You Can Be Thin: The Ultimate Programme to End Dieting... Forever (5 page)

When I said to Richard, ‘You just don’t ever feel you are enough, do you?’ huge tears welled up in his eyes and he cried. He then said, ‘I never thought of it like that before but it’s true.’ I made Richard repeat to himself out loud every waking hour ‘I am enough’. He stuck some notes on his mirror, car dashboard, fridge and screensaver with the same message and reminded himself of this truth every day until it stuck.

In Richard’s case the drive to be more and the need to eat more stemmed from his core feeling of never being enough. This had made him become a very successful actor because he wanted and needed everyone to see him as something and someone, but he never believed it of himself and was very unhappy and overweight because of it.

I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to tell yourself you are enough. It is so simple but the results can be life changing. You must say ‘I am enough’ constantly. Say it out loud. Say it with feeling. Say it like you mean it and say it over and over again and do so for weeks until it sinks in and replaces the feeling that you are not enough, which may be driving you to overeat. This will make you feel enough, whereas overeating will not. Begin and end every day with the words:

‘
I am enough
’, and ‘
I am always enough
’, ‘
I am more than enough
’, ‘
I have enough
’.

Write it on your screensaver, your mirror, stick a note on your wallet and your fridge, write it on your hand if it helps and repeat it to yourself over and over and really get it because
it’s true
!

Saying ‘I am enough’ before eating is particularly helpful as it can really curb your appetite and remove the desire to overeat. Say it at the end of every meal as well to confirm that you don’t need more. You can say it in your head when you are with company but say it out loud whenever you can. If you find yourself munching away on bags of nuts or any portable food just put them down and remind yourself ‘I am enough, I don’t need these’.

Many people when they first fall in love totally lose their appetite. During the first flush of love when they are constantly told by their partner ‘I love you, you’re amazing, you’re the best’, they do feel enough, they believe it will be like this forever and their hunger diminishes because they are so nourished emotionally. When I met the love of my life I knew it was the real thing because we went away together for the weekend and both of us had no desire to eat at all. I knew women did that but I was amazed and secretly thrilled that he did the same.

At this point you might be wondering how such a method can really work, especially if when you repeat ‘I am enough’ to yourself you find your mind coming up with all kinds of objections such as ‘I am not really enough, I have cellulite and I can’t wear stylish clothes’. At this stage many people give up not realising that it is
you
who is coming up with the objections and
you
who has the power to stop them. To fix that for good, counter the objections like this: ‘Yes I have cellulite, and I am still enough,’ and ‘I will wear stylish clothes even sooner as I accept I am enough’.

Then ‘I am not enough or I wouldn’t be alone’ becomes ‘I am enough and I don’t have to be alone’. And ‘How come I don’t have a boyfriend if I am enough?’ becomes ‘My fears kept men away, but as I accept I am enough so will any man I get involved with. The more I like me the more they will like me.’ And ‘I am always hungry’ becomes ‘I feel full, nourished and satisfied by so many things other than food.’

It’s natural initially to come up with objections to the ‘enough’ affirmations – what you need to do is look at the objections and shoot them down with something better. If you are determined and keep on with the affirmations, eventually you will run out of objections and your mind will conclude, ‘You say this so often and with such conviction it must be true’ and with that your mind is agreeing with you and you are finally making real progress. Now you are becoming a physical expression of what you believe
I am enough
instead of becoming a physical expression of the opposite: I am not enough.

A few months after my session with Richard I was walking towards my gym and saw a man ahead of me on the street. As I got nearer he seemed to recognise me and started to undo his trousers and lift up his shirt. I wondered what on earth was going on and as I got closer I realised it was Richard. He said, ‘Look, my stomach is flat now, look how much weight I have lost, look at that’, and he patted his very flat stomach with absolute pride while walking right up to me so I could admire it too. He told me he had shed three stone. He was beaming. I told him I was thrilled for him but it might not be the best thing to start undoing his flies in the street as a woman approached him. We both laughed and his happiness was infectious.

