The Zen Diet Revolution (13 page)

•   Keep clutter to a minimum – it is hard to relax if you are surrounded by junk.

•   Use pleasant scents to help you relax; some essential oils are perfect for helping you wind down – try lavender, neroli or sandalwood.

•   Allow some fresh air into your room; a stuffy room can make sleep uncomfortable.

Since melatonin production increases and adrenaline decreases as the body temperature drops at night, one way to hasten this is to have a warm bath before bed. As you cool down after your bath, you will begin to feel sleepy. Having a lower body temperature improves the chance of deeper sleep; after around 5 am, your temperature rises and adrenaline increases, which accordingly begins the process of waking.

It’s true, your granny was right: a warm drink can help you sleep. A cup of hot water or skimmed milk can really relax
you; the milk contains tryptophan, an amino acid that aids sleep and relaxation.

Some people insist that a ‘tipple’ sends them off to sleep – which is fine if it is just a tipple! Alcohol can certainly help you doze off, but too much and it disrupts your sleep by waking you later. If you want a drink, have it early evening.

Pretty obvious really – for those who like coffee, tea or cola and have trouble sleeping, the answer is simple: cut down or at least have the last cup before 4 pm. Anything after that time is liable to disrupt sleep.

Just because it is Christmas, Easter, your daughter’s birthday,
your
birthday, your annual two-week holiday or BBQ summer, don’t use this as an excuse to throw all your good work to the wind! You can still have some great food and drink, but why overindulge?

It’s easy to think ‘Oh well, I’ll make it my New Year’s resolution to lose all the weight I’ve put on’ or ‘The diet starts tomorrow!’, but statistics show that
less than 5 per cent
of those who make resolutions actually make them a permanent change! By the time three weeks have passed, unless you have cast-iron willpower, so have all the good intentions. So why doesn’t it work? Part of the problem is that we often make the resolutions weeks before the actual event of New Year’s Day – it is the classic ‘putting things off until tomorrow’. Everything seems so achievable when it is in the future, doesn’t it?

We have great visions of clearing out our fridge and cupboards and filling them with only healthy foods; we have a mental image of ourselves going to the gym every day and being able to squeeze into our new slinky clothes for the new season; but when it comes to the actual reality, what goes wrong? The problem is that inevitably we overestimate our goal and we make it unworkable – too much, too fast. We expect immediate results and then get disappointed and demoralized when things don’t materialize the way we imagined they would. This is where the Zen Diet is different. As you already have read,
kaizen
is the art of making ‘small but permanent changes’, and this applies to
everything
you do.

Make it easier on yourself: instead of making that list that says you
must
go to the gym every day; you
must
give up sugar; you
must
lose 2 stone; try rephrasing it and resizing it to make those changes a gradual but permanent habit. Do your best to go to the gym, but if you can’t for
any reason, try and fit in something active that you can do instead, such as walk home from work or vacuum the house for 15 minutes when you get in. It doesn’t have to be cast in stone, but as long as you make a small change in your behaviour, it will begin to make a small change in your body. If you want to cut out sugar or caffeine, don’t go cold turkey immediately as it can give you a ‘withdrawal’ headache or other niggles. Cut down instead: have two cups of coffee a day instead of four; have half a spoonful of sugar in your drink instead of a full one, then a quarter, and so on, until you have none. You’ll find that by making these smaller changes your body will be less likely to hassle you into craving the offending food or drink and you won’t notice the difference much anyway. Soon you’ll wonder how on earth you used to have sugar in your tea – yuck!

There is also a huge amount of social and media hype to follow New Year’s resolutions or ‘get bikini-ready’ for your holidays, but this is a sort of binge mentality in itself. The Zen Diet is a constant, and if you continue to make those small, permanent changes all year, then you are not buying into the idea that you can go crazy with a crash diet or two-week gym blitz and then slump back into old habits only to feel guilty afterwards and start the cycle again. The beauty of small, continual change is that very soon these things become such a part of your life that you wonder why on earth you ever considered going on a traditional diet, or why you suddenly cranked up your exercise for two weeks only to crash and burn. Imagine always being
‘bikini (or trunks) -ready’ and always knowing that you can control your eating because you want to and not because you have to.

