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:
