Freedom from the Diet Trap: Slim for Life

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 over we then start to eat the same crap which made us miserable in the first place and in no time at all the battle starts all over again. And every time we diet we end up with a bigger battle on our hands. When you have been knocked down just once it’s easy to pick yourself up. If you keep getting knocked down you end up thinking ‘what’s the point in getting back up?’

The answer is to remove the very thing that is knocking you down – this is not simply the type of food itself, but more the conditioning, brainwashing, and misinformation that is the cause of why we put this crap in our mouths. All these factors, as well as the diets themselves, combine to create the belief that life would not be as enjoyable without junk and drug-like foods. That life would be ‘dull’ and ‘boring’ if we ate healthily and did exercise; that people who do this are boring, no-hope health freaks who have forgotten how to really live; that it is a ‘constant battle’ to be healthy and maintain your ideal weight. I used to believe this rubbish too.

Two of the main weight loss clubs in the world also perpetuate the belief that it’s a lifetime battle – so much so that you have to attend their meetings every week just to make sure you are still on track, that you haven’t ‘fallen off the food wagon’. Yes I am talking about Weight Watchers and Slimming World. Now, before I go on, I must say that I am fully aware that both of these organizations have helped many, many people throughout the world and if you get a good ‘leader’ at your meeting place, they can be extremely effective. However, I also know that however admirable their motives might be, they are often instilling in the person with a ‘food problem’ the notion that they will have to try and ‘control’ their weight forever. They usually imply that almost no matter what they do, for them, it will be a constant lifelong battle.

TOTALLY POINTLESS

Weight Watchers used to have a ‘points system’. You were awarded certain points per food and at the time they probably thought it was a revolutionary system. However, did you know that as far back as the late Thirties and early Forties there was a very similar points system used for restricting people’s intake of food? It was called the ‘Rationing’ club! Yes, when food was scarce in the war people were given ration books and were allocated what were literally called ‘Personal Points’ for each day. You were allocated a certain amount of points and each food had a ‘value’ – sound familiar? The big difference was, no one was in the rationing club voluntarily and no one was pleased to be losing weight either. The whole business of counting the ‘points’ value of certain foods and rationing yourself accordingly is nothing short of madness. I bet there was not one single person in the war who ever thought they would see the day when people would actually pay for the privilege of deliberately restricting the amount of food they were allowed by counting ‘points’ – especially in times when food is in abundance.

Most diet clubs give the impression that if you don’t do things like count points and attend weekly meetings you will binge and go back to your old ‘habits’. Overeaters Anonymous (yes there is such an organization) take the idea of the ‘constant battle’ even further by suggesting that the ‘problem’ is due to some kind of weakness inherent in you, rather than with the drug-like foods and drinks themselves. They suggest you are born with an ‘overeating gene’ and they have a twelve-step programme to help you ‘cope with’ your disease. Yes, that’s what they call your problem – a disease. The twelve-step programme is to help you cope with, not cure, your disease. For as far as they are concerned the disease is caused by something in your genes and there is no known cure. You were born with it and there is nothing you can do about it. How’s that for setting yourself up for failure? That to me is the same as seeing someone sinking in quicksand and saying that the reason they’re sinking is nothing to do with the quicksand but it’s because they were born with a quicksand sinking gene. Yes people will sink at different rates depending on many factors, but surely if you can get someone out of the quicksand, they are cured? (more on this later).

DO AS I SAY … NOT AS I DO

Due to our often desperate desire to lose weight, it appears we are willing to take advice from virtually anyone – regardless of whether or not they are ill and fat themselves. Many of the ‘leaders’ running the now over 12,000 slimming clubs in the UK are often ‘yo-yoing’ themselves. They are often still constantly having a battle with food, their health and their weight. One person who actually owns one of the biggest slimming clubs in the UK is reported to be overweight themselves – that’s the founder!

It is true that you don’t have to be a great football player to be an excellent football manager, but when it comes to this subject it is extremely important. For example, if you went to a ‘stop-smoking’ therapist to quit smoking and they had a cigarette hanging out of their mouth, would you listen to a word they have to say to you, even if the advice was correct? Clearly not. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not picking on these people (after all, I know what it’s like to be in the food and diet trap and it’s really not that funny to be constantly struggling with your health, weight, and food intake), I just think it’s very hard for anyone to get truly free from this whole diet and food struggle nightmare, when the people teaching haven’t done it themselves. Remember, it’s not about simply losing the weight, it’s about getting slim and free. That way the change is easy and is one for life.

