You Can Be Thin: The Ultimate Programme to End Dieting... Forever (6 page)

So how much do you want to be slim and what are you willing to do to look and feel the way you want to look and feel? What are you willing to pay to be a normal size? Whatever your answer is you are probably already paying much more by being overweight. If you want to get thin and stay thin for life you have to make a choice: you can either have a diet that is slightly restrictive and a life that isn’t, or you can have an unrestricted diet and eat whatever you want whenever you want and pay the price by living a life that is restricted because of your weight. Having experienced both the former and the latter, I promise you the former is better in every way. I have worked with thousands of clients who learned my methods and I frequently get letters thanking me for showing them the way. I have never met anyone in my career of twenty plus years who said, ‘I was happier before and I preferred my old eating habits’.

If eating indiscriminately and immoderately made you happy you would be happy by now and you’re not. No one who is overweight is truly happy because the price they pay is so horribly high. Being overweight doesn’t mean you aren’t loveable or wonderful or a great person, but it does mean you are suffering when you don’t need to.

I am always amazed when people tell me that they refuse to restrict their eating while their life is in fact restricted by being overweight. Cutting out certain foods may seem restrictive, but if your weight limits your ability to be happy with what you look like and your self esteem, to be active with friends or family, to buy clothes that you admire on the hanger or in magazines or even affects your sex life, that is truly restrictive. Clients often tell me that they refuse to get involved in the tyranny of restricting what they eat but they are already involved in the tyranny of being overweight. They tell me they refuse to suffer by denying themselves certain foods while explaining how much they are suffering physically and emotionally from being overweight because so many options and activities aren’t open to them. They cannot get involved in many activities because they get breathless, they can’t play with their children because they are too out of shape. They won’t go to the beach, the swimming pool or even a communal changing room because they feel inhibited by their body shape. They can’t wear the clothes they want to wear.

You may see eating differently and changing your lifestyle as being enslaved to some dull monotonous diet, but what I’m suggesting is not a diet in the traditional sense at all, and if you aren’t leading a full life and don’t feel good about yourself and your body then you are already leading a very restricted life and missing out on so much. Restrict your eating instead of your living is a motto I live by, and I should know as I had an eating disorder for years and now I willingly restrict what I eat and I love getting the most out of my life as a result. I have been asked many times if I think my way of eating is restrictive and the honest answer is, yes it is, but only very slightly, whereas being overweight is restrictive all the time. It is much more restrictive to hate your body and to be depressed about how you look and to live life to only half its potential. I feel good almost all the time now, whereas when I was eating without any restriction I felt horrible almost all the time, including when I was eating like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t just feel bad about myself and my lack of control, I felt horrible physically, with constant headaches, lethargy, mood swings and stomach aches. And as for the guilt, yes there was an abundance of that too, and no amount of chocolate or ice cream could cure it. If you choose to willingly and happily restrict how you eat, this one action will free you from being restricted in other areas of your life forever, you will never look back with any regrets

You are probably sick of the ‘R’ word already, but here’s the thing – you already happily live with a wide range of restrictions without a second thought. If you are married you have to accept certain restrictions – you can’t behave like a single person, you can’t do just whatever you want, come in whenever you want, buy whatever you want and flirt with whoever takes your fancy as you made a choice when you got married to forgo those things. If you have a job you can’t go to work whenever it suits you and stay in bed when it doesn’t, you can’t even wear what you like. Again, in order to keep that job you have to restrain some urges and impulses. We all know that having children means sacrificing late nights, long lie-ins and pristine houses and we make that choice willingly when we want a baby. When you finally get to buy your own home, owning it means you may no longer have surplus cash to spend, but you are willing to accept restrictions in your lifestyle and spending in order to be a home owner and get on the property ladder. Even having pets has almost as many restrictions as benefits especially when it comes to travelling or cleaning up their mess or taking the dog out for a walk when it’s pouring and you have the flu, but we accept that it’s part of the deal. Nothing comes with only benefits not even that gorgeous puppy or cute kitten.

