Only Fat People Skip Breakfast: The Refreshingly Different Diet Book

Only Fat People Skip Breakfast: The Refreshingly Different Diet Book Lee Janogly Do all your dieting attempts end in failure? Do you ever intend to eat one biscuit but actually polish off the packet? Does your weight vary enormously depending on how 'good' you've been? If this sounds like you, it won't for much longer! Take control of your eating habits with Lee Janogly and break free from the binge-diet-crave-binge cycle.The reason why diets don't work for so many people is that they are actually binge eaters. This means that they can diet reasonably successfully until they get a taste of one of their trigger foods, whereupon they lose all self-control and eat as much food as they can physically cram in. The result is that a binger will be on a permanent see-saw of weight loss and weight gain, accompanied by varying degrees of guilt, anger, depression and frustration. Only Fat People Skip Breakfast Get Real – The Diet Book with a Difference Lee Janogly In memory of my brave, beautiful friends SHIRLEY SEGAL, JOY STOCK and JILL LEVY, who would have enjoyed this book. I miss your laughter. Table of Contents Cover Page (#u4df06c90-bc10-5e04-8030-ad57788359e3) Title Page (#uf2aba57c-0502-5ef7-af74-cf86396cdf78) Dedication (#uade9bd52-8282-5dc6-91a8-c1f8cc138512) The Binger’s Psalm (#u78baf2b3-d155-5b13-8b9a-797322f82e8e) Chapter One There Ain’t No Fairy Godmother (#u8482dacc-bc79-5373-a230-f56714af392f) Chapter Two Who’s Conning Who? (#ubff5ceea-c1e9-565e-a722-af9036398ca8) Chapter Three The Sugar You Eat is the Fat You Wear (#ue7f853fc-9968-5e7e-9b08-d30a9aafb7c8) Chapter Four Your ‘Living Slim’ Eating Plan (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Five You Either Get it – or You Don’t (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Six Exercise – No Sweat, No Point (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seven You Don’t Take Orders from a Biscuit (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eight You’ve Lost it—Now Keep it Off Forever (#litres_trial_promo) From Me to You (#litres_trial_promo) The Binger’s Prayer (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) The Binger’s Psalm (#ulink_9325ed95-036a-5b69-a45a-012241d31e95) On the eighth day God created cellulite. And it came to pass that the Lord looked down upon His creation of the female form and lo, she was partaking overly of the Snickers bars and the cheese ’n’ onion crisps and much of the produce of the H?agen Dazs. And she gathered unto herself an abundance of flesh and became wide of hip and thigh and the Lord was mightily pissed off at what He saw. So the Lord summoned his trusty prophet Bulgythias and spake unto him: ‘Yo brother, dig these fat chicks! Go forth and tell ’em how it is, man.’ So the prophet Bulgythias took upon himself the task of studying the word of the diet counsellor, as it is written in the mighty tome Only Fat People Skip Breakfast by Lee Janogly, and spake thus unto all womankind: ‘Heed my words, for if thou dost enter the portals of yonder Starbucks and order a full-fat caramel mocha latte with double cream topping, yea, verily thou shalt be great of girth and thick of thigh! ‘Yield not unto temptation. Seek ye not the fruits of the sugar cane but take unto thyself the flowering broccoli instead. As thou walkest through the valley of the Marks & Spencer car park and enter the holy portals of the food hall, choose thou wisely. Gather unto thee the fish and the fowl, the fruit and the veg, and forsake all products bearing the word "frosted". Leave behind thine vehicle and powerwalk around thine neighbourhood and, in time, thou shalt be rewarded with thighs that are a joy to behold—yea, a tight bum in Versace jeans shall be thine! And thine mate will be sent wild with desire, for your price is far above rubies (which doesn’t say much for Ruby, but still…) ‘So take heed of this wise counsel and thou shalt dwell in the House of the Slim forever. Amen.’ Telephone Conversation with a New Client (NC) NC:Hello? Is that the diet counsellor? I hope you can help—I’m desperate! I’ve got three stone to lose and it just won’t shift. I’ve tried every diet going, hut nothing works. I tried not mixing protein and carbohydrate hut who can stick to that? You can’t have fish and chips, there’s no spag bol or burgers, so what can you eat? Then I tried that French guy’s diet where you can have lots of butter and cream but that didn’t work for some reason. Cabbage soup made me nauseous. As for the high-protein diet, people backed away because my breath smelt so foul and I couldn’t go to the loo. But at least trying all these diets has taught me lots about nutrition. For example, I know that you must only eat fruit in the mornings because the enzyme that digests fruit doesn’t work after midday… Me:Oh really? NC:Oh yes, didn’t you know that? Anyway, so I went to Weight Watchers but I ran out of points by lunchtime. Then I did Slimming World but I accidentally had a hamburger on a green day and I’m colour-blind anyway. I couldn’t work out that Zone diet, I haven’t got a Little Black Dress, I read through all the blood group diets and you can eat more or less the same on all of them so what’s the point? I really don’t know what to do. Me:Have you tried eating less? NC:What do you mean? Chapter One There Ain’t No Fairy Godmother (#ulink_52111092-bb37-5f85-a613-3e509f2a5d9f) I am a diet counsellor. If you came to me for dietary advice I would assume that you wished to lose your excess weight and remain slim for the rest of your life. Obvious? Not exactly. Most people are looking for a quick fix and want instant results – and why not? That’s how we approach a lot of the difficulties we encounter in our daily life, both at home and at work: identify the problem, find the solution, apply it and move on. Unfortunately, that won’t work with your weight. If you’ve got rather more fat reserves than you need, well I bet they were there yesterday, a week ago, maybe years ago. Building them up has taken a lot of time and loving care, so it will take more than a few days of low-fat food to reduce them. But we live in a fast-track world. Many of us are drawn to short-term, intensive deprivation diets—cabbage soup for a week, for example—in the hope of quick weight-loss, even though the weight lost on such diets is usually just water. Few people these days seem to have the patience to aim for slow, steady weight-loss that will last for life. Many people are so eager to shed their excess pounds quickly that they become vulnerable to the allure of unhealthy or unsustainable diet regimes. There seem to be two main ‘start-slimming’ periods each year: the first is from the beginning of January, after the boozy excesses of Christmas, and the second starts around the end of May, with the expectation (dread?) of appearing by a pool in a bikini. In both cases, the motivation of all participants would seem to be ‘How quickly can I get down to a size 10?’ Any weight you lose during this period is likely to go straight back on again. To succeed at a restrictive diet you have to ignore hunger pangs, which means you also end up ignoring feelings of satiety. Your eating ‘cues’ get confused and you start looking for food in response to emotional rather than physical prompts. When you follow a diet formulated by someone else, your relationship to food can be disrupted and even break down, causing you to eat in a chaotic manner. If your most recent dieting effort ended in failure, then I’m pretty certain that the programme will have contained one of the following words or phrases: Atkins, protein-only, detox, calorie-counting, red day, points, sins, colonic, food combining, blood group, eliminate wheat/dairy/tea/coffee/alcohol. But don’t despair: we’ve all done the same. Chalk it up to experience and now…get real! A Long-term Approach You don’t have to be a martyr to change your lifestyle and your weight. You live in the real world where there are social occasions, celebrations, family gatherings, holidays—and supermarket checkouts stacked with chocolate bars. In this real world we experience stress, mood swings, happiness, sadness, tensions and boredom, and we are surrounded by food all the time. You need a strategy for dealing with all of this without having to think constantly ‘Will I be breaking my diet?’ If you have been on the dieting seesaw for many years and know that quick-fix methods have ultimately failed you, it may now be time to take a longer-term approach—to get slim and stay slim once and for all. Then you can get on with your life. This book contains the information you need to achieve permanent slimness. After years of diet counselling, I have realized that you can’t ‘treat’ someone who is overweight. You can only explain the effects fat and sugar have on the body and then leave them to make their own decisions about what to eat and how much. People have to take responsibility and become self-directed. I can only act as a guide. I will not be telling you what to eat. How can I know what you like to eat? I will advise which foods work to keep you healthy and the best time to eat them, but the final decisions are up to you. You are the one who does the eating. Only you. Obesity is when you weigh a stone more than your doctor. Get Real It would be very easy for me to write a diet book containing 50 pages of cock-eyed theory followed by 70 pages of recipes. I am not going to do that! This is not a cookbook! There are no ‘tasty recipes’—like the example I saw recently in a slimming book: ‘Breakfast—a portion of smoked haddock with fine herbs, on a nest of mashed potato’. This author thinks it’s feasible for you to jump out of bed, get the kids up, fed and ready for school with lunch boxes, gym clothes and homework, get yourself ready for work, then whip up a lovely dish of smoked haddock and mashed potato for breakfast. Yeah, right! Not in our world. Every diet you have ever followed has promised that you will lose so many pounds within a certain time frame. I make no such claims because with this method you chart your own course. You will choose when to eat, what to eat and how much to eat. You will work out your own eating pattern that fits in with your lifestyle and is exclusive to you. All you will get from me are common sense and a method that has worked for 98 per cent of my private clients (every counsellor gets one or two nutters!). If you feel that the time is right to sort out your shape once and for all, then stick around. If this is not for you, there’s a whole shelf of quirky diet permutations for you to enjoy… Let’s Face It If you’re with me, we’ll start with some hard facts that you may not want to hear. First, there ain’t no Fairy Godmother! Sorry. No magic wands to make that fat disappear. It took time for that fat to settle so comfortably round your waist and hips—it will take time for it to go. So? What are you doing for the next few months, maybe even the next year, while you lose the weight? You will still be living the same life, with the same family, same friends, same job – only gradually getting slimmer. There’s no hurry. No-one is offering you a contract to pose naked for a Playboy centrefold – are they? Now the rest of the ‘real deal’ facts—let’s get them all out of the way as quickly as possible: 1. Your body shape is the result of your lifestyle choices. It is the type of food you choose to eat, the quantities you serve for yourself, the exercise you do – or don’t do – and the excuses you make for those decisions. All these factors determine what you look like and how you think about yourself. 