today.’ CHANGING YOUR DIET GIVES YOU CERTAINTY I know for certain that I will never be overweight again. I know for certain I will never go on a diet. I know that I will not have to worry about whether I am getting the correct nutrients. I have energy, I feel light, I wake up and actually feel awake, I feel mentally sharp, I have regained confidence I had no idea I’d even lost, and I now wear whatever clothes I want. In short, I am what some people would describe as a ‘health freak’ and it is just simply the best feeling in the world and I wouldn’t trade it for any amount of money on earth. The reason I have written this book is because I also know for certain that once you fully understand every aspect of the ‘diet trap’ and follow a few simple instructions, you too will change what you eat and you will love it. Everyone has it within their power to change their diet for good – because it’s easy. Forget everything you have tried in the past and everything you have heard or read about food – let’s start with a clean slate. No past to drag with us or dwell on, just a compelling future to look forward to. I have designed this book so that at the end you will not only want to change your diet, but you will literally love the process. And that tends to be one of the main problems people have when they think about changing what they eat. They feel all doom and gloomy before they even start; as if they will be missing out and making a huge sacrifice by making the change. If you change your diet for life and totally change how you look at your old diet then you will never feel as though you are missing out for one simple reason – it will suddenly dawn on you that you aren’t. In order for you to see this clearly, and before we even attempt to make any changes, we need to debunk the clap-trap that you’ve been bombarded with for years about food and health. ‘Stuff’ that is now stored in your head and your conscious and subconscious doesn’t even question it as fact, it just takes it as read that it is. The biggest problem is we believe a lot of what we have heard over the years about nutrition, diets, and health because it is put across by ‘experts’. The question I want you to ask is: is it possible that some of the experts were taught incorrectly themselves? Is it possible that we just have too much information about food and nutrition? Is it possible that we have literally been blinded by science? Is it possible we have over complicated the issue so much that we can’t see the wood for the trees? I ask you to set aside what you believe to be ‘fact’ and read what I am about to write with an extremely open mind. It is time to simplify the whole business about what we should eat, what quantity we should eat, what time we should eat and what is best for us by unloading our minds of pieces of so-called vital health information, which, plain and simply … 6 (#ulink_be39382f-d97f-55fc-8c7e-05d231e93eec) WE DON’T NEED TO KNOW! (#ulink_be39382f-d97f-55fc-8c7e-05d231e93eec) What is your body fat ratio? What is your resting heart rate? Do you know? What is a bioflavonoid? What is riboflavin? Do you know? How many calories are there in a banana? How much protein do you need daily? How many vitamins are there? What is the best source of calcium? What does vitamin K do for you? Which has more vitamin C – an orange or a green pepper? What is a ketone? How does ketosis work? Do you know which foods contain vitamin P? What is your body mass index? What is your metabolic rate? If you do not know the answer to these questions – good! We don’t need to know. A little over one hundred years ago we didn’t even know what a vitamin was, but we still got here didn’t we? A gorilla doesn’t know how many vitamins or minerals there are in a banana or whether it contains any calcium or protein: why don’t they know? Because they don’t need to know! There are no nutritionists or dieticians in the wild, how do they cope? How do animals manage to keep so fit and excess fat free without knowing things like ‘their resting heart rate’ or without ever wearing a heart rate monitor to show what ‘zone’ they are in? With no dieticians on hand or fitness instructors, it almost makes you wonder how on earth they know what to eat to be healthy or how to stay trim and fit. Well I say it makes us wonder, but that’s not true. We fully expect all wild animals on earth to instinctively know what to eat, when to eat and what to do to be fighting fit. We don’t expect them to have to read books on the subject of food or to seek ‘qualified’ advice. We are under no illusion at all that their intuition, provided by whoever or whatever created us, is the best guide to health and healing foods. So this begs the question, why do men and women, who are apparently the most intelligent beings on earth, not expect to know these simple things for ourselves? Why is there so much confusion over what we should eat and how to get fit? The answer is simple really; too much knowledge; too much advertising; too much peer pressure; too many conflicting books; too many people with letters before and after their name; and too much brainwashing and conditioning from people with vested interests as their number one focus. There is no advertising, brainwashing or ‘intellectual’ knowledge in the wild. Animals eat foods that were specifically designed for them. They also eat when they are genuinely hungry and they stop when they are full. They are perfectly happy eating the diet laid down by nature for it fully furnishes their body with everything it needs and they love the taste and smell. Wild animals are also not concerned about how much they weigh on a daily basis, nor what size fur they are. Why? Because all of their own kind are the same size and shape. If a giraffe became extremely abnormally fat would we need to test its blood pressure, put it on a scale or take a sample of its poo (Gillian McKeith!) to see if something was wrong with it? Or do you think that intuitively we would just know? When I look back it seems strange that despite being what I consider to be a reasonably intelligent person, I would do things like jump on a set of scales to see if I was packing a bit too much on the weight front. Did I not already know? The only reason I jumped on them in the first place was because I already knew I had, I just wanted to know by how much. Again, could I not see by how much? Did my bulges not tell me? Did the fact my shirt buttons were popping not tell me enough or the fact I couldn’t squeeze into my jeans? All weighing scales do is confirm the obvious to us and to everyone else around us. As mental as this sounds I would even get on the scales slowly sometimes in a desperate, nonsensical attempt to weigh less. Did I honestly think that by getting on the scales slowly I would not be as fat as I was? What the flipping hell was wrong with me? After working with hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world over the years it was somewhat of a relief to see I wasn’t the only one who did such incredibly bizarre, irrational things. I believe all the ‘intellectual’ knowledge we are bombarded with makes us do things that are flipping bonkers. When I see your average bloke running around the park or on a treadmill with a heart rate monitor around their chest and looking at their special watch to see if they are keeping in the ‘fat burning zone’ I do wonder if we have all taken leave of our senses. Talking of which, here’s a perfectly true story which illustrates what I mean. A friend of mine was on one of her many ‘diets’ some years back. On visiting her about a week or so into her ‘new’ diet, I noticed that there was a large chocolate cake, half eaten, on a plate next to her. To be honest I was quite glad because I know what a complete waste of mental torture time diets are. I asked her if she was still on her diet (assuming she wasn’t) and to my surprise she said ‘yes’. I said what about the half-eaten cake? What