In terms of restrictions on food, we don’t eat garlic or onions if we are about to go on a hot date or go to an interview. We may choose to avoid foods that give us gas like beans, pulses and dried fruits if we are in certain situations such as an important meeting. These are choices that people willingly make and it is not hard at all with some effort and persistance to transfer these thoughts and feelings to your everyday diet.

With our jobs, pets and relationships we accept the restrictions and enjoy the benefits, and by using this programme to apply the same principles to how you eat you will succeed in reaching and maintaining your ideal weight. Most of us don’t abandon our job, spouse or children because they aren’t perfect, yet people abandon diet after diet because they can’t do it perfectly, we lose motivation as soon as it goes wrong and give up. This is the major flaw with diets – we can never adhere to them completely so we give up and feel like a failure. This programme will work for you because you don’t have to do it perfectly in order to get visible and lasting results, you just have to do it.

When I first began to work with overweight clients I was amazed that they would do almost anything to lose weight except change how they ate. They would pay for liposuction, diet pills, crazy quick-fix diets, expensive gym membership that they never used, slimming treatments that were a con and drugs that hadn’t been approved and yet they would not embrace a lifestyle where chocolate was an occasional item instead of a regular one. They would even say, ‘I would do anything to lose weight’, but that turned out not to be the case.

I had many discussions with clients who would begin the consultation by saying, ‘It’s so unfair that I can’t just eat whatever I want’. They had never considered that half the people in the world can’t eat whatever they want and even in the developed world many people can’t eat whatever they want either due to medical conditions, religious beliefs or financial restrictions. I can’t eat whatever I want
and
have the body and good health I want and I accepted that long ago, and once I had accepted it life got better and easier and I became much happier too. Smokers and drinkers can choose to smoke and drink whatever they want, but they know they will ultimately pay a price. So I answered my clients by saying, ‘You can eat whatever you want, if you are prepared to pay the price.’ I got one client to list what he would have to pay and what he was prepared to pay, and when he saw how high the stakes were he changed his mindset. It was very important that he did it, rather than me forcing it on to him, because we resist being made to do things by others, but are more open to changing when it’s our own idea.

When I asked one of my clients to write out what she was paying to eat indiscriminately the list was scarily long. She began with her fertility as being overweight by even a small amount can be linked to polycystic ovary syndrome, and excess fat acts as a kind of sponge absorbing the female hormones vital to conception. She included in her list high blood pressure, heartburn and feeling inhibited when she was naked so she never had the kind of unabandoned sex that both she and her husband would have liked. She ended the list with a higher risk of developing some cancers and her depression about never wearing the clothes she wanted to wear and always feeling that she was missing out.

At the end of this chapter I want you to write out your own list. I don’t want to scare you, I’m not a terrorist therapist, but to show you how high the stakes are, what you are paying, what it’s costing you, and why it’s time to do something different so you can be different. No one reaches the end of their lives and wishes they had eaten more biscuits and cakes. Generally people wish they had done more, seen more and led fuller, richer lives. Overeating is not going to move you towards this, it is going to move you further away from it.

So many of my clients tell me that going to the cinema or theatre isn’t as enjoyable as it could be as the seats are too small and uncomfortable and they cannot face the humiliation of having to squeeze past the row of people to reach their seats, knowing they could not go through that again if they needed the toilet halfway through the performance. This is restriction; cutting out the wrong food is a piece of cake by comparison.

Another of my clients who was overweight complained that his wife of only one year was not interested in him sexually. She in turn told me that she still loved her husband but because of his junk food diet he had constant indigestion and loud gas that woke her up at night. She had made a decision to have separate bedrooms because although she loved him he had lost all sex appeal for her. That is a huge price to pay. I had another client who was so depressed about being overweight that it affected his sex drive and made him feel insecure about his body. He didn’t want to have sex with his wife who suffered with him because she felt unloved and rejected by him.