The overall position of the ‘diet’ industry seems pretty clear then. When it comes to weight loss and changing eating habits we have only two choices:

A) Use willpower, discipline, and exercise control forever, or

B) Run out of the will to control, say ‘sod it’, binge – then after the binge go back to trying to control again for a while.

What a life!

It seems to be a no-win situation – miserable when you are allowed to eat the crap and miserable and deprived when you’re not. However, despite what we have all been conditioned to believe, there actually is an alternative and, as I have said, you are reading it. The best part of all is that when you see it clearly, when you see just how ridiculously easy it can be and indeed how obvious once pointed out, it will be one of the biggest ‘light-bulb’ moments you will ever experience

The diet mentality doesn’t just apply to people who are overweight either. There are many slim people who want to change their diet because they want to feel fitter and healthier and have more energy. But they too have the same problem. They want to be healthy, but they also want to eat crap. So they have to force themselves to do something which they do not want to do in order to reach their goal. Many overweight people think all slim people are happy campers, but often they are having the same mental battle with food as they are. They too believe life would be nowhere near as enjoyable if they ate healthily.

One of the main reasons for this false belief is often the diet itself. Diets often encourage us to believe that life is a nightmare and boring without our ‘usual’ foods and drinks and wonderful with them. But I feel a touch of amnesia sets in. Obviously when we are not on a diet we are happier than when we are on one; but we are still not happy. That is why we want to change isn’t it? It doesn’t seem to occur to us that even when we are not on a diet we are still more miserable than someone who doesn’t have to worry about their intake of food, their health or their weight. It wasn’t only when I was consciously on a diet that I had this ‘I want to eat, but I wish I didn’t’ mental tug-of-war. The truth is I always had it to some degree. I was constantly trying to control my intake of certain foods. On a diet I just had to try and control it even more than usual – which simply made me much more aware of it.

It is having to exercise control over your intake of food on a daily basis that is the problem.

You shouldn’t have to control what you eat, you should be free to eat whatever you want, whenever you want, without having to worry about your health or weight. We have all been doing it for so long we have come to accept it as the norm – but it’s not normal to have to exercise enormous amounts of control on a regular basis. For example, non-smokers can smoke whenever they want – they just don’t want to so clearly there is no problem. It is only smokers that have the problem of trying to control their intake that have a smoking problem, non-smokers have their freedom – the freedom of not having to smoke. Even those smokers who have stopped but still crave them all the time aren’t truly free either; they are still exercising control not to smoke. It is only those people who have smoked, stopped and don’t miss them who are truly free.

I can overeat whenever I want to, but I just don’t want to anymore. I finally have true freedom around all food. Wild animals have this freedom too. In fact we are the only creatures on the planet that do this control and dieting stuff. Why? Because we have television, radio, and so-called ‘experts’ telling us what we should eat and often when we should eat. Unlike us, wild animals rely purely on their natural instincts. We also instinctively know exactly what to eat and when to eat. Our problem is that we have an intellectual brain that can easily be ‘washed’ by people with all kinds of vested interests, either status or financial. However, if we were left to our own intuitive devices we would all be eating healthily and no one would have a ‘food problem’.

DIETS TREAT THE SYMPTOM – NOT THE CAUSE

Diets never solve a food problem – they ultimately make it worse for most people. The second you go on a diet you feel deprived. You are usually no longer ‘allowed’ to eat the foods you love or you have to restrict yourself from eating a certain amount of them. The situation is that even if you do manage to ‘hang on in there’ and reach your weight ‘target’ or ‘goal’, what happens? You ‘reward’ yourself … with what? Yes, the very ‘foods’ you have been longing for in the quantity you have been dreaming of. You have been incredibly ‘good’ and you feel you deserve a ‘treat’ for all the effort you have put in for all this time. The problem is the ‘feel good’ time is pretty short lived. In no time at all you soon realize that you are once again packing on the pounds. Once this dawns on you, the no-win situation rears its head again. You either let the food floodgates open, or you try to exercise immense control over your intake once again. The point I am making is simple – you are never truly free. All you have in fact ‘treated’ yourself to are feelings of guilt, self-loathing, lethargy, a body you hate, and a lifetime desperately trying to control your intake of certain foods. And how do we try and solve that problem – another diet!