I heard next has gone down in history: ‘It’s okay’, she explained ‘because I weighed myself before I ate it and I weighed myself afterwards and guess what? – there was not an ounce of difference’. I wish I was joking, but that really is a true story. I realize that most people haven’t done something as bats as that in order to justify their intake of food, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of perfectly intelligent people going places on a weekly basis and actually paying for someone to weigh them – paying for someone to tell them what is already painfully obvious to them and everyone else. Although it may not seem like it at first glance, weighing yourself all the time is certainly on a par with the half a cake thing. I went to Weight Watchers many years ago for a couple of meetings. The ‘leader’ was actually very good. But seriously, what the hell were we all doing there? We were standing in line waiting to be weighed. At the time I attended if someone had lost weight from the week before, they would ring a bell and the group would do what I call a ‘Ricky Lake’; they would literally clap and yell. Now I am all for encouraging and giving praise, but what about those who hadn’t lost any weight. You feel bad enough as it is going in to one of those places – the last thing you need is to be made an object of pity. I am aware that Weight Watchers no longer do the bell thing, but they do still weigh you, along with nearly every other diet group. Scales chain you to a diet mentality and they can be deceptive. Sometimes people look slimmer and feel healthier, but when they jump on the scales they see little or no change and so start to feel depressed. But we should sod the scales, it’s how you look and feel that is the real measure of success. What many people fail to take into account, and the reason I am so against the antiquated BMI scale, is that: Fat takes up five times more room on the body than muscle but muscle is a lot heavier than fat If you drop fat but increase your muscle, your scales could well stay the same, but your shape is so much thinner. Weight is not the issue, it’s all about the physical shape you are in. To free yourself of diet mentality you will also need to free yourself from the scales. Go for the ‘look and feel’ measure of success, it’s a lot more accurate. Throwing away your scales can be one of the most liberating processes in gaining freedom from the diet trap. We not only use scales to weigh ourselves, but also to weigh the food we eat in order to try to control our calories – and again we have been doing this for so long we don’t question the sanity of it. But seriously, what are we doing? You don’t ever see a gorilla weigh bananas before it eats them to check it’s not overeating and you certainly never see a squirrel weighing its nuts (OK perhaps a bad analogy). ‘A CALORIE IS A CALORIE’ IS A LOAD OF OLD TOSH The problem is that we have seen people doing these things for years so we just tend to follow suit without questioning what we are doing. Calories are a great example. Calories are one of if not the most meaningless gauges for health we have ever obsessed over. Unfortunately, the ‘how many calories does that contain’ mantra is so ingrained in us, that many people find it difficult to nigh on impossible to let it go. What is a calorie anyway? Do you know? Does anyone who hasn’t studied this subject in depth know? It’s actually the amount of energy (heat) needed to raise one gram of water by one degree centigrade. In other words – we really don’t need to know. Again there is not one wild animal alive that knows how many calories are in the food they are eating for the same simple reason – they do not need to know. They don’t know the recommended daily calorie intake for a female or male version of their species either, they just seem to know what to do – how very odd. I wouldn’t mind if the amount of calories we consume is a guaranteed way of controlling obesity, but it isn’t. Between 1976 and 2000, Americans lowered their fat consumption by 11 per cent and also lowered their calorie intake by 4 per cent. Yet what has happened to the weight of that particular nation? Obesity has risen by 31 per cent in the same period, proving two major misconceptions: A) The fat you eat doesn’t add up to fat on you, and B) The more calories one eats doesn’t always mean more fat on you I do realize that because we have been in the ‘calories are king’ mentality for so long there will no doubt be many people (particularly those in the nutritional field) who will be barking at the book at this moment. I did say an open mind was required for this book and that I would be challenging some strong beliefs. The point, however, is not so much to disprove the calorie theory, but to illustrate the nonsense of it all: intelligent humans staring at packets of snacks at lunch time declaring to whoever will listen its calorie content. In truth, knowing about calories, even if it were true, hasn’t got us anywhere. Other than obsession and obesity. If you are thinking that we are better off knowing about all aspects of nutrition and calories, ask yourself why? We apparently know more about ‘nutrition’ now than ever in history, yet heart disease is still the number one killer disease in Western society and we suffer from more self inflicted diseases than any wild animal on earth. We not only worry about this nutrition ‘stuff’ but industries have been built on our fears. We spend millions of pounds on vitamin and mineral tablets every year in the UK alone. And why are we popping pills and rattling down the street? Simply to try and counter the effects of the processed and de-natured food we are consuming. But what about the pills themselves, haven’t they also been processed in some way? Aren’t they also de-natured? I had a journalist from a famous magazine recently ask me as I was making a wonderful smoothie, ‘Is this a good replacement for vitamin pills?’ I thought she was joking, but no. It appears we are so far removed from nature that some people now think fresh fruit and veg are the ‘alternative’ to vitamin pills. I did point out that vitamin pills are indeed meant as an alternative to real nutrition, but it went completely over her head. I am not against all supplements or indeed all vitamin and mineral pills – with over farming unfortunately in twenty-first century Britain it’s often the only way to make up for the shortfall of vital minerals in our food. What I find crazy is the fact we have bastardised our food so much that we now have vitamin pills – when you think about it is kind of crazy. The danger here more than anything is that people believe as long as they get some vitamin pills down them they are free to eat crap. This is the real potential danger of such pills. Blinded by Science Did you know there are 40,000 phytochemicals in one tomato? What is a phytochemical? It’s a name for a vitamin that they haven’t formally named yet. Are there really 40,000 vitamins in one tomato? I don’t actually know and I don’t care because as long as I get it into my body, I don’t need to know. Who counted them anyway? Your body doesn’t care whether you call them vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, or zookinoids – it simply wants them and desperately needs them. Fruits and vegetables, as a whole, contain every single vitamin and mineral that we have found a name for and God knows how many more we haven’t. They apparently keep finding new and amazing disease-fighting agents in all fruit and veg. Recently they’ve discovered some real beauties. Ever heard of beta-carotene? Well now they’ve found alpha-carotene. They have also discovered phenols, indoles, aromatic isothiocyanates, terpenes, and organo-sulphur: all of which are part of the new category of ‘anutrients’. NEW? These scientists can shove together whatever letters they like but what they have found is far from new. They seem to want to get the credit for something nature produces. