Freedom from the Diet Trap: Slim for Life. Jason Vale

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СКАЧАТЬ you had to drink oil before each meal – again not joking), the ‘sex diet’ (yes there is one – best of a bad bunch I’d say, and more fun than eating cabbage soup). I could go on and on and on, but all of the above, even the Thumbnail seems incredibly sane compared to, wait for it – the ‘Fresh Air’ diet. Yes, let me repeat that –

      THE FRESH AIR DIET

      I wish I was joking, but it is perfectly true. This really is ‘Extreme Dieting’ and I believe the most dangerous ‘food movement’ (or non food movement) on earth. It isn’t actually called ‘The Fresh Air Diet’, but ‘Breatharianism’. It is a lifestyle popularized by an Australian woman called Ellen Greve, or Jasmuheen, as she is better known. Greve claims she hasn’t eaten since 1993; yet, she admits ‘she drinks herbal teas and confesses to the occasional “taste orgasm” involving chocolate or ice cream’.

      She claims not to eat the food but simply every now and then get the ‘taste’. The fact that three of Greve’s followers have starved to death while adhering to the Breatharian way of life, doesn’t appear to dissuade her. In 1999 the Australian television programme 60 Minutes tested her ability to live on ‘prana’, the ‘Light Of God’. After just four days, Dr Berris Wink – president of the Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association, urged her to stop the test. He wanted to stop the test because, according to Dr Wink, Greve’s pupils were dilated, her speech was slow, she was dehydrated and her pulse had doubled. Funny how when tested she couldn’t live without food or water for four days yet claims not to have eaten anything since 1993! Believe it or not she’s not the only one at it either. One Wiley Brooks, who heads up ‘The Breatharian Institute Of America’, is equally as bats in my opinion and there are many, many more. This is obviously the ultimate diet and I am amazed they haven’t been shut down. How on earth can you encourage people to ‘live on light’ and not be accountable if anything happens to them? In a world where the holy grail appears to be a Size Zero, surely these people need bringing to book.

      Clearly ‘Breatharianism’ is beyond extreme and obviously mental, but I think we have all been guilty of trying some pretty ludicrous diets over the years. But why do we do it? Why do we jump on one diet after the next, regardless of how irrational they are? In truth, don’t we already know exactly what we need to do in order to drop the weight and get healthy? Wouldn’t it be fair to say that you could write down at least ten different ways to lose weight that – if you followed them – would all work? Could you not also design yourself an exercise programme that – if you followed it – would make you lean and fit? I think that we are intelligent enough to realize that if we ate nothing but cabbage for three weeks we would lose weight (and most of our friends probably) and that if we ate loads of fruit and veg and drank the fine juices they contain, we would all be extremely healthy.

      I knew exactly what to do to get into shape and get healthy, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t. What I didn’t know was how to stop eating crap and be happy about it. I knew how to stop eating rubbish and be miserable about it – I had a Gold medal in that one – but how the hell do you change what you eat and be happy about it? The problem is, we have all simply been going about it the wrong way.

      TELL ME WHY I DON’T LIKE MONDAYS

      When I started any of my diets I would almost immediately suffer, not physically but mentally. I would always start my diet on Monday (when else?). I think if people just stopped going on a diet they would instantly eat less crap anyway. Think about it. When I made the declaration that I was going on a diet on Monday, I would go into ‘food freefall’. I would eat as much rubbish as I could possibly cram in from the Friday onwards declaring to the world, ‘It’s okay, I’m going on a diet on Monday’. So I would always eat a lot more than I would have normally eaten if I hadn’t made the conscious decision to ‘diet’ in the first place. I would then go shopping on the Sunday and buy a trolley full of fruit and veg. Have you noticed how immediately judgemental we become when we have a load of good food in our trolley? We start eyeing up other people’s trolleys and if they have a load of sugar and fat laced ‘foods’ and drinks and they don’t look the picture of health and have a little hyper child with them, we start thinking, ‘well no wonder, what do you expect’. All this and we haven’t even bought the food yet, let alone actually eaten the stuff!

      I would then wake on the Monday and immediately start to think of all the things I couldn’t have. I would ‘hang on in there’ using all my might and willpower. To be fair I had usually stuffed myself so much over the weekend in preparation for the dreaded day, that I was usually okay most of the first day. But then out of the blue, usually late afternoon, a little voice would start chipping away and my desire for something naughty would kick in. This is when I would use as much resolve as I could to resist temptation, which normally meant going to bed early in an attempt to sleep the craving away. Halfway through Tuesday and the inevitable ‘I’ve picked the wrong time’ would rear its ugly head. This would be rapidly followed by ‘The bomb could go off tomorrow’ and ‘What’s the point of living?’ and I’d be back where I started. Well not quite – usually I’d then eat more than normal to subconsciously make up for lost eating time.

      On other occasions I would not call it a ‘diet’ but simply say ‘As from Monday, I will start to eat healthily’. Now I am sure that whoever invented the fridge hated fruit and veg. There is that drawer at the bottom to put your veg in so that you can conveniently forget that it’s there – only to rediscover it days later when it’s beginning to make its own way out! You then throw the mouldy veg in the bin with the declaration, ‘I forgot all about that, if I’d have remembered I would have eaten it. Oh well, let’s go get a take-out – it doesn’t matter because I’ve decided to make a fresh start … on Monday.’ Recognize the pattern?

      I never once got excited about getting a slim physique and gaining health because of the hell I thought I had to go through in order to achieve that goal. I never once looked forward to a change of diet; it was always a feeling of dread. I was defeated before I started. We should all, if we think about it logically, be very excited when we are about to change what we eat in order to get the body of our dreams. But if you are psychologically hooked on certain ‘foods’ and you believe that you gain something from them – pleasure, comfort or whatever – then those foods, even if you know they are also making you fat and ill, do not become less precious if you are forced to do without them. As you have no doubt experienced, they become the most precious thing in the world. Your entire focus is on either eating them or not eating them – as a result you experience the same mental tug-of-war that so many people think they have to go through.

      The problem with this is there is only so long that anyone can ‘hang on in there’ and experience this often nightmarish mental tug-of-war. No wonder I never succeeded on a diet. No wonder it has such a high failure rate. And that is the real problem with diets – you effectively force yourself to do something which you do not want to do in the hope that you will reach what you do want – i.e. your ideal weight or optimum health. But all the time you are doing something you don’t want to do you are having an internal, and often external, tantrum. One side of your brain wants the fat producing ‘foods’ and the other half doesn’t because you want to look and feel better: ‘Yes I will, no I won’t’ – it’s a constant mental battle. There is only so long any sane person can do this before they say ‘Sod this for a game of soldiers, life’s too flipping short!’

      WHEN ARE WE EVER FREE?

      And at what point do we ever feel free from this mental battle? I use the term ‘free’ to describe not having to worry about the food we eat or having to exercise discipline and control over our intake; I mean truly free to eat what we want, whenever we want, free from guilt and restriction. So, when are we free? The minute the diet is over? I would say no. Because, when the diet is СКАЧАТЬ