So the thing to remember is to make small but permanent changes – little sacrifices that give BIG rewards!

I’m sure you’ve experienced it: you are at a dinner party or other social function and for whatever reason you decide that evening that you aren’t going to drink or have pudding, or whatever it is you want to avoid. Maybe you are sensitive to something and it always makes you feel a bit sick or upsets your tummy in other ways. You are quite happy to forgo the wine, the starter or the creamy dessert, but someone there doesn’t want you to! This person, or persons, will do everything they can to make you change your mind; they will try to make you feel guilty, stupid, socially inept or other unpleasant emotions.

I am really intolerant of two things – white wine and cream; they both make me feel incredibly nauseous and have an unfortunate effect after 20 minutes that I won’t go into great detail about; suffice to say that it makes me need to be in
very
close proximity to a toilet! To start with, I just thought it must be an unfortunate coincidence, but, after a few more rather embarrassing experiences of this, I realized it was not worth it. Yet I never imagined the illogical and totally negative responses I received from people. On one occasion I was offered a glass of champagne, which
I graciously refused – the initial response was hilarious, but soon bordered on insulting:

‘You don’t like champagne?’ my hostess asked.

‘No, thank you, I don’t.’

‘You don’t like champagne?’ she repeated.

‘Erm, no,’ I insisted, ‘I really don’t.’

She then proceeded to ask the same question while racheting up the incredulity along with the octave and volume of her voice. By this time I was beginning to feel a bit embarrassed as everyone was looking at me, and then she asked the billion-dollar question, ‘Why
on earth
don’t you
like
champagne???’ Now aside from the fact that I may actually just really dislike the taste (which incidentally I do), it could be a wide range of reasons – maybe I am on medication and can’t mix it with alcohol; maybe I am on a diet, maybe I am a recovering alcoholic or maybe … I JUST DON’T WANT ANY ALCOHOL!

She was so rude about it that in the end I was as graphic as I could be and told her why I didn’t like or want some darn champagne. The same old scenario happens when I ask for no cream in my food. Again, I have to justify why I am not indulging; if it was celery that I couldn’t have, absolutely no one would be hassling me to just try a little bit or looking at me as if I were mad. It is because cream hits the pleasure sensors for people and they can’t understand how or why I would not want any; in fact, one woman I met said that she’d rather put up with the consequences than never have cream again.

But why do we need to justify why we don’t want a drink or a cake or a starter? We don’t, but other people want us to because, and here’s the big deal, we make
them
feel bad if we aren’t doing what they do. Our society is obsessed with the idea that if you don’t drink, or at least don’t drink until you can’t stand up straight, that you are in their narrow-minded opinion some kind of ascetic dullard on a par with a monk or nun and about as much fun to be with.

Other people love to make us do what they want to do because it makes them feel better about their ‘vices’; we become one of them, and to a greater extent we enable them to indulge, and vice versa. These people are called ‘enablers’ or ‘feeders’ and could be anyone from your mother, sister, brother, best friend or partner; and often we are willing participants; doesn’t it always feel better when others are getting drunk together or pigging out on huge amounts of food? But they will use every approach, from the subtle such as ‘Oh, go on, it’s your birthday!’ to the worst kind of emotional blackmail which normally involves stating how much or not you love them and they love you. We’ve all seen the stereotype of the ‘Mama’ who wants to feed up her children: they use anything from body image – ‘You’re all skin and bones!’ – to mind games – ‘You don’t like your Mama’s food!’

As with most human interaction, these are indicative of the subtle games in play in social or familial life. The forcing of food, drink or other substances on another is about the lack of control or discipline in the ‘feeder’ and is something to be avoided. If someone makes you feel
bad for doing something that is beneficial to your health, mental and physical, then that is
their
problem and not yours, and is effectively a form of bullying. Don’t let anyone make you feel bad for doing the right thing, but you do need discipline.