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds have been the same since the dawn of time and everything we need to furnish our bodies is to be found within them. When they do discover a ‘new’ phytochemical in a particular fruit or vegetable they tend to try to isolate it, extract it, recreate it, process it, and put it in a pill. That is the equivalent of taking just one spark plug and the oil from a car in the belief you have found the most important components of the vehicle because it can’t run without them. BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! Most of the time they also try and blind us with science by using what I call blah, blah, blah language. I am talking about people who will use the longest, most obscure words available to describe something which is actually very simple. However, they have studied it for many years, have spent flipping great wedges of cash on their education and are going to let you know they have by completely losing you in whatever text they write. I call it blah, blah, blah language. It is about time we all took our brainwashed heads out of the sand. We just do not need to know what our ideal weight is (according to some man-made scale). We should not be weighing our food to see how much we should eat. Nor do we need to concern ourselves with vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, our body fat ratio, our resting heart rate, nor how many calories are in the bag of crisps. It is time to simplify the whole business of eating and health, remove the fear of changing your diet, and find physical and mental freedom for life. We will not achieve this by worrying about vitamin K, B6, C, D, K, Z, protein, calcium, or what foods are low fat. We will achieve our goal for life by not concerning ourselves with all this nonsense, but rather by removing the many years of brainwashing, conditioning, and manipulation by BIG FOOD and tapping into our genuine freedom of choice. You already know why you shouldn’t be eating the foods you are and why you should eat the foods you are not. However, that doesn’t matter because everybody with a food problem knows this too, yet this knowledge does not help them. It certainly didn’t help me. All it did was add pressure and make me feel stupid and weak-willed. And what would I do if I was under pressure, feeling down or a little stressed? Yep – EAT! The problem is that although we know all the benefits of making the change, we also believe that we have to go through pain to get there and stay there. As I will repeat throughout this book, you will not have to endure any pain at all because it’s easy to lose weight, gain health, have the body of your dreams and all the energy to enjoy it. You simply need to get into the right frame of mind, then you can easily get into the right frame of body. You will only have to suffer a lifetime of pain if you don’t make the change – not if you do. So now you know what you don’t need to know, but in order to remove all the brainwashing and release you from certain ‘junkie foods’, there is a lot you really do need to know. The first and most important thing is the nature of the diet and food trap. What really compels us to eat things that we then regret almost instantaneously? What makes us eat foods that we know for certain are causing excess fat, ill health, depression, stress, and premature death? In other words … 7 (#ulink_85fb009a-622e-58fc-a8a9-f2348830a7b4) WHY DO PEOPLE EAT JUNK FOOD? (#ulink_85fb009a-622e-58fc-a8a9-f2348830a7b4) The answer is very simple. It is a combination of just two reasons: 1) The advertising, brainwashing, conditioning, and mind manipulation we have been subjected to since birth (the mental side). 2) An empty insecure physical feeling due to malnutrition, withdrawal, low blood sugar, or a combination of the three – caused by the ‘food’ and/or drinks themselves (the physical side). These two factors add up to addiction. The good news is that virtually any kind of addiction, contrary to extremely popular belief, is easy to kick. However, it is only easy to kick once you have a full understanding how that particular addiction works and the nature of that particular trap. The main problem is the first of the two factors: the many, many years of conditioning, brainwashing, mind manipulation, and total misinformation that we have been subjected to by the advertisers and so-called experts on the subject of health. This is really the cause of the problem and this is what needs to be fully removed in order to gain freedom. The lethargy, excess fat, health problems etc. are simply symptoms of the cause. Fat Profits It is time to wake up and realize that the livelihoods of many people depend on keeping us none the wiser when it comes to just how harmful and addictive certain foods and drinks can be. It is often their job to keep you hooked – without your knowledge of course – on what I will continue to refer to as drug foods or junkie foods. They are constantly trying to change the way you think in order to give you the very false impression that you are choosing to eat and drink their druggy-like foods. As I mentioned earlier, and as I will repeat, you cannot have freedom of choice without the freedom to also refuse. When do we know it’s our genuine choice? The tobacco companies played the same game for years. They kept very quite about the fact that their product is addictive, controls lives and kills people – and all the while it was advertised on television and radio (and of course the government got its share of the profits). Many doctors even suggested smoking to their patients as a good way to relieve stress from their lives. Doctors at the time were actually suggesting a known stimulant will relax a person. It is now known that many tobacco companies were deliberately adding chemicals to tobacco in order to make then even more addictive. My question is a simple one: is it possible the same thing is happening in some areas of the food and beverage industry? Is it possible that there could be some unscrupulous characters in the industry who would, like the tobacco companies, deliberately add chemicals to their food simply in order to make them less satiating and thus sell more to an unsuspecting public? We have a situation where it is fairly widely accepted that the vast majority of ‘food’ sold in a McDonald’s isn’t exactly the healthiest on the planet. Yet some years back, planning permission was given to have a McDonald’s in the grounds of the Tower of London. BIG FOOD often have good contacts and, like the tobacco companies of old, they seem to be able to get their food sold in the most unlikely of places. Having a McDonald’s in a sacred place such as the Tower Of London is bad enough, but did you know there’s even a McDonald’s in Guy’s hospital in London? Yes, a McDonald’s in a blooming hospital! You may think it’s unfair to put junk food in the same category as cigarettes. After all cigarettes kill people, often control their lives, cost them a fortune and are highly addictive. But where exactly is the difference? As a nation the UK spends ?7 million a day on fast food. Second only of course to the good ol’ U.S of A. This money is spent on ‘foods’ that are known to be addictive and are known to cause all kinds of diseases, including cancer and heart disease – the two biggest killers in Western society. Just table salt alone is known to kill over 40,000 people a year in the UK, that’s more than 100 people a day. This is virtually the same number as alcohol. White refined carbohydrates and refined sugar are known to be a major cause of diabetes and a whole host of other diseases (which I will explain later). Aspartame (the artificial sweetener found in diet drinks etc.) has been linked to ninety-two different adverse symptoms and all kinds of health problems. This stuff is known to tighten blood vessels, cause additional thirst and has even been