2. Losing weight starts in the mind. If you just focus on the food, all you end up with is the Atkins Diet. The thoughts you put into your mind influence which foods you put into your mouth. ‘Ooh that looks delicious.’ ‘Surely a little bit won’t hurt.’ ‘I’ve had a lousy week.’ If you agree with those two statements, you must also agree that the reason you are fat is because you are choosing to be. This is the most difficult concept to take on board, but let’s face it: you are the only one who puts food in your mouth. You can’t be fat unless you overeat on a regular basis, and you can’t do that unless you arrange your life so that you are constantly around food. You probably use food for every occasion – as a celebration when you are happy, as a calming agent when you are stressed, as medication when you feel down, and as companionship when you feel bored or lonely. For you, food is providing some sort of purpose other than nutrition. You are feeding some need in yourself. As long as that unacknowledged need is there, it won’t make any difference which diet you follow or how many times you succeed (temporarily) in losing weight. If you don’t know why you overeat, then you will never remain permanently slim. Choosing to be Fat Maybe you just enjoy food so much that every meal is a party and you eat more than your body needs to stay slim and healthy. Maybe you put yourself on such stringent diets that you feel deprived and end up bingeing. Maybe you constantly tell yourself how fat and disgusting you are and how much you hate yourself, and use food to blot out the image this presents. Whatever—you are choosing to be fat. Think carefully about this because I know your natural response will be ‘How could I be choosing that?!’ I’ll tell you: Every time you eat a chocolate biscuit instead of an apple, you are choosing to be fat. No, one biscuit won’t make you fat but it will certainly influence what you eat later – and it reinforces that, for you, the choice is always the chocolate rather than the apple. Every time you break off a chunk of cheese from a block in the fridge and pop it into your mouth, you are choosing to be fat. No, cheese is not a calcium-rich, healthy snack. It is a lump of flavoured fat – and saturated fat at that. Every time you drink an extra glass of wine, which might weaken your resolve and influence your choice of food (and you know very well that it does that), you are choosing to be fat. Every time you slump in front of the television on a bright, sunny evening instead of going for a walk, you are choosing to be fat. So you see it takes quite a lot of organization to be fat. You have to actively work at it. You are not genetically programmed to carry around an excess amount of blubber, forcing your heart to work that much harder to pump blood around your body. Everyone has a natural set-point of how they are meant to look, based on their genes. Although there are some hereditary factors that will influence your shape, such as wide hipbones or thick ankles, you are not predisposed to carry vast amounts of weight around to the detriment of your health. You can only be fat if you have created an environment that over-rides these factors and supports being overweight. Here’s how to tell if you are doing it: You keep a ‘chocolate biscuit’ cupboard in your house (for the children? Those grown-up children who left home five years ago? Or those little children who will eat whatever you give them?) Your desk drawer at work resembles a sweet shop You think low-fat crisps are a healthy option You feel cheated if you don’t have dessert in a restaurant You have ‘no time’ for exercise You get up late and have a chaotic life Your social life is defined by food instead of activity You are too tired after work to cook a healthy meal You are contemplating taking one of those products that stops your body assimilating fat – making it OK to eat that plate of chips because the fat it contains will not be digested (dream on!) If you keep cakes in the house, sooner or later you will eat them. The Problems I’m not being insensitive and certainly do not wish to discriminate against fat people—although I did have a very uncomfortable plane journey back from New York seated next to a lady who could have qualified for group medical insurance all on her own! I do know what it’s like to overeat—regularly and continuously. I won’t bore you—yet—with my dieting history! I do understand that whenever you overeat, you are not consciously choosing to be fat. The last thing you want to be is fat. What you are choosing is to be mindless—separating your mind from your body. At the moment of reaching for the food you are not connecting what you are eating with the shape of your body. All you know is that you want—or need— to eat something, and you are choosing to ignore the fact that it will make you fat. Intellectually you know this but you are choosing to disconnect as the impulse to eat over-rides the intellect. Then you profess not to understand why your excess weight won’t shift. Using Food as a Reward Eating is a basic instinct. Scientists use mice and rats for experiments because they want to measure the results they get from basic instinct, not carefully thought-out decision-making. They program the rodents to understand that if they do what the researcher wants they will be rewarded with food. But to condition these rodents, scientists manufacture a situation where the rodents are really hungry so the food can be used as a reward. People often do the same thing to themselves to reward themselves with food. They wait until they are tired, hungry, depressed, weak, sleepy or anxious before allowing themselves to eat, then they reward themselves with fatty, sugary food. In most aspects of your life you plan in advance: you wouldn’t wait until your car was completely empty before filling it with petrol. When it comes to eating, however, many of us don’t bother planning ahead. Eating can easily become something we do to respond to the moment. Your brain naturally craves foods to meet specific needs, such as to make hormones and neurotransmitters, replace spent fuel stores or rebuild damaged muscles. By the time you crave nutrients to meet those needs, you have already suffered a deficiency. Your body signals you with urgent warnings that force you to over-correct, which means overeat. So by neglecting to feed your brain and body with what it needs before it starts a craving, you set yourself up to eat too much. Self-esteem and Bingeing In the fat war, there are no victims—only volunteers. That fat didn’t just happen. You created the shape of your body internally, by how you feel about yourself and the things you say to yourself, and externally by the food choices you make. If you are always criticizing yourself, putting yourself down, telling yourself how awful you look, how greedy and disgusting you are, you will never lose weight permanently. No-one ever lost weight by being humiliated. Bingers—people who use food in response to emotions rather than hunger – live with this continual low-grade preoccupation with food which erodes their self-esteem but seems normal to them. Regardless of their weight, many women feel uncomfortable about some aspect of their body. They dislike the body they live in and, as a result, end up disliking the person who lives there. Most bingers are aware of the fact that their weight is creeping up. As weight gain is a relatively slow process, however, they tend to deny that this is happening. They refuse to admit that they eat anything fattening. ‘Oh come on, a couple of biscuits at teatime isn’t going to put on that much weight!’ and live in a state of permanent denial. You only confront the issue when forced to do so either by a medical examination or having to let out your shower curtain! By then, instead of just dropping 10 pounds, you find you need to lose three stone to look halfway decent. But suppose it happened overnight? Suppose you went to bed weighing 8 stone 10 and woke up the next morning weighing nearly 14 stone, fat and bloated? You would be horrified and panic-stricken, wondering what sort of disease you had contracted overnight. The disease is eating the wrong food—that ‘couple of biscuits’ multiplied 20 times over, day after day, week after week. That’s what you have been doing to yourself. The fact that it might have taken years rather than happened overnight is beside the point. If the way you are behaving now is keeping you fat, you have to decide to behave in a different way. Don’t be a Food Victim It’s easy to become a ‘food victim’ and put the blame elsewhere: your job, your mother, the kids, money problems, holidays. Sure, these can all cause stress. You can’t control other people—only yourself. You can’t control events—only your reaction to those events. The events will happen whether you deal with them calmly or stuff yourself with food. You are not stupid. You know that if you eat 1,000 calories of food and only burn off 500, the other 500 are going to make their way to your fat cells and stay there. So you don’t need someone to come along and tell you not to eat that extra 500 calories. Yet in spite of knowing it, you still turn to food for comfort. And food is comforting. One of the first sensations any of us can remember is being held and fed, so you equate love and food. Food is instant relief, calming, soothing your jangled nerves, banishing stress, an antidote to feeling lonely, sad, angry or depressed. So what you are doing is medicating yourself with food. You are using food to change the way you feel. As one of my diet clients explained, ‘I feel as if it is the only time I can have what I want, when I want it and I don’t have to explain myself to anyone.’ If you settle down in front of the television with a pile of biscuits, chocolates, crisps, fizzy drinks and ice cream, it provides instant gratification. But what you are doing is actually abusing yourself with food, the same as other people abuse alcohol or drugs. You come to rely on this type of food almost as a recreational drug to attain, fleetingly, a pleasant state of mind. By doing this you also create the need for more and more of those foods as an antidote for how they make you feel after the eating marathon—nauseous, bloated and dispirited about the effect on your body. What you have to try to discover is why you are doing this. Before you start going in the right direction, you have to stop going in the wrong direction. The last thing you want is to be fat, so ask yourself if there is some aspect of your life that throws you into the kind of despair that makes you turn to food. Sometimes it can just be a stressful day, but often there may be deeper, ongoing situations that you can’t change, like taking care of an elderly parent. In this case, you have to learn to deal with them without resorting to food. If you continue to binge or simply overeat regularly as your method of coping, it stops you dealing with reality. You just get instant false relief and the stressful situation remains the same. Diet Stress Sometimes just the thought of going on a diet—‘I’m never going to eat biscuits or cakes ever again!’