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.
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:
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