linked to brain tumours. Yet not only is it being sold as a ‘food’ stuff, but is promoted as a product that will help people who have a weight problem. (I will cover aspartame and products like it in depth later so you’ll never want to touch them again.) The point is this, in my estimation the wrong kinds of food overall actually kill more people than all other drugs combined. And yes that includes heroin, crack, cocaine and even cigarettes. Yet there is not one single drug food product that has a warning on it. We banned direct cigarette advertising, yet BIG FOOD spend literally billions advertising products that have been linked to major diseases and hardly any restrictions are put on them. These are ‘foods’ that can and do cause premature death, just like cigarettes; control people’s lives, just like cigarettes; and products which, I estimate, slowly kill two-thirds of those who are hooked on them (which is more than cigarettes). You cannot open a magazine, switch on your TV, or go to the cinema without being bombarded with images of drug-type foods. The government of course is not about to do anything about it as they earn billions in tax revenue from people’s addictions to these heart-disease causing, stroke-inducing so-called foods. Their argument is always the same and runs along the lines of ‘people are not stupid, they know the facts, we advise them to eat five portions of fruit and veg a day. If they choose to eat junk, then it’s up to them’. Yet they make it law to wear a seat belt. Why isn’t it our choice then? Because people are not addicted to putting on or leaving off their seat belts, but they are addicted to trashy foods. To say to someone like Barry Austin, (reportedly the fattest man in Britain) who I believe, at the age of 29, was 50 stone (317 kg) in weight and had a 82 in. (208 cm) waist, that it’s his genuine choice to be like that is ludicrous. Given the genuine choice I imagine he would love to end his addiction to crap foods and he would love to be slim. You Black Tar Nicotine Loaded Bastard One of the major problems with ‘food’ addiction is that the problem is visible because the most common symptom for many (although not all) is excess fat on the body. Think about it: no matter how many cigarettes someone smokes, they’re never called a black tar, nicotine-filled git or a cigarette-smoking bastard are they? Yet along with food addiction go the names and scathing attack on our characters: we get called gits and pigs – we’re never just fat are we? This is why so many people don’t reach obesity – because of how they will look. But they still have a food problem and are still constantly battling to control what they eat. I used to feel very proud of myself if I managed to be good for a few days, or if I managed to control my intake of chocolate to the point where I only had it at weekends. I often used to cut down on the coffee and biscuits – put myself on the ‘food wagon’ if you will. There are people who do manage to exercise extreme control over their intake of trash food, but this is an awful way to go through life. If you have to exercise control over something, it must mean that that something is controlling you. It is the need to exercise control that means you are not in control as I alluded to previously. Confused? Let me put it this way. I do not have to exercise control over my banana intake, if I needed to discipline myself with my bananas then I would have a banana problem. For years smokers thought it was their genuine choice to smoke (in fact some people still retain this belief). However, when the ban came in and smokers were forced to stand outside their workplace in the freezing cold in order to get their fix, they started to realize they were not choosing to smoke, but had to (I know first-hand as I used to smoke 40–60 a day). I do not know one single person who has to exercise control over their apple intake. Why? Because it is not a drug food. No chemicals have been added deliberately in order to compel you to overeat them. There is a natural cut off point. I also don’t know anyone who would have the slightest problem getting rid of apples from their diet if a doctor told them they caused heart disease, lethargy, weight gain, and premature death. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of people who, if you told them the same thing about coffee, chocolate, alcohol, crisps, or fast-food burgers for example, would say, ‘Up yours, life’s too short’ and continue eating them. Why? Because they are drug-like foods that compel people to want more and more, even if it goes against their rational judgement. Whether you actually have more and more is neither here nor there, it’s the wanting more that causes the real problem – the need to exercise control. TOTALLY WIRED Some unfortunate people have lost the ability to exercise control over what they eat or drink. It was reported that Barry Austin was told he would die unless he slimmed, and he went through the drastic measure of having his stomach stapled. I also understand that when he was 19 he had his jaws wired together which lasted for four months and he lost 4 stone (25 kg) in that time because all he could consume was soup. I imagine his life was hell, especially at Christmas when he saw all the beautiful food laid out in front of him and knew he couldn’t take part. Can you imagine the torture he must have been going through? Apparently, his family liquidized his roast dinner and pudding for him to drink but on seeing the mush he was supposed to drink, his desperation was such that he ripped the wires out with wire cutters, leaving his mouth bleeding in agony. Do you think he goes through all this for a hamburger because he simply likes the taste? Is it possible that there is more to it? Is it possible he is simply mentally and physically addicted to drug foods in the same way a nicotine addict is addicted to cigarettes? It is not just possible but once we start to really look at it, it becomes obvious. It is not his genuine choice to do this – given the choice he would just eat healthily. Given the genuine freedom of choice we would be free to eat what he wants to eat. He doesn’t want to eat that rubbish, he is just compelled to – for reasons unknown to him The reason I have used Barry as an example is to illustrate the point that often it is not our genuine choice to eat certain ‘foods’. We have simply been conditioned and brainwashed by BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK on both a mental and physical level to the point where we get upset and even angry if we feel we can no longer eat certain things, even if those foods are making us ill. Unless you start to realize what is going on, you are in danger of remaining in the food and diet trap for life. The point of this book is to set you mentally free, so that you can eat whatever you want to and not what someone has conditioned you to in order to boost their bank balance. This can only happen if you fully understand how BIG FOOD, the very people who are peddling drug and junk foods, go about their business. AD – FABRICATED How do you sell a product that is of very dubious quality, is unhealthy and is contributing to (and in many cases causing) major health problems? Good old advertising of course. We have been programmed and conditioned to consume drug-like foods and drinks. That is why people think it’s normal to eat these foods. But then didn’t people think it was normal and sociable to inhale cigarette smoke a few years ago too? Let us not underestimate the power of all the advertising and conditioning either: it works. Our brains are very clever computers, but they can also be programmed just like any other computer. Unless we learn to run it effectively ourselves, there are many, many people who are paid tremendous amounts of money to run it for us – and they do. That is why we have such a strong belief that fruit and veg are for boring people who don’t want