—can make you feel stressed. You think of your sugar-fix as a drug and, as with any drug, you fear withdrawal symptoms or that you will feel deprived. The stress this invokes just makes you want to eat more, but this sort of stress is just something you have manufactured so that you can use it as an excuse to stuff your face. When I ask my clients what makes them eat inappropriately, I get the following answers: 1. Boredom. So does eating cake relieve boredom? Boredom is a state of mind. If you are doing something that fully occupies your mind, you’re not bored and don’t think about eating. In truth, eating will simply intensify your boredom because the sugar makes you feel lethargic, and instead of doing some energetic physical or mental activity, you lounge around feeding your perceived feeling. 2. It relaxes you. Really? Yes, eating carbohydrate foods like biscuits can relieve anxiety and, as the food fills you up, you do experience a certain relief. But what about later when you try on your favourite trousers and they won’t do up? How relaxed are you then? 3. Having a bad day. Everyone has good and bad days, even people who don’t binge. Let’s face it: some days are a total waste of make-up! Eating sugary food will just make a bad day worse. You must have dealt with bad days before without bingeing, so are you just using this as an excuse to eat? If you take the food out of the equation, you have to find another way of coping with whatever problem is driving you. Sometimes it is difficult to put your finger on exactly what is making you overeat. Maybe it started as a habit and just carried on that way. The trouble is that overeating is an auto-exacerbating disease—the more you do it, the worse it becomes. When you eat you feel guilty and disgusted with yourself, and when you feel that bad, you eat. The only way to cure this habit is to manage it. Your eating behaviour is deeply ingrained into your subconscious. If you have binged in stressful situations in the past, you will automatically do it again, unless you can get your eating under control and change the way you think and feel about yourself. Once you admit to yourself that you do have a problem, you have taken the first step towards dealing with it. You have coped before. You can cope again. Do not turn to food. Food will not change the situation. It will only make you feel worse. Don’t do Diets First, though, you have to realize that no-one and no ‘dietary method’ can do it for you. Although most diets don’t cause eating disorders, most eating disorders begin with a diet. Going on a diet can disrupt your physical sense of when and how much to eat, and can lead to bingeing. Sticking to a restricted eating plan can in itself promote that ‘Oh sod it’ response of bingeing on vast quantities of food when anything disrupts your strict sense of being ‘good’. The typical dieter’s mind-set is that if eating makes you fat then not eating must make you slim. But trying not to eat is not being in control because your body perceives this as starvation and will set up an enormous craving until you give in. This is simply your body’s way of making sure you stay alive. Even on ‘Eat-as-much-as-you-like’ weight-loss regimes like the high-protein Atkins diet, there are pitfalls, as described by writer Allison Pearson in the Evening Standard. She, ‘like half of London’, is ‘doing Atkins’ and says it goes something like this: ‘Atkins, Atkins, biscuit, oops (not very Atkins), Atkins, white wine, oh God, sorry. Atkins says eat cheese and butter, but how can you eat cheese and butter without crackers? I am allowed to eat double cream but no berries. Atkins, Atkins, croissant…’ Those who are not on the Atkins diet seem to be on a ‘counting’ diet. I have had it up to here with counting! Everybody I meet is counting something: points, calories, sins, fat units, stones, pounds, kilos, dress sizes, days (‘I’ve been good for four days now," I haven’t had chocolate for two weeks’, ‘This week I’ve done three red days and four green days’. What are you going on about, woman?). Is this some sort of endless numbers game? Stop counting! The overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction my clients express with commercial diet plans comes from the realization that they simply do not work in the long term. It’s not that surprising, though. If you were a research animal, maybe a kindly scientist could deliver you precisely the amount and type of food that would achieve the weight-loss you want—and you could just lie around in a cosy cage while it happened. But you are a human being and your life is not lived in a laboratory. You probably already know from bitter experience that following a particular diet theory may produce startling weight-loss results while you stick to it. But if, in a year’s time, you are back where you started, was it worth it? And once you climb on the dieting seesaw, it is very difficult to get off. The diet habit becomes deeply ingrained as a way of life and the ‘language’ is imprinted on your brain. You are always thinking about food, evaluating the calorie content, having those ‘Shall I, shan’t I?’ conversations in your head about some fattening item of food, usually ending with ‘Oh well, I’ve blown it now. I might as well go on eating for the rest of the day and start my diet again tomorrow’. Bear this in mind: dieters always eat much more when they think they have ‘broken their diet’ than people who never diet at all. The urge is to cram it all in now so they can start tomorrow with a clean slate (plate?). The only way to stop this is to get off it. Lose the dieting mentality. If you want to be permanently slim, you have to change the way you think, act and behave. It is no accident that some people are fat. This is a disease of choice. People carrying a lot of extra weight may have a slower metabolism but they are still making choices. You can either choose to eat something fattening or choose to eat something non-fattening. Maybe you choose the fattening option every time? If so, why? You have to acknowledge that if you choose to behave in a certain way, you also choose the results of that behaviour. It may not be ideal but it’s the only deal you’ve got. There is no point in saying ‘I’m going to do this or that’—you have to activate the plan and start doing something. The Solution Be Accountable Acknowledge and accept accountability for the shape of your body. You are accountable for the type of food you put into your mouth—not some of the time but all of the time. If you follow someone else’s diet that tells you what to eat at each meal, you are simply handing over your responsibility. When you don’t lose weight, it is the ‘diet’ that didn’t work, thereby absolving you of all blame. You are accountable for the way you see yourself and the way you feel. If, at times, you are angry, hurt or upset, then those are your feelings and you are accountable for their presence in your life. Whatever your circumstances, accepting this key premise—whether you like it or not—means you can no longer dodge responsibility for the position you find yourself in. If you think I’m labouring this point—I am! If you don’t accept accountability, if you insist that you ‘can’t help’ being overweight, nothing will ever change, plain and simple. By convincing yourself that you are a victim and ‘can’t stop eating’ (of course you can), that you ‘really try’ (obviously not hard enough) and that you ‘hardly eat anything’ (who are you kidding?), you will stay stuck on the diet/binge seesaw for the foreseeable future. The only person you can rely on to change your life is you. You have free choice. You make the decisions about what you are going to eat; you take responsibility for your shape, your health, your level of fitness and the thoughts that govern all of the above. Once you acknowledge that you are in charge of your life and your eating, it will happen. Self-choice isn’t deprivation – it’s freedom. Get Positive To get a clearer picture of how things will be, you have to move towards something positive, not just away from something negative. Create a picture in your mind: in this corner there is ‘you’—overweight, feeling heavy and lumpy and hating yourself. This is a very painful state to be in. Over in that corner is ‘you’ as you want to be—slim, light and attractive and feeling good about yourself. No pain there. When you have embarked on a weight-loss programme before, you have simply gone on a restrictive diet without a clear plan or strategy. At the beginning, your motivation is obviously high. As the pounds disappear you begin to move away from the ‘fat you’ corner and the pain lessens slightly. Then when the hunger and cravings start to kick in, you go back to your old habits and begin to eat a ‘little bit’ of the fattening foods you ate before. Soon you get sucked back into the fat corner because nothing has really changed. You have simply gone on a diet without changing your behaviour or your lifestyle, without including any extra activity into your life, without a specific strategy for change. If you keep on doing the same, you will keep on getting the same. However, once you stop being reactive and make a definite commitment to change your way of life, you will gradually and steadily start to move towards the positive corner, and become the slim ‘you’ that you want to be. In this way, you are not just moving away from something negative—the ‘fat you’—but towards something positive—the ‘slim you’. To do this you have to be very clear about how your life will be different once you have lost the excess weight. What aspects of your life would you have to overcome or change in order to become the person you want to be? What are you doing right now – or not doing—to impede your efforts to get slim? Negative thoughts produce negative results. Positive thoughts produce positive results. Be Mentally Slim To be a slim person, you have to live like a slim person. You have to see yourself as a slim person. This means having a very clear picture in your mind of what it is like to be a slim person, how to behave like a slim person, how to present yourself as a slim person, all the time. You have to mentally turn into that person. Even though you are not there yet, by pretending that you are, by acting as though the weight has already gone, you are programming yourself to succeed. A slim person is not someone who is on a diet. She does not wake up and tell herself that she will be ‘good’ today. Acting slim means that when you look in the mirror you don’t dwell on the rolls of fat round your waist and hips. You simply check that the clothes you are wearing look OK and move on. It means you don’t call yourself names like ‘greedy pig’ and tell yourself you look ‘fat and revolting’. Slim people see themselves as attractive and energetic. They automatically veer towards healthy food and limit their intake of the more fattening varieties. They would rather eat two squares of good quality chocolate than gorge on several bars of the cheaper kind. Slim people do not have a problem making food choices. They do not agonize over whether they should or shouldn’t eat some fattening item of food in case it starts them eating for the rest of the day. They simply avoid eating obviously fattening food because they know it will make them fat. Fat people know this too but always seem to be amazed and depressed when it happens. The rules for living like a slim person are very simple: You have to be in control of your eating – no mindless picking. You have to make a commitment to eat healthy food. If you want to be slim there is no point eating the sort of food that makes you fat. This food usually contains refined sugar. You have to delete the diet mentality – whether you are having a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ day, meaning whether or not you ate anything fattening today. You have to change the way you behave. If your life is one chaotic rush with no time for anything, that has to be sorted. You have to make time for some regular activity in your life. Everyone can find 20 minutes a day for exercise if they want to. You have to change the way you think about yourself and the way you think about food. Most importantly, you need to have a clear picture in your head of what you want to look like when you have lost your excess weight, what you will feel Like when you are slim, how you will behave when you are slim. Once you know what you really want—a slim, healthy body—getting there takes resolve and commitment. If you have spent most of your life just moaning about what you don’t want— how you hate being fat, how you can’t stop eating—then simply making the commitment to be slim will seem unnatural. Lose the ‘fat’ thoughts in your head and you © will lose the fat on your thighs. Stop Lying All bingers lie – to themselves and to others. Seventeen-stone clients swear to me that nothing passes their lips except lettuce and cottage cheese. Come on now, you know biscuits make you fat and you also know that one biscuit won’t do that. But taking the view that ‘one biscuit won’t make a difference’ leads to ‘just a few nuts/an ice cream/one slice of pizza/two squares of chocolate—won’t make a difference’. Individually, maybe not—if you are already slim. But collectively, every day, they do. So why are you surprised when this happens? ‘I’ll start again tomorrow.’ Why? What makes you think it will be easier tomorrow, especially if you are planning to activate your sugar-craving with an almighty binge for the rest of the day? Stop kidding yourself. Are you going to wait until you are another stone heavier before you start doing something about it? There is only one life; this is not a dress rehearsal for the slim life you should be living. Only you can bring that about. As Professor Ben Fletcher of the Framework of Internal Transformation (FIT) says: ‘You get what you expect. If you are not getting what you want, you have to change your thinking slightly. Because we are such habitual creatures, we cocoon ourselves in the world that we had yesterday. We like the comfort of what we know. People have the illusion that they are flexible, and this is especially true of leaders, politicians and chief executives. In fact, many are prisoners of their habits.’ The simple, obvious premise outlined in the following pages will give you the knowledge and tools to change the habits that have kept you fat. It will enable you to live the rest of your life as a slim person. You can choose to use these tools at any time. Sometimes you may disregard them and put on a few pounds, but once this knowledge is firmly implanted in your head, you can use it to get back on track any time you choose. Whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you’re right! Conversation with Client C:Will you just verify something for me: my hairdresser says that you need four tablespoons of olive oil every day to keep your hair strong and shiny and that a low-fat diet will cause dryness of the hair and scalp. Me: I don’t think your hairdresser knows what he’s talking about. Even if you cut down drastically on your fat consumption, if you are eating a balanced diet you will still be getting more fat than you need to keep everything properly lubricated, including your hair and scalp. C:Oh. He also says that to lose weight you should eat half a grapefruit before each meal. How does that work? Me:It doesn’t—unless you don’t actually eat the meal after you’ve had the grapefruit! Which I don’t advise, by the way. What other gems does this font of all nutritional knowledge have to impart? C:Well, apparently, to speed up weight loss you should eat negative-value foods like celery and radishes. He says this sort of food burns up more calories in the chewing and digesting than is actually contained in the food. Me:That’s a load of rubbish. What else? C:Come on, he’s really knowledgeable. Did you know that to make your nails grow stronger you should eat jelly or dip your hands in it because it contains gelatin? Me:Well, if you want to sit with your hand in a bowl of jelly, then don’t let me stop you. Which nutritional academy did this genius graduate from? C:The Morris School of Hairdressing. Me: I thought so. C:You are being very unkind. He knows a lot about nutrition. He told me that pineapples contain a special enzyme that burns up fat. Is that true? Me:Wrong again. Pineapples do contain an enzyme called bromelin, which digests protein and is similar to an enzyme called papain in papayas. These are not found in any other fruits but, sadly, they do not burn up fat. There is no food yet invented that does. Even if there were, you wouldn’t be able to find it because I would have bought up the entire supply! C:But surely he is right about some things? Me:Well, he has cut one side of your hair shorter than the other. That should tell you something. Chapter Two Who’s Conning Who? (#ulink_db1953a4-cae6-5c16-8c05-3729236b436b) ‘In the year 500 BC (Before Conley—of the Sainted Rosemary), the Prophet Legawaxius declared (from the Book of Salon, App. 10.30, Bikini-Line 1): “If thou dost prevail and surrender thine body into the hands of practitioners well versed in the art of beautifying the flesh, be it encumbered upon you to preserve thy maidenly modesty by remaining clothed in thy garment of knicker—be it elephantipants or thong—at all times." How the Diet Industry Gets Rich As a dieter you are part of a very exploited group. An ?80 million diet industry thrives on your failure. To the pharmaceutical industry, fat people represent a potentially unrivalled source of revenue. Having found a cure for impotence with Viagra, it now sees a remedy for obesity as its holy grail. Even the reputable slimming organizations would surely prefer that you fail so that you will keep coming back and paying your weekly dues. How else can they make money? Slimming Aids The same applies to the slimming aids you can buy over-the-counter in chemist or health-food shops. People keep buying these products then blaming themselves when they don’t work. The diet companies are making a fortune persuading you to buy these pills or food substitutes on the assumption that they will make you feel and look better. But do they? You tell me. While there are reputable manufacturers of diet products, there is also a huge market in what can only be described as weight-loss fraud. As long as people are prepared to try to lose weight at any cost there will continue to be ‘entrepreneurs’ who exploit that desire by selling bogus products. Recently I received an ‘invitation’ through the post to buy an ‘all natural’ tablet whose main unspecified ingredient reportedly helped dieters lose 72 pounds in 10 weeks—a result, which I imagine, could be achieved only by amputation. If I sent off my application ‘immediately’ I would be lucky enough to get an extra week’s supply of these fabulous capsules absolutely free. I can’t wait! According to the product blurb, if I take just two tablets each day I will lose as much weight as I want and—yippee!—my metabolism will increase to such an extent that the fat will drop off my body (into a greasy puddle on the floor?). Developed in Switzerland (why is that meant to impress?) by doctors (not window cleaners then?), these tablets mean I will never feel hungry. Amazingly, I will never have to diet again as the tablets will be ‘retraining my body’s ability to convert fat to energy’. Thank goodness for that then. The leaflet accompanying this miraculous, 100-percent herbal fat-burner shows a studious-looking man in a white coat wielding a stethoscope (in case I didn’t believe the ‘doctor’ bit?). The wording is full of scientific terms that seem to suggest the product has been created as a result of exciting new research into lipogenesis—the metabolic processes by which fat is stored in the body. The unique ingredient (still unnamed) is ‘especially relevant for people whose calorie consumption exceeds healthful levels’. These claims are designed to persuade you that if a product is ‘relevant’ to overeating, you will stay fat forever if you don’t use it. The fear factor! Are you convinced? If you’re looking for a quick-fix slimming aid, you are undoubtedly well served by manufacturers of diet products. It is a terrific industry – I wish I’d thought of it! But do we really believe we can buy a product and it will make us slimmer? Aren’t we just buying a fantasy? Some people buy Lottery tickets and dream about becoming a millionaire. Others buy diet products and dream of becoming slim. It’s the same thing (except that there’s a very small chance of actually winning the Lottery). If there were indeed a safe, authorized, over-the-counter product that could make a fat person slim, we would all know about it. We would have read about it in a respected medical journal. There would have been controlled medical tests, serious long-term research and all the endorsements in place from government drug-safety administrations to license the product for sale. More to the point, everyone who wanted to be slim would be. But they aren’t. So that magic product or ingredient isn’t available. This doesn’t stop manufacturers claiming their diet products achieve this effect or, if they’re more responsible, suggesting that they can help you lose weight as part of a properly managed diet plan. Sometimes these products are endorsed by doctors, who extol the safety and benefits of the tablets, potions or supplements. Personally, I believe that any doctors endorsing a diet product should be made to declare whether they have a financial interest in that product or are being paid any kind of commission. Any product that promises instant success without the chore of dieting and exercise is a real concern to me. Such claims simply divert consumers from considering healthier ways of controlling their weight. Moreover, there can be serious side-effects from taking more than the recommended dose on the packet, and many dieters do this, as the diet mentality dictates that if one tablet or tea bag will make you slim, then five will make you slimmer. In an image-obsessed culture, where companies market diet products aggressively to exploit people’s dissatisfaction with their looks, common sense sometimes loses out. Even though, intellectually, many people know the products won’t work, their desire to lose weight—to find a short cut so that they can be accepted, admired and successful – is so strong that it’s worth ?29.99 just to buy into the fantasy. Stop deluding yourself. You can’t have it all. You can try. You have tried. It doesn’t work. Creaming off the Profits Talking of cost, hands up who has paid a large amount of dosh for a cream that you rub in your thighs and bottom to get rid of cellulite? Oh, come on, you haven’t! And did it work? Did it get rid of the fat? Where did the fat go—to your stomach, your ankles, the bloodstream? If you had a bath in the cream, would you emerge slimmer all over? A marketing friend told me about a campaign that was initiated to create massive demand for a cream that would reduce fat on the thighs. The plan was to create a huge buzz about the product before it was launched—and it worked magnificently. It was so simple: just a little whisper in a few susceptible ears: ‘It’s only available in France at the moment!’, ‘They’re queuing round the block to get it’, ‘It’s selling out over there’, ‘Coming here soon!’, ‘Really expensive!’, ‘Limited stocks when it does arrive’, ‘Quick—before they sell out!’