For years I tried using food to make me feel better but it never worked and a lot of the time I was absolutely miserable. I love to eat but I have taught myself to love eating the foods my body can digest, that keep me slim and happy. It is so easy now and such a way of life that I wish I had done it years ago. I wasted so much of my twenties dieting then breaking the diet and I didn’t have a normal attitude to food because I was preoccupied with losing weight. It’s ironic that now I do have a normal attitude to food I actually eat more than I ever ate back then, and I am the weight I always wanted to be.

It is unfair that overweight people cannot enjoy certain everyday foods like snack foods, wheat products like breakfast cereals, and cheese because, as you will see as you read on, they are quite definitely linked to excess weight. It is also unfair that diabetics, people at risk of heart disease, people with high cholesterol and people with nut or fish allergies can’t eat at random either. They have to make a choice and eat selectively. But when you know the facts it’s easy to appreciate that eating less of the unsuitable types of food for life is much less restrictive and much less of a hardship than being overweight for life. People who have shed weight all readily agree that life is easier when you maintain your ideal weight. All the celebrities and everyday people I have worked with conclude, without exception, that changing how they eat permanently, by restricting some foods in their diet in order to be free from the limitations of excess weight is most definitely worth it.

I am not recommending either the usual type of diet where you have to be so controlling over what you eat, or suffer hunger pangs or a massive deprivation of food, which makes people absolutely miserable. I am recommending eliminating or restricting some indigestible, unhealthy foods that seem to cause weight gain and disrupt weight reduction in many people. There are still so many wonderful, delicious foods you can enjoy. You don’t have to give up any food forever, just restrict their intake. I still enjoy rice pudding and rhubarb crumble with custard, but I save them for holidays and high days. I don’t need them very often and I don’t miss them at all.

Athletes make food choices all the time. Bodybuilders eat more protein and much less carbohydrates so their muscles show more easily. Many bodybuilders restrict their diet six days a week by only eating low-carbohydrate and low-fat foods and then eat anything they like on the seventh day. Actresses and dancers all make food choices and choose to restrict what and how they eat in order to look and feel a certain way. The many celebrities I work with would all admit to willingly restricting their diet in order to reach their dreams and goals and look a certain way. A lot of singers have to forgo all dairy products as the mucus reaction they get from milk affects their voice. The casein in milk triggers histamine production. This in turn triggers mucus production. The mucus collects in the throat, chest and sinuses and blocks the production of sound for singers who use the diaphragm to sing.

Many people choose to restrict how they eat in order to look and feel a certain way. Making a decision and coming to accept that there are certain foods you cannot eat, or cannot eat very often, will help you adapt to a lifestyle of choice that will work for you permanently. Eventually these foods won’t even look or seem like food to you. You will find you can be around them without being tempted at all. You will be able to look at, say, doughnuts or cheese and feel indifferent to them.

Behavioural experts have stated that humans do so much better when they are able to accept something rather than fighting it. Accepting it means you will work with it instead of resisting it. By the end of this programme you will be able to accept and embrace a new attitude towards what and how you eat and you will be able to reach and keep your ideal weight for life.

So far we have been looking at what being overweight is costing you in terms of lifestyle and health but it can also cost a lot of money to be overweight. Generally, people overeat cheap foods like chips, bread, snacks and chocolate and convince themselves that they can’t afford to eat any other way. This is not true. We can still eat inexpensive food and shed weight. Fast food isn’t cheap in the long run and although we can buy a bag of chips or a bar of chocolate for less than the cost of fresh fruit and vegetables, in the long run we pay dearly for buying cheap food. I have clients who tell me they can’t afford to eat anything but fast food yet taking some hard-boiled eggs or tuna with some pitta bread and fruit to work costs less than eating in fast food restaurants. One client I talked to said that after a lifetime spent eating fast food because she told herself she could not afford the alternative, she then ended up paying over £5,000 for liposuction.