to ‘live’. After all with Pepsi Max you can go snowboarding, skiing, bungee jumping, and ‘Live life to the max – Pepsi Max’. Then of course we all know that ‘A Mars A Day helps you work, rest, and play’ and that ‘Breakfast at McDonald’s makes your day’. I can’t ever remember hearing ‘Live life to the max with a fresh mouth-watering Mango Max’ or ‘An apple a day helps you work, rest, play and helps prevent cancer’ or ‘Breakfast at a juice bar, stimulates the mind, feeds the cells, helps to lift the waste from your body and really does make your day that little more alive and vibrant’. Incidentally, if breakfast at McDonald’s does make your day – YOU REALLY DO NEED THIS BOOK! MIND CONDITIONING The Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiment illustrated just how easily we can be conditioned. It has been well documented, but for those of you who are not aware of the experiment from the 1890s I will explain it very briefly. He starved his pet dog for three days, then, when he gave it some food, he rang a bell at the same time. After that, every time his dog felt genuine hunger, Ivan would put some food down and at exactly the same time he would ring a bell. He didn’t simply do this once or twice, but over and over again until it became a conditioned response: food/bell, food/bell, food/bell. In the end (and this is why I am using this analogy) even if the dog had already eaten and could have in no way felt genuine physical hunger, when the bell was rung the dog would look for food and literally begin to salivate. Advertisers for drug and junk food know the power of this and they use it to sell you food when you are not even hungry. Have you ever been driving along, not even thinking about food, when all of a sudden you see the two golden arches of the McDonald’s sign and felt hungry? Or do you remember when you were a kid playing in the street, not thinking of food at all, when all of a sudden you heard the sound of the ice cream man and decided you felt hungry? WELL THAT’S THE BELL. Going to the cinema means popcorn and a drink: THAT’S THE BELL. Easter – a chocolate egg: THAT’S THE BELL. Christmas – turkey or pudding: THAT’S THE BELL. It’s 11.30 a.m. – time for a Diet Coke break: THAT’S THE BELL. Going to get petrol? – time for a pastie, or a bar of chocolate and soft drink: THAT’S THE BELL. Elevenses – time for a cup of tea (and a biscuit of course): THAT’S THE BELL. Watching football – must get the beers in: THAT’S THE BELL. The fact is we react to a thousand different bells without even realizing it. The way they link in a bell is to advertise it over and over again. Sometimes they even include a specific time to take their product (as in the cases of Diet Coke break at 11.30 a.m. or After Eight mints). This is why they pay people like David Beckham and Britney Spears millions for a 30-second commercial to advertise products like Pepsi-cola. They link their ‘feel good’ music to a product that has nothing to do with feeling good. Do you remember this? ‘When your carpet smells fresh your room does too so every time you vacuum remember what to do. Do the shake and vac and put the freshness back, do the shake and vac and put the freshness back …’. I would be surprised if you don’t, because it was the most successful advertising campaign of all time for a household cleaner. The point I am making, and sorry if this freaks you out, but the last time that ad was on TV as an actual advertisement was well over twenty years ago. Twenty years ago and yet you probably remember it like it was yesterday – why? Because they beamed the song again and again and again until in the end you couldn’t help but sing it and buy the product. This is why I make no apologies for repeating certain points throughout this book. I know it can jar and yes I know it can drive people nuts. However, it is the only way to remove the bells and create new empowering ones. It is the only way to de-brainwash you. So if you think, ‘He’s said that already’ – I know, it was genuinely intentional and is based on the same principles BIG FOOD use to hook you. I am simply using the same technique to un-hook you. The products we are dealing with here are not household cleaners, but ones that can literally destroy people’s quality of life and reduce their life expectancy. They are products which – if consumed in large enough quantities – have been proven to undermine confidence, depress, and disable people. They can also enslave them. Oh, and of course, let’s not forget that in the long run they can also potentially kill you. We are constantly being bombarded with so many ‘trendy’ images for junk food. The junkie food outlets have all become fashion statements. We have McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, KFC, Ben and Jerry’s, H?agen-Dazs and Starbucks, to name just a few. It has literally become a ‘designer label’ business. Is it any wonder that so many people are under the misapprehension that junk is where the pleasure is? That crap foods are a treat and fruit and veg are boring? Things have got so bad that we now believe that it is ‘normal’ to eat this rubbish and ‘abnormal’ to eat healthily. After all, if you do eat healthily on a consistent basis you are referred to as a freak, a health freak to be exact. These images and beliefs have been drip-fed into our computer brains since we were born. Of all the bells, these are the most detrimental. Many television programmes and virtually all Hollywood films are also playing their part. Product placement is huge in the film and television industry, especially for drug-like foods and drinks. The coffee chain Starbucks, for instance, are now a major placement in many of the Hollywood Blockbusters. The movie You Got Mail should have been called You Got Starbucks. Hollywood has an entire department devoted to product placement, and specific agents to get your product in the latest blockbuster. And if they can get the actor to drink or eat the product it’s a hit. It’s one thing getting Superman thrown into a huge Coke sign, but if they can get him to drink it – BINGO! In the film Austin Powers, the lead actor mentioned Heineken and sales of the beer went up by 15 per cent – hardly a coincidence. The last few movies in the James Bond franchise have plugged a variety of products, too. BIG FOOD product placement and advertising’s main objective is to sell the idea that you can feed emotion and make yourself happy with their particular food or drink. If someone’s boyfriend leaves them on a TV show, the first thing to come out is the ice cream. If a child is depressed we can cheer them up with a chocolate bar or ‘treat’ them to a McDonald’s. The problem is that we end up believing it. Not only that, but we all play our part in keeping the chain going: ‘Tidy your room and you can have an ice cream’, ‘If you are good, you can have a chocolate bar’, or perhaps worst of all ‘If you eat your vegetables, you can have a treat’. We have all been conditioned to believe that effectively poisoning ourselves with crap food, often devoid of nutrition, is a reward, a treat, a comforter and a genuine pleasure from a very early age. Sadly it’s those who care for us most who are often the biggest culprits. To compound the message we have sounds and images beamed into our computer brains confirming what we have been taught. Every holiday seems to have a strong bell that revolves around food: Easter means chocolate eggs, birthdays mean cakes, Christmas equals pudding and so on. The main reason why most people in Western society are caught in the food and diet trap is because it is an exceptionally easy one for people to fall into. Years ago it was very easy for people to fall into the smoking trap. This was largely down to everyone believing it was not only okay to smoke at the time, but that it was very sociable and had no harmful effects (well the masses believed that – the people in the know always knew). Everyone now knows that