. And the inevitable result? ‘How do I get it?’, ‘Where can I get it?’ Rather ordinary smoothing cream becomes the must-have new product before it is even packaged in the expensively designed pot, because no-one wants to be the only person left in town with fat thighs. Don’t worry. You didn’t miss anything. As one doctor said, ‘If this cream has any effect on physiological function, then legally it should be sold as a drug. If it doesn’t have any effect, why should anyone buy it?’ For the sake of your body and your bank balance, understand this: you cannot break down fat from the outside. The only way fat gets on your body is when you eat more food than you expend in energy, and the excess gets stored in your cells. Therefore the only way to get rid of it is to make sure it gets used up as energy—and you know exactly how that works. A cream that could dissolve fat would have to dissolve the skin first—think about it! There is a discrepancy between the manufacturers’ and the public’s perception of what constitutes a ‘cure’ for cellulite, or cauliflower bottom syndrome (CBS). The manufacturers assume it is to make the skin smoother and less lumpy-looking; the user wants to end up two inches slimmer. Beware Beauty Salon Treatments Save your money. Any treatment undertaken in a beauty salon which claims to make you slimmer by applying ointment, clay, slimy gunge, or attacking your thighs with nasty-looking instruments, tight bandages (to squish the fat into submission?), electrical impulse treatment, or whatever, is a complete waste of time. Little electrical impulses to stimulate your muscles will have no impact on the surrounding fat. Similarly, there is no such thing as a ‘non-invasive’ face-lift. You should also be wary of suggestions made by the attractive, slim beauty therapist attending to your vulnerable thighs while you lie prone in your cubicle. A white nylon coat and a name tag do not confer instant qualifications upon the wearer. The letters after her name are probably her postcode. Aspiring beauty therapists are indoctrinated with three key phrases: ‘Breaks down the fat’, ‘Increases the circulation’ and ‘Gets rid of toxins’ (sound familiar?). Therapists are instructed to repeat these phrases at intervals during each consultation with a client, in the firm belief that said client will not dispute this. Asking for a more detailed analysis, ‘What do you mean it breaks down the fat?’ will elicit the response, ‘You know, it breaks down the fat so that it can be carried away by your increased circulation’. Don’t bother to ask ‘How?’ or ‘Where does it get carried to?’—she doesn’t know and you will only confuse her. You will certainly be lighter when you leave the beauty salon—by at least 50 or 60 pounds – but only in your wallet. And news travels fast, so if by the remotest chance any of these anti-fat treatments worked then nobody would have any fat. Surely this should tell you something. However, there’s no telling some people – and with time on your hands, fat on your thighs and money in your pocket, the choice is yours. You could even join Cherie Blair on her Detox Slimming Machine. Appearing svelte and slim(ish) at the Labour Party Conference in October 2003, the prime minister’s wife was reportedly very enthusiastic about her three-times-a-week slimming treatments to get rid of ‘toxic waste’ and reverse years of ‘digestive abuse’. The treatment consists of lying on a couch and being attached to 32 electrodes that emit electrical currents to tap away at the ‘intestinal plaque’ lining the colon and intestines. A course of 12 sessions costs ?695. A laxative would have the same effect at a fraction of the price as would taking a natural product like psysllium or ispaghula husk, marketed in the UK as Fybogel. You are also advised to go on a strict detoxification diet—eating only fruit, vegetable soup and salad with a small meal of chicken and rice for dinner. Oh really? No sausage, bacon and chips then? Let’s talk toxins for a moment. A toxin is a poison usually produced in the body by bacteria. Health Encyclopaedia, the medical guide used by the Royal Society of Medicine, suggests that bacterial toxins are extremely dangerous, and if they enter the blood in more than minute quantities, the effects are always serious. If you suffered the build-up of toxins suggested by these so-called ‘health experts’ you would probably be dead, and the idea that you can be ‘cured’ of toxins by electrical stimulation, colonic irrigation or a detox diet is ludicrous. Not one toxin, as the term is understood by the Royal Society of Medicine, can be removed by any detox programme. As Amanda Wynne, a spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association tactfully put it: ‘I can’t really comment on this so-called detoxifying process but the diet doesn’t sound hugely nutritious to me. You can lose between one and two pounds a week quite easily just by eating healthily and exercising—and save yourself ?695.’ If you have that much money to spare, why not go for surgery? Plastic surgeons have developed a technique to get rid of the ‘orange peel’ effect of cellulite by snipping the ligaments just under the skin to produce a smoother look (Tucks R Us?). Unfortunately, this doesn’t eliminate the fat; you just look smooth and fat instead of lumpy and fat. Fatso intacto. The only plastic surgery that will effectively protect you from all of the above is to cut up your credit cards. Fad Diets Even if you don’t succumb to slimming treatments, nothing it seems will deter you from going on your next diet. Over the years the professional dieter must have lost at least 40 stone. Each new diet promises you more food than you can eat, instant results and strangers on the bus coming up and asking you to dance. Let’s face it: authors write diet books to make money. If they can think up some weird food permutation—the quirkier the better—that captures the public imagination, they are laughing. Even better, if loads of people try it and lose weight—as you do—word of mouth is the best publicity. What doesn’t concern these writers, however, is the effects their methods could have on someone’s health if they stay on the diet for a long period. If you keep repeating the same action, you will keep getting the same results. High-protein, Low-carb Regimes In the same week it was announced that the Atkins diet book—which advocates foods high in protein and fat and low in carbohydrates—was rivalling Harry Potter in sales, a report was published in the Lancet medical journal linking too much fatty food with an increased risk of breast cancer. Dr Sheila Bingham, who led the study for the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer and Nutrition said: ‘The effect seems to be related particularly to saturated fat found mostly in butter, meat, lamb, sausages, bacon and cheese,’ foods which are the main staples of the Atkins diet. Women eating the most fat had a 33 per cent extra risk of developing the disease. So—are you dying to be slim? Another report by Dr Bill Robertson, a clinical biochemist at the Institute of Urology at the University College Medical School, claims that although you could lose a stone on the Atkins diet, you could also gain a stone—in your kidney. Kidney stones are extremely painful hard deposits that often need an operation or laser treatment to remove them. Dr Robertson says, ‘It (The Atkins Diet) is the worst possible combination. The absence of fruit and vegetables means the body is deprived of a means of counteracting the negative effect of a diet rich in animal proteins and calcium oxalate. The high-protein diets have contributed to an increase in the number of kidney stones that we are seeing.’ Are you suffering to be slim? These reports have caused the Atkins company to hastily ‘revise’ how the diet should be used. It appears the consumer ‘misunderstood’ Dr Atkins’ use of the phrase ‘eat liberally’ in relation to foods high in saturated fat, and are now advised to place more emphasis on fish and chicken rather than red meat. In other words, ‘Please don’t sue us if you get sick.’ Television personality, Anne Diamond, now more well-known for her fluctuating body shape than her presenting skills, described being on the Atkins diet as follows: ‘In my view, the Atkins diet is a recipe for a revolting feeling of bloated over-consumption, coupled with a disgusting, fatty taste in your mouth and breath like vapours from a compost heap. I tried it for six days. In the end, I gave up because I felt so nauseous, and I was seriously worried about my heart.’ Anne finally went to her GP with palpitations. Once he knew what she had been eating, he said, ‘Stop being so bloody silly and to go back to eating proper food in moderation.’ That’ll learn yer! In the short term, a high-protein diet does little harm. The trouble is, it just encourages yo-yo dieting where you lose significant amounts of weight quickly, and put it back on as soon as you start eating ‘normally’ – then you have to go on the diet again to lose it, and so on. According to doctors, this sort of fluctuation is more dangerous than staying permanently at a slightly inflated weight. An interesting fact to emerge from the Atkins diet is that, contrary to previous thinking about weight, dietary fat doesn’t make you fat—in fact, in the absence of carbohydrates it appears to have the opposite effect, albeit only while you adhere to this formula. It is sugar that makes you fat, and the fat/sugar combo found in cakes, biscuits and the like is the surest way to increase your girth. So Why Diet? The stupid thing is that most dieters are not significandy overweight. Dieting has become so much part of our culture that many people, especially women, go on diets regardless of their actual weight on the assumption that, no matter what they weigh, it would be better to weigh less. The ‘what should be’ never did exist but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be’ – there is only what is. Social Conditioning Women are particularly vulnerable to the diet-based lifestyle. Girls tend to learn from an early age that their worth can be measured on a set of bathroom scales, and it sets the pattern for a lifetime of dissatisfaction with how they look. A study carried out by the University of London in September 2003 involving nearly 3,000 youngsters from 28 schools, found that almost half of the girls aged 11 to 14 were trying to lose weight. Most modelled themselves on Victoria Beckham and admitted to skipping meals in their efforts to adhere to the latest manifestation of a world gone mad, where women are supposed to look like pre-pubescent boys with big tits. By the time these girls become young adults, they will have internalized the belief that there is something wrong with them for being their natural size or slightly bigger. They think it is their fault and collude with the culture that tells them they should be thin to be worthwhile. Guilt This is why all dieters feel guilty about eating—whatever they eat. Even though they enjoy the taste of food, they usually gulp it down quickly. This is because, subconsciously, they feel they are doing something wrong by eating anything at all – although logically they know they have to eat to stay alive. Guilt is also the