The next section follows a similar theme, but is about how we use love to get us into bad habits.

Romantic dinners, ‘date nights’ and snuggling up in front of the TV with some nibbles? Quite often couples use food as a way of bonding, which is a lovely way to do it, but can become a way of overindulging on a regular basis. The emotions of love, pleasure and bonding with your mate are a potent fix of chemicals to lock you into the idea that food is the only way to do this. You certainly shouldn’t avoid the odd intimate dinner together as the love benefit far outweighs the consumption of food, but only if it is a special night. The danger of using food as a means to feel close to your partner means that your brain recalibrates to equate ‘pleasure’ with being fuelled by high-calorie consumption that equals weight gain. Try to use these occasions for other, more intimate pursuits, and if you decide to have a sexy night in, a big meal is not going to aid this!

Your digestive system is a crucial part of your body: not only does it do the most obvious job of digesting your food and eliminating waste, but it has a host of other hidden functions that can affect the way you gain or lose weight. Some people assume that the digestive system consists only of your stomach and bowels, but actually it begins at the mouth and ends … well, at your rear end! It is technically comprised of the mouth, oesophagus, stomach, small intestine, liver, gall bladder, pancreas, small intestine (including the duodenum, the jejunum and ileum), large intestine (made up of three parts, the caecum, colon and rectum), appendix and finally the anus. All these separate organs play an enormous part in dealing with our daily food intake, and it all begins in the mouth.

Even before you actually start eating, enzymes in your saliva kick off the digestive process; often the smell or anticipation of food makes the salivary glands start producing. As you chew your food, various enzymes start to break it down – amylase, which breaks down starch, and lipase which converts long-chain triglycerides into partial glycerides and fatty acids. Helped by your tongue, your food is then pushed down the oesophagus and into the stomach, where a cocktail of enzymes, acids and other processes get to work on the semisolid material.

After an hour or so, the churned-up contents are moved through to the small intestine, where the majority of
digestion and absorption takes place. Bile, pancreatic juices and intestinal enzymes then work their magic to break down fats and absorb nutrients from your food and pass it into the bloodstream. Toxins and other waste are removed, to be dealt with more specifically by the liver and kidneys. What is left is then passed into the large intestine, where water is reabsorbed into the body and the fibre and other waste product moved along the bowel until it is expelled.

To help our body absorb the maximum of nutrients for optimum utilization, we need to make sure that our digestive system is a smooth-running machine. Rather than make things complicated, a couple of simple changes can make all the difference:

•   Chew your food thoroughly – this allows the salivary enzymes to really begin to work.

•   Eat a varied diet full of soluble and insoluble fibre (if you suffer from irritable bowel syndrome, you may find the usual sources of fibre – wheat bran, beans, pulses, etc – don’t suit you, so it is probably best to include fruits, vegetables and oats in their place).

•   Drink plenty of fluids.

•   Sit down to eat – eating on the move can cause indigestion and wind.

•   Eat regularly – erratic eating can play havoc with digestion.

•   Take prebiotics and probiotics or eat plenty of live natural yogurt or kefir to help keep the natural bacteria in your gut happy.

•   Try and keep relaxed – the movement of the bowel can be upset by stress and tension.

•   Exercise regularly – even a brisk walk daily can help your digestion.

•   Drink lemon juice in warm water – it reputedly stimulates gastric juices and aids the liver in the production of bile which is crucial to help digest food.

Sounds far too ambitious in some respects, but considering some people are sitting down for up to 12 hours a day, then the subject deserves some space. An interesting experiment by James Levine, a British scientist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, showed that by keeping yourself moving throughout the day, you could reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease by up to 80 per cent. He believes that ‘sitting is sort of the new smoking’, and was so sure of this that he invented the ‘work fit’ which is a cross between a treadmill and a workstation. He encourages workers to stand whilst working or, better still, use the ‘work fit’ and walk while you work. His research and experiments have
shown that people ‘can burn up to 350 additional calories per day and perform better at work by replacing 2½ hours of sitting with standing each day’.
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