smoking causes cancer, and it is widely seen as anti-social. The tobacco companies therefore have to work harder and harder to get people hooked on their product. This is why with such a declining market in the West, the tobacco companies are expanding into developing countries – as if they don’t have enough problems as it is. However, unlike ‘real’ drugs, drug-like foods are seen as genuine food, and most of us have been on this junkie stuff from a very early age. In fact, if you were not breast fed there is a good chance you have been on junkie and drug foods ever since you were born. Even if you weren’t on rubbish from the second you left the womb, it wouldn’t have been long before you had your first fix. Think about it – at what age would you give a child a cigarette? Never I guess, but 16 at the earliest. What about an alcoholic drink? Well it varies, but usually we wouldn’t dream of anything less than double figures. What about junkie or drug food? Now we begin to see the problem. It seems perfectly normal to feed children junkie drug foods from a very early age. Not only is it seen as normal, but this drug-like food is seen as a treat; as a reward – so much so that you are seen as a baddie if you refuse to give them some. At the same time we are bombarded with billions of pounds’ worth of advertising that is cleverly designed to keep people hooked on (or to change their brand of) drug-like food. The biggest problem, and this is where you really need to open your mind, is that the so-called food itself seems to confirm everything we believe. Our minds are often easily deluded because of a physical chemical reaction in our body – a reaction which seems to confirm the advertiser’s message and what we believe to be true. It is this element above all which we need to understand in order to break truly free. There have been some very clever and successful mind manipulation techniques used over the years with many aspects of people’s lives, but none have affected more people or had more impact on our lives than … 8 (#ulink_e009b369-cc20-5ee7-ad6a-48fe28372d97) THE FOOD TRICK (#ulink_e009b369-cc20-5ee7-ad6a-48fe28372d97) There’s an old saying, ‘you can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time’. But BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK have almost managed to pull it off. As you are no doubt aware, all businesses are out to increase their profits. How does any business sell more of the same product to the same person? Simple: by making them believe that they need it, that it will benefit them, and that their life would be incomplete in some way without it. The drug food industry is no different to any other. Their objective is simply to sell more food. However, logically this shouldn’t be as easy to do as it would be with something like clothes for example. You can, after all, keep buying clothes and very rarely, depending on the size of your house, will you run out of room for them. Even if you do run out of space, you can simply throw the old ones away and make room for the new ones. The fashion industry survives by making you believe the clothes you already own are no longer in vogue and you must buy more in order to fit into our fashion conscious world. But how can they do this with food? Unlike clothes and storage your body does get full. You are after all either hungry or you’re not. If you eat a certain amount your body gets what it needs and you no longer feel hungry. Well that’s the theory anyway and that is exactly what happens when you consume genuine highly nutritious natural food, as I now know. However, what if BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK found a way to remove many elements of genuine nutrition from what they sell and add chemicals which actually make you to feel hungrier than you would normally feel? What if they found a neat way to create ‘false hungers’ and thus a way to sell more of the same food to the same person? What if they found a way to make a person believe the only thing which can fill the hunger they feel is more of the same type of food? Now that would be a neat trick. The food trick is very similar to the nicotine trick. The tobacco companies would have made very little money if a smoker had just one cigarette a day. How do they make them have more? Well they don’t really have to do a great deal; the drug will do most of it for them. ADDICTED TO AN ILLUSION When nicotine leaves the body it creates an empty, insecure feeling, rather like a hunger for food. The feeling is so slight the smoker does not realize that the previous cigarette they had caused the feeling. They have another one and the empty, insecure feeling goes away. They no longer feel as low, as empty or as insecure as they did, and so end up believing there is a genuine pleasure in smoking. Yet all they are actually enjoying is the ending of an aggravation which was caused by the previous cigarette. All the tobacco industry then had to do was some product placement and advertising. Words such as ‘smooth’ and ‘satisfaction’ were used to describe cigarette smoking on advertisements. Every film and television hero was a smoker etc. As most people are aware, the body will always build up an immunity and tolerance to any drug and you therefore end up needing more and more to get the same effect. In the end a feeling of dissatisfaction is felt even when the addict is taking the drug. The nicotine companies found a way to create an additional hunger to a normal hunger. All addiction creates a hold which the addict believes is filled by the very substance which caused the hole in the first place. Junkie foods – foods which have had a great deal of their nutritional content removed and other chemicals added in their place – create a hole. Apples will not fill this hole initially; in the same way that an apple will not fill the hole nicotine has created for a smoker. This fools us into believing that fruits and vegetables and good wholesome foods don’t satisfy and that junkie foods do. But this is the trick – this is the illusion. All that’s happened is you have had an injection of your ‘food fix’ and some of the empty hole appears to have been filled. But the huge hole is only there because of the junkie foods in the first place. When we change our diet in the correct way, the hole disappears in no time at all and we feel genuinely satisfied. Drug-like junkie foods and drinks are the real cause of the food and diet trap. They are designed to create additional hungers and feelings of dissatisfaction – the complete opposite of natural foods. The sad reality is that most people are suffering from malnutrition. In fact whenever you see someone who is overweight you can be almost certain they are suffering from this condition. When we think of malnutrition, we tend to see images of starving people in the developing world, so it’s hard to imagine that someone who eats loads of food and has so much abundance of food around them is also suffering from it. But the fact is they are and it is vital you fully understand this. WHAT IS MALNUTRITION? The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as, ‘A dietary condition resulting from the absence of some foods or the absence of essential elements necessary for health; insufficient nutrition’. This is exactly what I was suffering from when I was over 30 lb (13 kg) overweight, and it is what every junkie food addict is suffering from whether they are overweight or not. They have a severe deficit of nutrients going into the body. Without nutrients feeding the cells, the body will of course be starving. It is no wonder many junkie food addicts feel hungry and dissatisfied a lot of the time: it’s because they are. If the body doesn’t get what it needs it stays hungry for nutrients. Hunger is not a pleasant feeling, it’s an empty, insecure, dissatisfied feeling. What do you do when you feel hungry, empty and dissatisfied? EAT! It is this simple: The less food