reason they put themselves on horrendous detox regimes, living on just fruit juice for a week with all the discomfort, headaches, weakness and coated tongue that are the inevitable results. And when they feel that bad they think they deserve it because this is the price for eating too much and becoming fat. People go on strict diets to punish themselves for being fat – for overeating. Once you understand that diets are punishments for bad behaviour, you can understand why they fail. Eating is not a crime but you behave as though it were. Diets are like being in prison where you do ‘time’ for not looking right: ‘I’ve done three days now’. Prisoners, however, become rebellious. Regardless of how willingly you entered your diet-cell, after a while you begin to think about breaking out. Convicts fantasize about a cake with a file in it. Dieters just fantasize about the cake. A Distorted Self-image Most dieters have such a distorted view of their own bodies that they don’t know what their genetic shape should be. They accept the idea that there is an ‘ideal’ body and that theirs is far from it. So whenever they feel bad about themselves, regardless of the cause, they say they ‘feel fat’. Although you see yourself as weak-willed, self-indulgent and lacking in self-discipline, none of this is true. No-one has ever tried more diligently to solve a problem than the chronic dieter. You have followed every recommendation ever made regarding the best way to approach what you see as your problem. You have deprived yourself of food in endless ways, and spent time, energy and money in your efforts to find the answer. Unfortunately, the diets you have embarked upon have always failed you in some way because, if you are an over-eater or binger, once that urge to eat is upon you, there is no way you could stick to a diet devised by someone else. These diets never address your need to turn to food when under stress. That is why only four dieters out of every hundred keep the weight off. Even now, scientists are testing production of a new, ‘safer’ diet pill—one that will eliminate hunger without the damaging side-effects of previously used amphetamine-based drugs. They might as well not bother. Most overweight women do not eat because they are hungry. They eat because they are tense, stressed, bored and often because they are depressed at being fat. How many times has the following scenario been played out by a woman and her concerned partner: Him:Why are you eating that? Her:Because I’m fat. Him:But if you finish that whole packet you’ll be even fatter. Her:I know. I don’t care. Him:But you do care. You keep saying how miserable you are because you’re fat. Her:Just LEAVE IT will you! I’ll do it when I’m ready. That’s it, mister, leave it. She will do it but in her own time. Any word from you will send her diving into the biscuit tin. You may not believe it, but you are not deliberately being self-destructive if you eat when you’re not hungry. You eat at these times because it feels ‘right’ to you – as if food will ‘help’. And you’d be right. For many years, compulsive eating has provided you with a coping mechanism. So it makes no sense to assume that the thousands of people who are currently dieting are somehow deficient, that they lack the strength of character to achieve anything, particularly when many of them succeed in their pursuit of goals in other areas of their lives. Those shapeless women Members of Parliament who reach the front benches and look as if they get dressed in the dark are a good example. Clearly there must be something in every diet that ensures its ultimate failure, regardless of how long it’s been in the bestseller list. Dieters always assume every aspect of their lives will be perfect in a smaller size. They cling to the belief that the next diet will be their passport to a better life, and they are putting everything on hold until this magic moment arrives. Compulsive eaters can’t imagine not being on a diet – the only alternative lifestyle they see involves eating everything in sight. The truth is that if people ate natural produce all the time, including grains, fish, chicken, fruit and vegetables – even a certain amount of butter or oil – they would be slim and have adequate nutrition. Highly processed, fatty, artificially sweetened stuff just confuses your system. Your body simply doesn’t know what to do with the chemicals. Ultimately, this sort of food is not satisfying so you crave more of it, and you lose track of the brain’s usual regulatory signals that tell you whether you are hungry or full up. When your body doesn’t get what it wants, it keeps trying, eating till it is satisfied. As a seasoned dieter, you probably welcome the rules and regulations of a new diet and feel relief to be able to hand over your food decisions to the author, assuming they must know what they are talking about. But diets never live up to their promises if they prescribe some quirky food permutation or are very restrictive. You will always find a reason to go back to what you consider to be ‘normal eating’. Media Pressure The media doesn’t help. Editors of women’s magazines are constantly under pressure to come up with news about dieting to feed their readers’ presumably insatiable desires for weight-loss advice. Although some of these magazines are cautious and thorough in their approach to nutrition reporting, a ‘diet breakthrough’ is just too hard to resist writing about—as the editors will tell you, they have to give the readers what they want! You will have seen countless articles in magazines saying ‘Diets Don’t Work’ followed, 20 pages later, by a ‘Get Slim for Summer’ feature. Everyone who reads the message that diets don’t work resists it. You cling to the belief that you can find a way to make one work. Look at all those ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of people who have tried to lose weight for those beach photos. Surely if it works for them it will work for you. (Secret: what the magazine didn’t tell you is that the people in the ‘after’ pictures didn’t make it through to ‘Still Slim in Spring’, and neither will you.) Some writers are paid by product companies to place promotional articles in magazines. The pressure on editors to fill their magazine content every month with new stories can lead to reporters and feature writers falling back on ‘press-release journalism’, which means they will simply reproduce material sent to them by PR companies—and every magazine editor is bombarded with press releases all the time eulogizing new products and services for their readers. The press release may sound scientific, or may even be issued from a reputable university or research institute. The ‘experts’ quoted, however, may have some financial interest in the product they are promoting, or might even influence the editor by placing a full-page advert for the product in the magazine. To enhance readers’ interest, the magazine will list famous people who apparently swear by the stuff. In recent years it must seem as though Geri Halliwell, Liz Hurley and Madonna are the recipients of every weight-loss and beauty aid invented! What about adverts you see or hear on radio or television? How objective are they? When food manufacturers sponsor television programmes, how much could they, or do they, influence the content of that programme? Do we even think about it when we see the logos come up and hear ‘this programme is brought to you by’ or ‘in association with’? In one country, a well-known fast-food manufacturer even sponsors the news bulletins on one channel. Now how much critical comment are you going to get about junk food from that television station? Newspapers and magazine editors and makers of lifestyle programmes for radio and television know that dieters love to hear the latest scientific discoveries. This audience, however, is not looking for the latest news about a cure for cancer; they just want to read that someone has invented a lettuce that tastes of chocolate. Editors and programme-makers therefore owe it to all of us to ensure that their stories about ‘diet breakthroughs’ are informed with broad research and deep scepticism—but don’t hold your breath for that. The Triumph of Hope over Experience You would think that people who have spent their adult years failing at diets would be relieved to discover that they don’t have to try every new one that comes out. But that’s not the case. If there is the slightest suggestion that they might be able to ‘Get Slim for Summer’, they want to give it a try. Professor Janet Polivy, from the psychology department at the University of Toronto, conducted some very interesting research studies a few years ago. She found that simply going on a diet disrupted people’s physical sense of when and how much to eat – and this led to overeating. In experiments where dieters had to eat a high-calorie snack, thereby purposely breaking their diet, they ate much more than non-dieters in the same situation. Furthermore, they ate more than non-dieters when they believed the snack was high-calorie, even when it was in fact low-calorie. In tests where dieters thought they were being watched after breaking their diet, they ate very little; but afterwards, when they thought they were alone, they would binge. Again and again the researchers provided evidence for what they came to call the ‘what-the-hell’ effect of overeating after breaking a diet—and what I call the ‘Oh sod it!’ syndrome. Every time you put yourself on a strict diet you are trying to train yourself to give precedence to what the diet allows over what the body demands. That would be fine if the body demanded only what the diet allowed but this is rarely the case. The crucial problem with all restrictive dieting is that it drives a wedge between the person and her body; a struggle ensues and generally the situation deteriorates until the dieter has wrecked the natural signals, since these signals are what the diet is designed to over-ride. So out goes eating on the basis of natural hunger cues and in come calorie calculations or peculiar nutritional combinations, in particular the current fashion of cutting out entire food groups such as wheat, dairy, tea, coffee, sugar and alcohol. This leads to emotional bingeing and being controlled by the vast swathes of foods you are trying to eliminate. This turns you into a binger, eating on the basis of compulsion, obeying mysterious urges to eat that correspond neither to the original hunger that is entirely natural nor even to the diet that you substituted for natural eating. ‘Low-fat’ doesn’t mean ‘not fattening’ if you eat a lot of it. The Binger Let’s profile the binger for a moment. Not all dieters are bingers. Some people are overweight because they just eat too much of the wrong foods at mealtimes and do no exercise. Bingers are another category altogether and comprise a significant proportion of my clients. Compulsive eating is more than an activity; it is an all-absorbing state of mind. Bingers come in all shapes and sizes and lead all kinds of emotional lives. What they share is their obsession with food and weight. This dual preoccupation with food and body shape is the hallmark of the compulsive eater. The clients who consult me are not necessarily very fat. Although we are accustomed to equating fat with gluttony, I have found that the shape of someone’s body is not necessarily a reliable indicator of their relationship with food. Some people come to me just to learn how to stop bingeing. Although their weight fluctuates wildly over a six-month period, they don’t allow a binge to go on long enough to cause a lasting weight increase. They go back to a strict diet to bring it down again. As one of them said, ‘No-one believes me when I say I have an eating problem. I know I don’t look as though I have, but not a day goes by when I don’t obsess about food.’ Privately, I call these ‘thin fat people’. Most bingers though, offer convincing proof of their struggle by their increased girth. They are constantly eating more food than their bodies require, reaching for food for emotional reasons rather than natural hunger, and if they do start out hungry, they continue to eat way past the point of physiological satiation. Therefore, no-one can diagnose compulsive eating based on size. Only you know if you are a binger. Given the all-too-human capacity for denial, a binger is simply unaware of the inordinate amount of time she spends thinking about, choosing, buying, cooking and eating food. (I use the term ‘she’ because most bingers are women but that’s not to ignore those many men who have the problem.) For our typical binger, her mealtimes, socializing, weekends and celebrations are the focus of her food obsession: what she should or shouldn’t be eating, will she manage to stick to her diet, is she having a ‘good’ day? So much mental energy is expended on a substance she is trying desperately not to eat. It is senseless to label a binge habit simply as obesity – just as you can’t say that alcoholism is simply drunkenness or drug addiction merely the problem of being stoned. The fat is simply the symptom of the underlying eating disorder, albeit a significant one. Most bingeing is done in the hours between the evening meal and bedtime—unless you are a mum with young children, when it starts at afternoon teatime. Food eaten during the early part of the day doesn’t seem to stimulate the need to continue eating as much as the evening meal does – probably because most people’s days are fairly structured and food eaten towards the end of the day signals a release of tension. There is a difference between the eating habits of an ‘overeater’ and a ‘binger’. Returning from work, an overeater will nibble on peanuts or olives with her alcoholic drink while preparing the evening meal. This will probably consist of something like thick soup with a roll and butter, followed by roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, rice and a green vegetable. She will finish with apple pie and custard or ice cream. Tea and cake will follow a couple of hours later. She can’t understand why eating this way—plus a substantial breakfast and lunch—keeps her fat. Our binger, on the other hand, who is constantly on a diet, will eat sparingly at her evening meal, preparing grilled fish with steamed broccoli and carrots and avoiding the mashed potato she serves to her partner and children. She too may serve apple pie for dessert, but only to the other members of the family. Unfortunately, one of her children may leave the crust of his pie and she absent-mindedly pops this into her mouth. This activates the need for more of the same and she will quickly finish the rest of the pie, then nibble on biscuits while clearing up. Later, preparing the children’s lunch boxes for the following day, she will open a five-pack of chocolate biscuits, put one into each box and eat the remaining three. Now into full binge-mode, she will continue eating for the whole evening, often indulging in weird food combinations like spooning lemon curd and muesli into a tin of condensed milk and eating it out of the tin with a teaspoon (as you do). She will do this stealthily, keeping an eye on the door in case anyone should come in and see her. She knows why she is fat and tells herself she will ‘start her diet again tomorrow’. Changing Bad Eating Patterns When you are greatly overweight, your ‘fat’ becomes the problem and your lack of control both mystifying and depressing. Some doctors classify this as an obsessive-compulsive phenomenon but the issue is the overeating, not the result. You need to identify the problem behaviourally rather than in terms of your appearance. The best way to deal with this is to give up the notion of dieting (even ‘sensible dieting’ is a contradiction in terms) and substitute a healthy-eating plan encompassing food from every group and cutting out only the food that is not good for your health. Eating is something to be enjoyed rather than feared. A balanced diet is not a biscuit in each hand. In a following chapter I will show you how to change the words that have made you fat in the past and substitute them for words that will keep you slim. As you are the one who talks to yourself, you are the only one who hears what you say, so you need to keep it positive all the time. This may sound easy, but if you have been a compulsive eater for many years, you are so used to berating yourself about your uncontrolled eating, your perceived weakness and unacceptable shape that these thoughts are a part of who you are. Subconsciously, you may want to hang on to them. Life is much simpler when all roads lead to one destination. You perceive that if all of your problems can be reduced to food and fat, the only solution is to go on a diet. When you mentally shout at yourself for overeating, you get upset then need to comfort yourself with more food, thereby creating a circuit. If you stop being nasty to yourself and change your words to praise and encouragement, you break the circuit and stop translating all problems into fat. Faced with loads of problems, you’ll need to come up with solutions instead, and sometimes that isn’t easy. Let’s face it: it is often fear of your real problems that sends you scurrying for the food in the first place. Body-image Versus Self-image It is time to stop confusing your body-image with your self-image. Body-image is not what you see in the mirror: it is the reaction you have within you in response to what you see. I understand that you want to be different from the way you are now—that you don’t like the shape of your body – but this does not make you a bad person. You say you hate yourself but you are not your body. Consider your character: I am sure you are kind, generous, funny, a good loyal friend. What has that got to do with the fact that for some reason you have eaten too much food and allowed your body to become fat? Some of my very large clients say they feel ashamed to be seen and think that other people are talking about their size. So what? That is their problem. Why should you care? They don’t live with you. I am not suggesting you resign yourself to being overweight but that you acknowledge what is – without judging that reality. Acceptance does not imply self-delusion. When you accept yourself you simply say, ‘This is how I am right now and it’s OK’. How you look, the number on the scales and your eating habits are neither good nor bad. They just are. As you learn a healthier way of eating, your body will reflect this change and you will get slimmer. For now, however, developing an acceptance of how you look is crucial to resolving your problem with food. The easiest thing to be in the world is you. © The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. The logic of why you binge may still elude you but that logic is there nonetheless. Each person in the course of their development finds ways of coping with life’s experiences. Therefore your eating has simply become your chosen way of dealing with your problems. When you reach for food to comfort yourself, you are reaching back in time. It is something you have always done. So? Is that a reason to hate yourself? Of course not. What you are going to do now is to replace this means of coping with something better, and make the decision that from now on you are going to be nice to yourself. What We are Going to Do The aim of this book is to help you identify the foods, thoughts and behaviours that are keeping you fat so that you can make the necessary changes. I want to make you feel better about yourself – not simply to lose weight no matter what it takes. This means that the plan you devise should not be geared towards undereating—or trying to achieve a negative energy balance. Rather, if you can eliminate overeating – meaning eating in excess of your body’s natural requirements—and learn to stay in control, your problem will be solved. Your objective, instead of focusing on the numbers on a scale, is to develop healthy and sustainable eating and exercise habits, and build a more positive body image. Here are some of the issues we will be addressing in the following chapters: Step 1: What is Your Specific Goal? Not a dream, but a real goal, a target you can reasonably achieve? Of course it’s fine to dream (‘I wish I could eat as much as I like and still be slim’) but a goal is something you want to achieve and are prepared to work towards. Is it only your weight that you want to change or some other aspect of your life? What is really keeping you fat? What do you need to change? Be realistic in your answers. If your goal is to be permanently slim, what are you prepared to sacrifice to achieve this? You now know that you can’t eat everything you want any time you want it. Are you prepared to live without the sort of food you know is not good for your health and shape and just concentrate on putting healthy food into your body? Step 2: How Do You Intend to Measure Your Progress? Are you aiming to stay below a certain weight or go for a dress size at which you feel comfortably slim? Again, make this something that is achievable, not wishful thinking. Step 3: Devise an Eating Plan This should be a plan you can live with, not too far removed from the way you eat now. I will help you do that in the next couple of chapters. Arrange your environment in such a way that it helps you achieve the results you want. This means making your house and your workplace ‘safe’; stocking up your fridge and freezer with healthy food; and planning an exercise routine that you can stick with on a regular basis. Rely on your strategy, planning and programming, not on your willpower. Step 4: Assess the Obstacles To pursue a goal seriously requires you to assess the obstacles realistically and create a strategy for dealing with them. Identify those places, times, situations, other people and circumstances that set you up for failure. Reprogram those diversions so they cannot compete with what you really want. This means getting to know when you are likely to be tempted, and working out your own plan to deal with it. For example, if you always pop into the bakery for a Danish pastry on your way to work, find an alternative route. Avoid buying your evening newspaper in a shop where they also sell sweets and chocolates. If crisps set you off, tell your children not to eat them in front of you. Step 5: Define Your Goal in Short, Measurable Steps A wishful-thinking statement would be, ‘I am aiming to go from a size 16 to a size 8 by the summer’. A reality-based statement would be, ‘I will make the necessary changes to enable me to lose one pound a week for the next 20 weeks’. Changes happen one step at a time. If you think about losing four dress sizes, the task can seem overwhelming. But it looks decidedly manageable when you break it down into the steps of losing one or two pounds a week. Steady progress through well-chosen, realistic stages produces lasting results in the end. But you have to know