This probably sounds ridiculous to you, but you can choose to be thin by choosing to think and behave differently around food, by choosing to believe different things about food and about your relationship with it.

Choosing to do the right thing is very good for humans as it makes us move towards our goals. Humans are all built as goal-seeking creatures. With goals we have purpose and direction, without them we drift and flounder. Having a goal, taking steps towards its accomplishment and seeing it through to its end makes us feel good about ourselves. Achievement makes us feel satisfied, more self confident and self motivated, more like winners. Having some self control is very liberating. In our Western lives, eating at random anything and everything is not always a freedom; it can imprison us. The unfair reality about being overweight is that overweight people show the world their weakness. They are no weaker than someone who has an addiction to shopping, pain killers, cigarettes, drugs, porn or internet sex, but other addictions can be hidden, disguised or laughed off. Confessing to work colleagues ‘I was so fed up I went crazy and overspent on my credit card or drank too much’ will illicit murmurs of sympathy, understanding or even humour. However, saying ‘I was so down I ate four cakes, two sandwiches and then loads of chocolate until I could hardly move’, or saying, ‘I ate until I felt sick’, can produce revulsion in others.

Because overweight people wear their weakness and we all see it, because they cannot hide it or disguise it, we judge them as weak, as gluttons, as having no control. It is very unfair and cruel but we are an outwardly visual (a lookist) society. We forgive celebrities for being drunk, we even seem to forgive them for using drugs, but we don’t seem to forgive them for being fat, and they know it. Paris Hilton’s career was enhanced when a film of her having sex was released but it would no doubt end if she became very overweight. Celebrity magazines make a point of highlighting celebrities who have gained weight and mocking them. The message they send is that being overweight is something to be ashamed of but other failings are more acceptable. We are scared of weak people because we are all scared of our own weaknesses and scared of being identified as being like them, so it follows that most people who are critical of fat people are scared of becoming that way themselves.

Fortunately, by making the right choices and using your power of choice you can succeed fully in beating being overweight, reaching your ideal weight and maintaining it. The minute you say ‘I can’t eat that’, ‘I mustn’t have it’, ‘I am not allowed it’, or ‘I should not eat it’ you are likely to want it even more as you are trying to deny a desire. Replacing the ‘I can’t’ with ‘I am choosing not to eat that’ makes an assertion to your mind that you have a choice and are making the right choice willingly. This means you are not using willpower to fight desire, which is usually unsuccessful, but you are using a stronger desire and you will succeed.

In the same way you can say ‘I am choosing to eat fruit’, or ‘I am choosing to leave food on my plate’ instead of saying ‘I can’t eat what I want so I’ll have to have this other boring stuff instead’ and ‘I can’t waste food’. Replacing the words ‘I can’ or ‘I can’t’ with ‘I choose to’ or ‘choose not to’, will give you control, power and lasting success. In doing this your brain moves immediately to what you are choosing to do and believes you want to do this so you feel empowered and in control. Studies of very successful people find that they don’t say ‘I can’ or ‘I can’t’. Successful people say ‘I choose to’ or ‘I choose not’ to instead. You can choose to say ‘no’ to filling up your body with junk food, pesticides and preservatives and ‘yes’ to slimness.

At the same time you are moving away from denial and resistance. When you constantly refer to what you can’t or must not or should not do you literally increase the desire you are trying to deny. Have you ever noticed that when you are on an aeroplane and they lock the toilets an hour before landing that the minute you know you can’t go you want to go and the more you try to deny it the harder it is?