you eat containing live nutrients, the hungrier you will become. The hungrier you become the more dissatisfied and incomplete you will feel. The more dissatisfied and incomplete you feel the more you eat to try and feel satisfied and complete. This, in itself, of course is bad enough. However, an even greater problem we have are the additional hungers we experience on top of a genuine hunger for the right nutrients. These are caused by the additional chemicals often added to junkie-type foods designed to cause an even bigger hole. They are designed to cause an empty, insecure feeling, an identical feeling to a normal genuine hunger. Such feelings are the result of the withdrawal effects from certain junkie foods, or the effects of low blood sugar – which, again, are caused by the drug foods themselves. These junkie foods really are a double whammy. Not only are they void of some genuine nutrients, they ultimately create a set of false hungers which feel exactly the same as a normal genuine hunger. And because they are sold as food, and not drugs, people remain none the wiser to the fact they are hooked. Instead, people who are caught in the food trap because of drug foods are called ‘pigs’, and are often ostracized and given no sympathy whatsoever. The people who are caught also believe it must be some flaw in their own character rather than a result of a very clever confidence trick – the food trick. It is the false physical hungers, along with the false advertising, that cause people to have mental and physical cravings for drug foods. This is ultimately why people attempt to ‘use’ drug foods in much the same way drug addicts attempt to ‘use’ drugs: i.e. reaching for them in times of boredom, loneliness, or for comfort etc. What frustrates me most is that the people who make and distribute drug foods even have the front to advertise the fact that their product will not end a genuine hunger. They have the audacity to let us know that their ‘food’ will only seemingly satisfy a false mental and physical hunger. Our problem is that we don’t question it because we believe it’s our genuine choice and that we derive some genuine pleasure from it. A great example of this was an advert for a chocolate bar which claimed you could, ‘Eat it in-between meals without ruining your appetite’. So what’s the point of eating it then? I thought the whole point of eating was to satisfy your appetite, to end your hunger. With this advert they are blatantly telling us that their ‘food’ will not satisfy a genuine hunger. In other words it won’t genuinely feed you. Another old ad that did this was the finger of fudge one. If you cannot recall, allow me: ‘It’s full of Cadbury goodness and very small to eat, a finger of fudge is just enough until it’s time to eat.’ First of all what the hell do they mean by ‘full of goodness’? Isn’t it full of sugar? The second part says, ‘it’s just enough until it’s time to eat.’ In other words it’s just enough to take the edge off the false hunger, but it won’t ruin your genuine appetite. The reason we are so easily fooled is not because we are stupid, but because such products do feed the false hungers; in the same way nicotine feeds a smoker’s hunger for nicotine and heroin feeds a heroin addict’s hunger for heroin. When you end any kind of hunger you feel a sense of relief. A feeling of relief from any type of aggravation is pleasurable and this is where the confidence trick really kicks in. The makers and advertisers of these so-called foods try to give the impression that there is a genuine pleasure in eating, even if you are not genuinely hungry. But it is a false sense of pleasure created by a false hunger and it’s just a trick. On top of that you’ve got every diet and ‘health’ book giving the advice over and over again that you should simply, ‘eat when you feel hungry’. But the point I am making is that the drug food eater has additional hungers and is hungry, but it is a false hunger created by the rubbish itself – they are effectively in a loop. Until the junkie food addict realizes exactly what’s going on, statements like ‘eat only when you feel hungry’ are ludicrous at best. Someone like US born and bred Terriny Woods – who, at the age of just 15, weighed in at 41 stone 12 lb (over 260 kg) – was no doubt following the advice to eat only when hungry, but she was such a drug food addict and had built up an immunity to drug foods to such a degree that she probably felt the false hungers even when she was stuffing herself with drug foods in her desperation to relieve her false hungers. At this stage she would be in a constant state of withdrawal, would be hypoglycaemic and have a constant level of insulin in her blood (which, as I will explain in simple terms later, can cause a permanent state of dissatisfaction). And this condition was seemingly only lessened to some degree by more drug foods. She had created a monster of a hole and was simply desperately trying to fill it with the very things causing the hole in the first place. The more she tried the bigger the hole became … and the bigger it became the more desperate she became to fill this empty insecure feeling. The bigger the feeling, the larger the sense of relief when drug food hits the bloodstream and the bigger the sense of pleasure. The more aggravations BIG FOOD creates, the MORE PLEASURE we appear to get from them, the BIGGER the Sacrifices we believe we are making when we stop and the HARDER we find the change. This is why we feel such a sense of loss and missing out when we try to cut down or cut them from our diet completely. It’s a trick – and requires a very open mind to see through it. Eric Schlosser in his wonderful book Fast Food Nation wrote a small passage on gambling, which I feel works just as well for any form of addiction and works brilliantly to illustrate the food trick: ‘It is the ultimate consumer technology, designed to manufacture not a tangible product, but something much more elusive: a brief sense of hope. That is what Las Vegas really sells, the most brilliant illusion of them all, a loss that feels like you’re winning.’ That is also what BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK is selling – the most brilliant illusion of them all, a loss that feels like you’re winning. When you give yourself a ‘lift’ from drug-like foods it feels like you have just won, when in reality you have in fact lost – in many areas of your life. ‘Nothing seems to satisfy like a Snickers’ This was another advertising slogan blatantly informing the drug food addict that nothing will satisfy their need like a drug food. Why? Because their need is a false one created by junkie foods in the first place. Let me explain in case this is starting to get confusing as this is probably one of the most important aspects of the book to grasp. All the food in the world will never satisfy a smoker’s physical and psychological need for nicotine. All the food in the world will never satisfy a heroin addict’s physical and psychological need for heroin. Why? Because they are completely separate hungers created by the drug itself. Non-smokers and non-heroin addicts just do not have these hungers. This point is obvious when we are talking about what people clearly regard as drugs, but it is exactly the same with drug foods. And this is why it is essential to really open your mind and change the way you view these ‘foods’ – it is a vital part of freeing yourself of the diet trap for life. All the natural food in the world will never satisfy a physical and/or psychological need for drug food. Why? Because it is a false physical and mental hunger that has fooled us all for generations. That is why you can seemingly satisfy your false need for junk without ruining your genuine appetite. It explains why even when I did eat fruit or salad it just didn’t seem to satisfy me the same way as junk and drug food. And it also explains why I would sometimes feel stuffed but, at