We need to start understanding that excess fat is a physical ‘symptom’ of a psychological problem. The real issue is mental – not physical. Diets aren’t designed to change the way you think, they are simply designed to change either what you eat or how much you eat, not how you see certain foods. Diets are designed to treat the excess fat (the physical symptom) but they do nothing to address the real issue, which can solve the problem for life. Because diets only treat the symptom, inevitably the situation ultimately gets worse.

Hit The Roof

For example, if I had a leaky roof and rain was falling onto my ceiling tiles, pretty soon it would show. If I simply replaced the ceiling tile, I can feel good for a while, but soon the tile would need replacing again. However, because the cause of the problem hadn’t been addressed (the hole in the roof), the situation would naturally get worse. The hole in the roof would get bigger and more tiles would be affected. I could keep replacing more and more tiles and on the surface all would look good, but in reality far from solving the problem I am always making it worse. All I clearly need to do is fix the roof and I would never have to replace a tile again. Exactly the same principle applies here. Remove the brainwashing, conditioning, and false beliefs about certain foods and drinks while exposing BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK for what it is, and you get to the root cause of the problem. Once you remove the mental cravings, you have removed the need for any willpower, thus removing the cause. Once the cause has gone, the symptoms (excess fat) soon start to disappear and so to does the need ever to go on a diet again.

DIETS CAN MAKE YOU FAT!

Another major problem with restrictive diets is that they often aren’t nutritionally thought through and many times you literally starve your body. If you deliberately stop yourself eating when your body is genuinely screaming for food, you are fighting against the most powerful instinct in the world: survival. No wonder people find it hard. When you do this, your body’s metabolism slows down; yes down. If it keeps going at the rate it is with such a small amount of food coming in, you will die very quickly. This is why the minute the body senses that there is a severe lack of food coming in, it assumes you have no choice in this decision (after all no other creature on earth would restrict in times of abundance). And rather than let you die, your metabolism slows down considerably to conserve energy. At the same time, the body stores even more of what you do eat as fat as it senses lean times ahead. Because the fat is needed, the body even begins to burn muscle tissue, which is a bit of a bugger as muscle helps to burn excess fat – so a double whammy. In fact, virtually every time you go on a restrictive diet you lose muscle tissue and gain more fat cells. Once you gain fat cells they never die, they simply shrink. This is why it is so much easier for people who have been overweight in the past to gain weight again … rapidly.

MORE BIG FAT PROBLEMS

When the ‘diet’ is over (which normally happens either when you say ‘sod the diet’ or you somehow manage to reach your physical goal) your metabolism is still working much slower than before you started the diet. It will increase again, but gradually – which is why it is important to build food up again slowly and not overeat. However, as most people are chomping at the bit for the diet to end so they can ‘live normally’ again, any chances of a gradual increase in food is pretty slim. In fact, any ‘end of diet’ period is usually followed by a massive meal – either to celebrate the achievement, or to illustrate the fact that ‘life is too short so sod you all …’ etc.

Having acquired a slower metabolism, you now go back to eating exactly the same amount of food you ate before you started the diet. What happens? You put on more weight than before you started the diet – and, it seems, a lot faster than it took to shift it. This is not simply your perception either. A study carried out on a group of rats in 1986 showed that by the time they did their second diet, the weight loss was half of what it was the first time and, wait for it, the weight was put back on THREE TIMES AS FAST. This is happening to millions of people around the world as we speak. The problem is it’s a cause and effect chain reaction, for when you see the weight rapidly piling on again you once again think that it’s time to do something about it – what? Yep the latest DIET.

Now I understand why dieting, as well as the addiction to certain foods and drinks, makes people fat. They often contribute to the problem people are trying to solve. It is only in fairly recent times that people have reached over 500 lb (227 kg) in weight. One family in the US – The Woods family – weighed in at 1 tonne – yes ONE TONNE. And if you think we are talking about a large family (so to speak), we are talking a combined weight of just four women. One girl, Terriny Woods, was 41 stone 12lb(over 260 kg) and she was just 15 years old at the time. Yes 15 years old.