When I worked on
Celebrity Fit Club USA
some of the celebrities were very pampered and unused to doing anything that was hard or painful. As they went on the treadmill or running machine for the first time they would, within minutes, start to say ‘I hate this’ or ‘it hurts, it’s painful’ or ‘I don’t like it, when can I stop?’ The minute we begin to speak in this way our brain begins to look for a way to stop the activity. But saying, ‘I am choosing to do this because I am choosing to be thinner so I might as well choose to enjoy it’, helps to stop any resistance. You don’t even need to lie. When I was a personal trainer in LA and teaching boot camp classes I would always get my class to say, ‘My body loves this, my body is benefiting from it, my body likes it’, and that was true – they may not have liked the fiftieth sit up but their bodies really did. You would not consider running a marathon while telling yourself after the first mile, ‘I hate this and I want to go home’. You would tell yourself, ‘I can do it, I will do it; I am doing it’ because that would keep you going. When squaddies or marines are training they don’t bitch and moan about the exercises, they sing and inspire each other to keep going. By singing and joking through endurance training they are sending a very clear signal to their brain that says ‘I have a choice here, I am choosing to do this and choosing to feel good about doing it’.

If you go to the gym and tell yourself you hate it, if you eat salads while telling yourself you hate them you will quickly go back to your old destructive behaviour. Tell yourself you love the gym, tell yourself that your body loves exercise (what a concept, actually telling yourself and your body the truth!). By repeating this over and over you will spend more time working out. Tell yourself your body loves fruit and even if it is not true it will become true. If you eat a big salad while saying, ‘Yuk this is tasteless rabbit food’ you will have no incentive to eat healthy food. Find healthy food that you like and tell yourself, ‘My body loves this, I can feel it doing me good’. Even if this isn’t an absolute fact it will become one very quickly. If your weakness is chocolate or fry ups tell yourself, ‘I am choosing not to fill up my body with fat. I am choosing not to clog up my arteries with grease.’

If a certain food made you ill or brought you out in a rash or made you itch horribly you could look at the food and no matter how good it looked or smelled you would choose not to eat it because it would not be worth feeling ill or coming out in a rash. It would not be hard because your mind would be quite clear about why you made your choice. You wouldn’t feel too deprived by its absence. You will be able to get your mind to feel like this about any food by the end of this book as long as you do the exercises.

While doing research for this book I came across some studies from Great Ormond Street Hospital about how epileptic children cannot metabolise flour. One of my clients has a daughter with epilepsy and she decided to try her on a flourless diet. The results were very impressive but her daughter Karen hated the exclusion diet. I was talking to the little girl and she said, ‘I can’t eat cakes and muffins like my friends,’ and I replied, ‘Well Karen you can if you want to. You can eat all those things but you don’t want to have fits and to have to wear a crash helmet in school so you have to choose what’s more important to you. What do you want more, to eat the cakes or to not wear the crash helmet and not have fits?’ I know that sounds like a harsh conversation to have with an eight-year-old but it made her feel better, it made her feel like she was choosing to get better rather than having her parents force a diet onto her without her agreement.

People who don’t smoke don’t say, when offered a cigarette, ‘I can’t’ or ‘I shouldn’t’ or ‘I mustn’t’, they say ‘I don’t smoke’ and it is so easy to refuse something you have chosen not to indulge in. If you don’t take drugs or drink spirits, if someone offers them to you, you say no easily because you don’t want them, there is nothing for you to deny or resist and in saying no to them you are simply stating a fact.

It’s really important for you to know that you can eat whatever you want to but are choosing not to. Very young children and people who are naturally thin do not think about food all day, they only think about food when they are ready to eat. They have no problem refusing food or leaving some food because they have a mindset that says ‘I can have this whenever I want it and it will always be available for me’ so they often don’t want it. It’s only when you get into the mindset of ‘this is not allowed, I can’t have it, it’s forbidden’ that you want it so much more.

Sometimes simple changes have the most powerful results. Actively choosing reminds your mind that you do have a choice. You can choose to be in control rather than being controlled by food. By choosing how to communicate with yourself, how to control your thoughts and how to say and think the right things about how you eat and how you exercise, you really can also choose to be thin. Once you know that you can choose to be thinner you can start to understand that every time you eat pizza and chips followed by cake you are choosing to remain overweight. If you choose to eat fruit instead of a dessert you are choosing to become slimmer. As you accept this fact you also accept that you have not failed at dieting and you are not destined to be overweight or ruled by food. You have been making the wrong choices and choosing to believe you just can’t help it, but from now on you can choose not to believe that any more. You have not failed at diets, diets have failed you.