Only Fat People Skip Breakfast: The Refreshingly Different Diet Book. Lee Janogly

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СКАЧАТЬ disease you had contracted overnight.

      The disease is eating the wrong food—that ‘couple of biscuits’ multiplied 20 times over, day after day, week after week. That’s what you have been doing to yourself. The fact that it might have taken years rather than happened overnight is beside the point.

       If the way you are behaving now is keeping you fat, you have to decide to behave in a different way.

      Don’t be a Food Victim

      It’s easy to become a ‘food victim’ and put the blame elsewhere: your job, your mother, the kids, money problems, holidays. Sure, these can all cause stress. You can’t control other people—only yourself. You can’t control events—only your reaction to those events. The events will happen whether you deal with them calmly or stuff yourself with food.

      You are not stupid. You know that if you eat 1,000 calories of food and only burn off 500, the other 500 are going to make their way to your fat cells and stay there. So you don’t need someone to come along and tell you not to eat that extra 500 calories. Yet in spite of knowing it, you still turn to food for comfort.

      And food is comforting. One of the first sensations any of us can remember is being held and fed, so you equate love and food. Food is instant relief, calming, soothing your jangled nerves, banishing stress, an antidote to feeling lonely, sad, angry or depressed. So what you are doing is medicating yourself with food. You are using food to change the way you feel. As one of my diet clients explained, ‘I feel as if it is the only time I can have what I want, when I want it and I don’t have to explain myself to anyone.’

      If you settle down in front of the television with a pile of biscuits, chocolates, crisps, fizzy drinks and ice cream, it provides instant gratification. But what you are doing is actually abusing yourself with food, the same as other people abuse alcohol or drugs. You come to rely on this type of food almost as a recreational drug to attain, fleetingly, a pleasant state of mind. By doing this you also create the need for more and more of those foods as an antidote for how they make you feel after the eating marathon—nauseous, bloated and dispirited about the effect on your body.

      What you have to try to discover is why you are doing this. Before you start going in the right direction, you have to stop going in the wrong direction. The last thing you want is to be fat, so ask yourself if there is some aspect of your life that throws you into the kind of despair that makes you turn to food. Sometimes it can just be a stressful day, but often there may be deeper, ongoing situations that you can’t change, like taking care of an elderly parent. In this case, you have to learn to deal with them without resorting to food. If you continue to binge or simply overeat regularly as your method of coping, it stops you dealing with reality. You just get instant false relief and the stressful situation remains the same.

      Diet Stress

      Sometimes just the thought of going on a diet—‘I’m never going to eat biscuits or cakes ever again!’—can make you feel stressed. You think of your sugar-fix as a drug and, as with any drug, you fear withdrawal symptoms or that you will feel deprived. The stress this invokes just makes you want to eat more, but this sort of stress is just something you have manufactured so that you can use it as an excuse to stuff your face.

      When I ask my clients what makes them eat inappropriately, I get the following answers:

      1. Boredom. So does eating cake relieve boredom? Boredom is a state of mind. If you are doing something that fully occupies your mind, you’re not bored and don’t think about eating. In truth, eating will simply intensify your boredom because the sugar makes you feel lethargic, and instead of doing some energetic physical or mental activity, you lounge around feeding your perceived feeling.

      2. It relaxes you. Really? Yes, eating carbohydrate foods like biscuits can relieve anxiety and, as the food fills you up, you do experience a certain relief. But what about later when you try on your favourite trousers and they won’t do up? How relaxed are you then?

      3. Having a bad day. Everyone has good and bad days, even people who don’t binge. Let’s face it: some days are a total waste of make-up! Eating sugary food will just make a bad day worse. You must have dealt with bad days before without bingeing, so are you just using this as an excuse to eat?

      If you take the food out of the equation, you have to find another way of coping with whatever problem is driving you. Sometimes it is difficult to put your finger on exactly what is making you overeat. Maybe it started as a habit and just carried on that way. The trouble is that overeating is an auto-exacerbating disease—the more you do it, the worse it becomes. When you eat you feel guilty and disgusted with yourself, and when you feel that bad, you eat.

      The only way to cure this habit is to manage it. Your eating behaviour is deeply ingrained into your subconscious. If you have binged in stressful situations in the past, you will automatically do it again, unless you can get your eating under control and change the way you think and feel about yourself. Once you admit to yourself that you do have a problem, you have taken the first step towards dealing with it.

       You have coped before. You can cope again. Do not turn to food. Food will not change the situation. It will only make you feel worse.

      Don’t do Diets

      First, though, you have to realize that no-one and no ‘dietary method’ can do it for you. Although most diets don’t cause eating disorders, most eating disorders begin with a diet. Going on a diet can disrupt your physical sense of when and how much to eat, and can lead to bingeing. Sticking to a restricted eating plan can in itself promote that ‘Oh sod it’ response of bingeing on vast quantities of food when anything disrupts your strict sense of being ‘good’.

      The typical dieter’s mind-set is that if eating makes you fat then not eating must make you slim. But trying not to eat is not being in control because your body perceives this as starvation and will set up an enormous craving until you give in. This is simply your body’s way of making sure you stay alive.

      Even on ‘Eat-as-much-as-you-like’ weight-loss regimes like the high-protein Atkins diet, there are pitfalls, as described by writer Allison Pearson in the Evening Standard. She, ‘like half of London’, is ‘doing Atkins’ and says it goes something like this: ‘Atkins, Atkins, biscuit, oops (not very Atkins), Atkins, white wine, oh God, sorry. Atkins says eat cheese and butter, but how can you eat cheese and butter without crackers? I am allowed to eat double cream but no berries. Atkins, Atkins, croissant…’

      Those who are not on the Atkins diet seem to be on a ‘counting’ diet. I have had it up to here with counting! Everybody I meet is counting something: points, calories, sins, fat units, stones, pounds, kilos, dress sizes, days (‘I’ve been good for four days now," I haven’t had chocolate for two weeks’, ‘This week I’ve done three red days and four green days’. What are you going on about, woman?). Is this some sort of endless numbers game? Stop counting!

      The overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction my clients express with commercial diet plans comes from the realization that they simply do not work in the long term. It’s not that surprising, though. If you were a research animal, maybe a kindly scientist could deliver you precisely the amount and type of food that would achieve the weight-loss you want—and you could just lie around in a cosy cage while it happened. But you are a human being and your life is not lived in a laboratory.

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