what those steps are before you set out. Step 6: Be Accountable for Your Actions or Nonactions As they progress towards their goal, people tend to con themselves and think, ‘That little bit won’t hurt’ or ‘It’s raining, I’ll go for my walk later’. Some people find it helpful to share their plan with a trusted friend to whom they have to report their progress periodically. The thought that someone is checking up on them might prevent a tempting situation from turning into a binge. If you think this will work for you, then go for it. Personally, I usually advise people not to confide in others, mainly to avoid the sort of remarks people feel obliged to trot out whenever anyone is on a diet, such as ‘Why? You don’t need to lose weight’ or ‘Oh, come on, try a bit of this, it’s not fattening’. It is nobody’s business when you put on weight and nobody’s business when you lose it. Step 7: Lose the ‘Diet’ Mentality If everyone stopped talking about eating, weight and body shape all the time, it might cease to be such an important and debilitating issue in our lives. We might also find many more interesting things to talk about. So how about: Don’t compliment friends when they look like they’ve lost weight. Don’t whinge about how much weight you have put on so your friends feel they have to say that you don’t look as though you have. When the conversation turns to weight and eating habits, start talking about something else – books, films, how there is nothing to watch on television. Cut out all the negative, guilt-ridden comments about food (‘I ate so much last night!’), including your habit of berating yourself for overeating (‘I am such a pig’). That last point is extremely important. I understand that you want to be different from the way you are now. I also know that, ironically, accepting yourself as you are is a prerequisite for changing. This means accepting your body in its current shape and not putting yourself down all the time. Hating the way you look sends you scurrying to the fridge. Possibly your self-hatred is the factor most responsible for keeping you fat. Get ready to programme yourself for success. Conversation with Client C:How can I get rid of cellulite? Me:You can’t. C:Is that it? Me:Is that what? C:The end of the conversation? Me:What do you want me to say? Have you tried to get rid of cellulite? C:Are you kidding?! I’ve tried everything. I’ve rubbed in creams, lotions, radioactive mud and seaweed extract. I’ve had pads strapped to my thighs with electric currents going through them. I’ve been wrapped in tight bandages and enveloped in hot wax. My bum has been squished between rollers and I’ve even had electrodes put in under the skin into the actual fat… Me:Ouch! What does that do? C:An electric current passes between each pair of positive/negative needles and it’s meant to make the fat cells fight each other. Me:And do what? Jump out and run away? Oh please! How did that work for you? C:It didn’t. Me:Then get real. You cannot break down fat from the outside. It has to go through the process of lipolysis within your body to be turned into a form that can be used as energy. Look, you are eating sensibly, you’re losing weight, your legs are getting toned from all the exercise, so just relax and enjoy life. C:But the cellulite is still there. Me:Then learn to love it—because it sure loves you. Why else would it stay with you all this time? Because it’s very attached to you, that’s why! C:Smartarse! Conversation with Client C:I have always believed in taking extra vitamins and minerals to ensure I get a balanced diet. Am I right? Me:Most people who take vitamins do so as a protection against various ailments, but vitamin pills do not ‘cure’ anything. Neither does not taking them make you susceptible to illness. Vitamins are components of food and are found in plants and animals. If you are eating food from all the main food groups, you shouldn’t need to take anything extra. On the other hand, some of the food we buy is so adulterated and processed that much of the vitamin content is lost. C:Is that a No? Me:That depends. What are you taking? C: I take calcium for my bones, magnesium, vitamins E and C, gelatin for my brittle nails, vitamin B6 for premenstrual thingy, garlic pills, that stuff that improves your memory—what’s it called?—um – anyway, I take iron in case I’m anaemic, aloe vera, lecithin to break down my fat… Me:Hang on a minute. You take lecithin to what? C:Really! You’re a diet counsellor – you should know this! I want to get thinner and I read that lecithin breaks down fat. Me:Oh it does indeed, but only in the food that you eat as an aid to digestion, not the fat already encasing your thighs. Lecithin is an emulsifier. It breaks down the fat you eat into tiny droplets and carries them in the blood to the tissues that need it. It doesn’t obligingly break it down and shunt it out of your body! Anyway, your body makes all the lecithin you need and if you take extra, your body will simply make less. C:How disappointing. But surely everybody needs extra vitamin D because there is so little sunshine in this country, and I also take royal jelly because it’s supposed to have magical properties. Me:Rubbish! Royal jelly is made by bees to make queen bees strong. Royal jelly capsules are made by humans to make money. Why are you taking all this stuff? Wouldn’t it be better simply to eat lots more healthy food? C:(shrugging) Can’t afford it. Chapter Three The Sugar You Eat is the Fat You Wear (#ulink_aba34328-afa0-5730-9a36-54451af10367) ‘Woe is she who partaketh most plentifully of the fruit of the sugar cane,’ sayeth the prophet Tatenlyle (from the Book of Diabetes, Type 2, verse 1). ‘For verily, this will bestow upon her the gift of mighty generous thighs that overflow her airline seat and render unto her much embarrassment.’ So – let me ask you: have you got a large hippocampus? If the answer is: ‘Well, it was the last time I looked’, you may be mistaken. Eating an abundance of sugary food can enlarge just about every part of your body but could be shrinking the part of your brain that deals with memory – the hippocampus. According to research carried out by Dr Antonio Convit at the New York University School of Medicine, higher-than-normal blood sugar levels can cause the hippocampus to reduce in size. People with raised blood sugar were shown to perform less well in short-term memory tests than those with normal blood sugar levels. Some of us do not have enough insulin—the hormone that removes sugar from the blood—to deal with all the sugary cakes and chocolate bars we put away. As a result, sugar collects in the blood instead of being pumped to body tissues such as the brain, where it is needed as fuel. As Dr Convit explained, when the hippocampus is looking for that extra fuel during memory processing and can’t find what it needs, it ends up shrinking. Now, what was I saying? Oh yes, moving down from the hippocampus to the parts where that sugar will ultimately settle… My Story Like many people, I used to grab for food whenever I felt anxious, stressed or bored. Starting with cake or biscuits, I would resign myself to the fact that I had ‘broken my diet’. This meant that I might as well go on stuffing my face with food and restart my diet the next day. Then I would gravitate towards chocolate and ice cream. After a while, as the sweet taste became more cloying, I would switch to savoury foods, usually crisps or nuts, washed down with gallons of cold fizzy drinks like diet (!) cola. Once fully into binge-mode, all thoughts of healthy food would disappear. While serving dinners of chicken or fish I had cooked for the rest of the family, I would make a pile of toast, layer on the butter and cheese and plough through the lot, before heading back to the cake and chocolate—dessert time! The next day I would wake in a terrible state: horribly bloated, lethargic and deeply depressed. With my clothes feeling tight and uncomfortable to remind me of what I had done, I would try and analyse why I kept doing this while knowing throughout that it would make me feel so awful. I couldn’t understand my own behaviour. I certainly had no wish to be fat. All I knew was that once the sugar craving took hold, I gave in to it every time. A binge would usually last about three days before I could get myself back on my ‘diet’, whatever popular programme I was attempting to follow. As this was a long time ago, it was probably the Beverley Hills diet or the F-Plan. My weight used to fluctuate by about a stone. I kept three sets of clothes, from skinny-mini skirts to saggybaggy sweat pants, to cover all eventualities. Most astonishing, though, was the extent to which my eating habits affected my mood. When I was slim and eating normal meals I felt light, happy and confident. I would exercise regularly and was fit, supple and strong. After a binge, however, I felt heavy and depressed. Even hauling myself out of bed was a massive effort. I hated being fat and hated myself for being fat. I had no inclination to go near the gym and was sure that if I ran my thighs would jiggle like a mobile waterbed. I was either bad-tempered and snappy or just limp and weepy. The slightest problem upset me enormously and I had an overwhelming sense of being out of control and unable to cope – not only with my food choices but with everything. Why should this be? If I struggled into some jeans and the two sides of the zip refused even to make eye contact, let alone meet and engage, I could see why that might be dispiriting, but surely not enough to produce the sort of depression that was affecting my whole life. Enlightenment came when someone recommended a book called Sugar Blues published in 1975 by the American author, William Dufty. Reading it produced a ‘lightbulb moment’ for me. Dufty described how he was extremely overweight, had no energy and suffered recurring irritations like migraine, bloating and stomach problems, bleeding gums and haemorrhoids and often felt low with depression. He wrote: ‘One night I read a book that said if you are sick, it is your own damn fault. You know better than anyone else how you have been abusing your body, so stop it.’ Sugar, said Dufty, is a poison, ‘more lethal than opium and more dangerous than atomic fallout’. He resolved to stop eating it. He then went through his kitchen cupboards reading the food labels and was shocked to discover that once he threw out any products that contained refined sugar, the shelves were almost bare. Starting his new eating regime, Dufty suffered withdrawal symptoms for 24 hours but then described a feeling of being ‘reborn’. Over the next few weeks his depression lifted, he lost 2001b (imagine what he must have weighed before!), his skin improved and the various ailments he had suffered from gradually disappeared. Could a food as innocuous and as readily available as sugar really cause a mental condition like depression? It seemed unlikely. I began studying the effects of sugar in more depth and was privileged to meet the late Professor John Yudkin, Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics at London University. He urged me to read his book Pure, White and Deadly, about the scourge of refined sugar. Reading it produced another ‘lightbulb moment’: I was convinced. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/lee-janogly/only-fat-people-skip-breakfast-the-refreshingly-different-diet/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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