An Unfit Mother: How to get your Health, Shape and Sanity back after Childbirth. Kate Cook

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СКАЧАТЬ agree with Lucy—give your scales to your worst enemy—they are a curse. Get weighed every so often when you go to the doctors or the gym, but don’t live by the scales or you make a pact with the devil!

      If you get into the game of weighing yourself every day, then every day becomes a desperate competition with yourself. ‘OMYGOD! How could I have put on three pounds in a night?’ ‘Right,’ you declare, ‘I am going to take my earrings off, stand on one foot and see if that makes a difference. OK, if I go to the loo, that will knock off a few pounds.’ You beat yourself up for the BAD days and stuff your face, because—what does it matter? But when you have actually lost weight, well, you starve yourself all day because you are on the right track—mad logic.

      Another game that goes on in your head is to get down to a target weight that, in effect, you have made up. When I played this game, for example, I had to be an ‘odd’ number on the scales, so I had to be 8 stone 7 and not 8 stone 8…

      …and, of course, when you get to 8 stone 7, the game is to get to 8 stone 5…

      …and then that is not really good enough because, in fact, the most ideal weight is 8 stone 3…

      …Then all your friends start badgering you because you look too thin…arggh!

      So the best thing is, don’t even get into those games in the first place. The nutrition programme in this book should liberate you from all that. Please let it. You can allow yourself to be liberated by:

      * Blowing up your scales with dynamite—or, better still, giving them to a ‘friend’.

      * Just cracking on with eating well, doing some exercise and trying to change your attitude.

      * If you really can’t give up the scales, try putting them on different surfaces.

      * Or slightly alter the scale dial to read just a bit lighter, because the scales can’t possibly be right. Can they?

      A balancing act

      Have I got a brilliant no-brainer exercise for you to do or what? All you have to do is be able to stand on one leg. I know that after a long day that can actually prove more difficult than it looks. Why would you want to stand on one leg? Because standing on one leg tones your leg muscles, and gives a little support to your butt muscles—even better, holding the muscles tight increases your metabolism. If you can hold in your tummy at the same time, this helps you to keep your balance, vital to the whole thing. Don’t forget to change legs or you will get one toned leg and one flappy one. Oh yes, and keep the knees bent.

      Now how easy is that? Feeling better and ready to get down to business? Of course you are!

       The nutrition bit

      Eat healthily

      If I was prescriptive—guess what? I would be giving you a Diet, just like everyone else does. And guess what again? I am sure you have already discovered that you just don’t have time to follow diets. They are too much of a schlep—especially with junior in tow. In the old days you could go out shopping for all the ‘right’ kit and do it all perfectly, but now you have other demands. Without driving yourself crazy, you can no longer be that precise. And calorie counting—we don’t do that either—calorie counting long-term doesn’t work unless you are very good with maths.

      It is important to know that when you start eating right in this way that you are embarking on a journey—you won’t be arriving top speed at your destination, but once you’re on the road and making a start, step by step, you will get nearer to where you want to be. You will get the results. I have applied the method I am sharing with you with literally thousands of people and so I know it works. Follow this programme and you will be off the slimming diet treadmill and getting on with your life, which is so much more important than worrying about your weight all the time.

      You don’t need to diet to lose weight

      Have you noticed how everything these days is over complicated? People want things to be complicated because then it seems as if it is worth it. If the system is too easy, surely it can’t be true and can’t be working. But remember that people who invent diets are just trying to make money out of you and make it so complicated that you are a prisoner to their system. You have to buy their book—and carry it round with you in your handbag at all times so that every time you feel like eating, you have to check back to see if you are doing the ‘right thing’ or the ‘wrong thing’. The diet only works if you are using their method and if you are unsure how the sacred method works, then you can buy the video, DVD, CD, flashcards, food, calorie counter, exercise pack—and that’s a whole lot more money they just made out of you.

      The point is that every one of these diet gurus has a part of the truth, but not the whole truth. And following a rigid system disempowers you as a woman. With a twinkle in my eye, I always say that these diets were invented by blokes—blokes who like working on spreadsheets to keep a track of points, calories, goals and other blokey things. We are prisoners to systems to keep us in check. Wouldn’t it be powerful if us girls were liberated from the worry of food and that food became something that we really enjoyed without beating ourselves up about it the whole time? How much more time we would have? Tomorrow the world!

      Low fat diets

      Of course, all diets have an element of truth in them. The no/low fat diets of the Eighties had a point—saturated fat (animal fat) in huge quantities is obviously not a good thing and probably a case of ‘a moment on the lips a lifetime on the hips’. The problem is that when you take the fat out of food it tastes really disgusting and so the manufacturers of processed food, in their wisdom, add a whole pile of sugar to products to make them taste even half decent—either real sugar or fake sugars like aspartame. So there might be no fat but there is a load of sugar in it, too.

      Low calorie diets

      Low calorie diets work too—but boy, do you have to concentrate on the whole thing—either adding up calories or avoiding forbidden foods. And when the day comes that you start eating ‘normally’ again—like an elastic band that has been stretched and stretched and stretched, when you finally let go and eat a cream bun, you go nuts and can’t stop eating ‘forbidden’ things.

      High fibre diets

      Then there were the fibre diets, which worked mainly because it was about eating healthier food, but all that fibre without drinking enough water gave people constipation. Also, many of these types of diets relied on wheat as the main source of fibre, and wheat is in a lot of junk food, too. Also eating too much bread can’t be good for us either as flour and water, the two major ingredients in bread, make glue. Enough said, I think, don’t you?

      High protein diets

      Then things really swung the other way with Old Dr Atkins and the fear of carbohydrates really took off. Of course, he wasn’t the one to actually invent high-protein diets—variations have been around since the ark—but it was Atkins who got rich and famous on it. Eating loads of protein increases your intake of saturated fats (and all the dangers of that), also all that protein to digest puts your body under a lot of pressure, which the poor old kidneys don’t like much.

      Atkins СКАЧАТЬ