the same time, dissatisfied and still hungry. After all your stomach can only hold so much. The excellent news is that the false hungers are very easy to get rid of and towards the end of the book I will discuss how to starve them to death, enjoy the process and set yourself free. First you need a full understanding of drug foods and false hungers. There are several products that create false hungers and I will cover each in turn. However, the biggest culprit of false hunger, the biggest drug food of them all and what really compels people to overeat and to eat as a response to emotion is a substance which, when it hits your bloodstream, has your body screaming … 9 (#ulink_f810c8c3-6d62-595c-8c11-41500693c304) OH SUGAR! (#ulink_f810c8c3-6d62-595c-8c11-41500693c304) Sugar not only needs a chapter to itself, but an entire book could be written on this subject. We do not have time for that and luckily you really do not need to know the entire history of the sugar industry to rid most it from your life. All that’s required is full knowledge of exactly what happens when refined sugar enters your bloodstream and how it attaches itself emotionally to our minds, creating ‘addiction’. There is a danger this small chapter could get a little ‘blah, blah, blahish’, but as refined sugar is one of the biggest causes of food addiction and probably the largest contributor to many of the world’s biggest killer diseases, it’s worth paying full attention. When natural food is eaten, it is first broken down in the mouth then passed into the stomach. Once there, it is further broken down and eventually passed into the intestines, where the energy and nutrients can slowly be absorbed. The body then has the job of getting rid of the waste through the usual outlets – bowels, bladder, lungs, skin, etc. White refined sugar however, (and that includes brown sugar), is very different. It goes straight through the stomach wall without being digested, giving an instant rush of glucose to the bloodstream. This causes your blood sugar levels to rise too high. You now have too much sugar in your blood and your ‘PH balance’ is out of sorts (this is not to be confused with your skin PH). Your blood PH level is very, very important. If it goes just a couple of points below or above what it should be you will die. Your body therefore has to do whatever it can to counteract your rocketing blood sugar levels and reinstate the body’s normal balance. How does it do this? By using some of your body’s bank account of the powerful hormone insulin. The rush you feel when you eat ‘simple sugars’ is simply the rush of insulin entering the bloodstream The insulin produced to deal with this high blood sugar causes your blood sugar to ultimately fall. When we feel the effects of low blood sugar what do we need? Food that can raise blood sugar rapidly – more refined sugar. The moment the insulin reaction has cleansed your bloodstream of this excess sugar, you will be running on empty – an empty feeling created by refined sugar. See the loop? White refined sugar has no essential nutrients, vitamins, minerals, fats or amino acids. It simply contains ‘simple sugars’, which are extremely dangerous to the natural balance of the body. There is no need whatsoever for simple refined sugars in the diet of a human. The only reason for its inclusion is to: A) Abnormally sweeten foods to pervert our natural taste buds B) Extend shelf-life C) Use as a cheap filler D) Keep you coming back for more and more and more It is a totally empty food that leaves you ultimately feeling empty. It is, however, used at every available opportunity by the junkie food industry. SUGAR CAUSES LOW BLOOD SUGAR If your sugar levels were properly balanced you would feel satisfied for longer and the hunger you feel would always be a genuine one. That simply is no good for BIG SUGAR – they need you to feel the effects of abnormal low blood sugar, they want your sugar levels to crash, they need you to feel unbalanced and empty. That way you will feel the need for a quick fix and thus the sugar industry is guaranteed repeat business like any other addiction led industry. This is because the only thing that appears to end the feeling is something which has more white refined sugar – the very thing that caused the problem in the first place. It’s like treating the symptoms of a disease with the cause. White refined sugar causes dis-ease in the body, which in turn causes dis-ease in the mind. Many people I see are under the misapprehension that they don’t consume that much sugar. If they don’t have it in their tea, coffee, or on their cereal, they assume there is little sugar in their diet. However, BIG FOOD relies on it and it is in virtually every processed food we consume. You can find refined sugar in bread, cereal, cakes, biscuits, nearly all soft drinks, cheese (yes some cheeses), virtually all ready meals, ice creams, burgers, sausages, and the list goes on and on and on. I also want to make clear that when I talk about white refined sugar I am not just talking about the sugar found in drinks, processed foods, chocolate, ketchup and so on. I am also talking about white refined carbohydrates. These include white rice, pasta, bread cereals and the like, all of which rapidly turn to glucose (sugar) in the bloodstream. The fast food outlets – the ones who rake in well over ?3 billion a year in the UK from junkie type foods, use white refined sugar in all forms to keep you coming back for more. They rely on its inclusion. Without white refined sugars, salt, and refined fats (more on these topics soon) they would nearly all go out of business overnight. Most would have literally nothing to sell. I have mentioned that when you eat white refined bread, pasta, rice, flour etc. your sugar levels go up rapidly and more insulin is secreted to help counteract it. Any ‘lift’ you feel from a sugar or carbo ‘hit’ is very short lived and in no time you feel a drop as the body scrambles to balance its blood sugar levels. However, there is something else you need to be more than aware of, particularly if you are reading this book to lose excess fat. The insulin that has been produced by the pancreas to rectify your blood sugar is also known as ‘the fat-producing hormone’. Its job is to transport the carbohydrate energy (which has been converted by the body into glucose) to the liver and muscle cells for short-term storage of energy. However, if there is too much glucose at once – which is inevitable when white refined foods are consumed – some of the excess glucose (energy) has to go into the long-term storage banks: in other words it is stored as FAT. Let me simplify to make this insulin, low blood sugar thing very clear Insulin is produced by the pancreas to counteract the excess glucose (or sugar) that floods the bloodstream when you consume white refined carbohydrates. Any over-spill from the high amounts of insulin necessary to tackle this onslaught are stored as fat. When the insulin levels start to come down, a signal is sent to the brain to inform it that sugar levels have now stabilized. Once sugar levels are stabilized, you feel satisfied. However, in no time at all, blood sugar levels fall as the food it was given was an empty fuel and one that is released into the blood much too quickly. When your sugar levels drop again to an uncomfortable level, you once again get an empty dissatisfied feeling. If you then try and satisfy this feeling with more simple empty junkie foods and drinks, the cycle will continue. This loop is problematic enough and, along with the advertising and mind manipulation, is what keeps people hooked. However, just like a drug addict who needs more and more of their drug to try and feel satisfied as time goes on, so it is for the junkie food addict. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/jason-vale/freedom-from-the-diet-trap-slim-for-life/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.