If you keep going on a diet and then binge directly afterwards, your body will produce more fat cells, your metabolism will not know what the hell it’s doing and your system will store more fat in case you starve it again. This is the cycle people repeat again and again. Physically and mentally diets can be a nightmare. You never break free from the constant mental battle of trying to control your intake of certain foods or certain amounts of food. Nor do you break free from the many physical problems they create – all that happens is you become totally obsessed with food. You’re not happy when you feel you can’t eat and you feel like crap after you do it. It’s time to stop this madness. It’s time to fix the leaking roof once and for all and stop replacing the tiles.

The Medical ‘Solution’

There are of course many people who have been through the dieting mill and have realized this is not a long-term solution. At the same time their excess weight, as well as ailments related to their obesity, often cause people to take much more drastic measures than simply trying the latest diet. The increase in weight loss surgery and weight loss pills has exploded over recent years. Big people are big business and there are many people making billions of pounds by preying on their insecurities and desperation – all in the name of ‘medical help’ and ‘genuine care’ you understand. While I am all for some short-term medical intervention in many areas of ‘disease’, I see no place whatsoever for weight loss pills. And when I say no place, I mean no place at all. Even weight loss surgery, in some very desperate cases, can at times be the only solution to save a life and I can see at least a debate for it. However, these all new all-dancing and singing ‘weight loss solution’ pills are never the answer. Weight loss drugs are no longer aimed simply at the morbidly obese and given by GPs only as a last resort to those who really do feel they have tried everything else and would possibly die otherwise. Unfortunately things have got so far out of hand with the weight loss drug industry (as indeed I believe it has with the whole drug industry no matter what the disease) that I think it’s now safe to say we are without any question on the verge of …

4
PHARMAGEDDON

Never in history have we seen so many drugs being handed out so willy-nilly to so many people for so many different things. Every pill sold, means more money for BIG PHARMACEUTICALS. And one particular ‘disease’ is now more of the holy grail for BIG DRUGS than almost any other – obesity. With millions of people getting bigger by the day while craving the land of the thin more and more, the desperate need for a ‘quick fix’ is now at an all time high. And what better quick fix than a simple pill?

In 1998, the NHS (National Health Service) gave out 20,000 anti-obesity pills. Just seven years later in 2005 that figure rose to 880,000 pills, the figure will almost certainly be over 1 million pills today. This annual cost to the NHS was £690,000 in the late 1990s and is now nearly £40 million. Yes FORTY MILLION POUNDS of your tax money going directly into the hands of the pharmaceutical companies, and the figure is growing daily. The government justify the ever increasing costs by claiming, ‘… the benefits to the economy outweigh the cost to the NHS’, they go on to explain, ‘… a lot of illness can be avoided by using these pills to aid weight loss’. Exactly what illnesses have ever been ‘cured’ as a direct result of the introduction of so many weight loss drugs I don’t exactly know, but no doubt there will be some ‘scientific data’ to back up such claims and if there aren’t it wouldn’t be too difficult to get some. I also haven’t seen a reduction of people gaining weight either, which given all you have to do is take a pill, is surprising. If these weight loss drugs are, as they often purport to be, ‘the easy solution to fat and obesity’, and given we are in an obesity epidemic, why don’t they simply give them to everyone so we can all live a ‘fat free’ and disease free life?

Well the simple answer is they aren’t exactly the ‘magic bullet’ some purport them to be. What is extraordinary is that each anti-fat drug comes with a little side note explaining something along the lines of ‘can help to lose weight in conjunction with a diet and exercise programme’. Now, stop me if I appear nuts here, but doesn’t that defeat the whole argument of these fat drugs? Aren’t they apparently there as a last resort for those people who have tried everything else and now have no choice but to seek medical help? Aren’t they surely designed for people who have failed on the diet and exercise front? People who, for whatever reason, cannot tap into the right mind set to change their diet and exercise more? If that is the case and they are only meant to be given to such desperate people (after all, drugs should always be the last resort) and if these drugs are only effective with a change in diet and an increase in exercise, how can they possibly work for the group for which they are intended? Do these pills somehow miraculously inspire people to change their diet and get on the treadmill? If so, they really are miracle drugs. I get images of perhaps a three-dimensional tablet acting like a motivational cheerleader/speaker inspiring people to eat well and exercise. Seriously, think about it. If these drugs don’t help people lose excess weight by simply taking them, regardless of any change in diet or physical movement, then what’s the point of them? Even if they did enable an odd few to lose a little weight without changing anything else, are the potential risks of taking any drug and changing the fine chemical balance of the body worth it and what on earth do these pills do to get to the cause of the problem?