The Zen Diet Revolution (2 page)

The Zen Diet is no ordinary diet because it isn’t
just
a diet – it is a way of life. Based on the Japanese principle of
kaizen
, which means ‘improvement’ or ‘small, permanent change for the better’, it ensures you will never be ‘on’ another diet ever again! The problem with all fad diets like the ‘Cabbage Soup Diet’, ‘Atkins’, ‘Maple Syrup Diet’, etc., is that they don’t encourage a permanent change. In fact, they introduce a change that would be extremely unhealthy to maintain permanently!

Anyone who has tried one of these approaches will know that this is not a positive change and that these diets bring nothing but low blood sugar, bad moods, hunger cravings, and disruption to life patterns and digestive
function. All the focus is on the initial loss of weight, and then the dieter goes back to their normal eating habits without solving the issues that caused the problems in the first place.

With the Zen Diet it is different: the focus is on the small but permanent changes that you will continue for life. Each change is a positive evolution in behaviour, which brings vitality, harmony and wellbeing. No big dramatic change, just small positive ones. Imagine not being a slave to faddy or ‘crash’ diets; no more broken resolutions, New Year or otherwise; always being ‘bikini-ready’ or fit for anything without having to go to extremes. We have designed and lived the Zen Diet; it is not a diet of deprivation or complete denial unless you want it to be, and even those terms can be viewed the wrong way. We need to calibrate our minds so that ‘deprivation’ or ‘denial’ become positive things; if we no longer crave what is basically not good for us physically or mentally, then deprivation and denial are no longer an issue – we are not even experiencing them. Social conditioning and status anxiety are conditions that we feel the Zen Diet can alleviate; by following the techniques and advice in the book that work for you, you will be a much more confident and strong person and will no longer even buy into the media hype and scare-mongering that is pumped at us daily. You will just shrug off the ‘celebrity’ ideals of the ‘perfect’ body or immediately unattainable lifestyle, and even the bad attitudes to ageing we see in the papers and on TV, and embrace the new you!

The Zen Diet is the first diet to offer a long-term solution based on
kaizen
and other harmonious spiritual principles from Japan.

The term
kaizen
originated in Japan and began as a philosophy and practice that focused entirely on continuous improvement in the process of manufacturing, engineering, business and management. This became so successful in companies such as Toyota that it eventually caught on and became a sensational buzzword in the international business world.

However,
kaizen
can be applied not only in business but to an individual’s everyday life – it merely involves small but permanent changes for the better.

Japanese characters Kai and Zen

But what does the word
kaizen
mean exactly?
Kaizen
is a Japanese term meaning ‘small change’. The idea of
kaizen
is to make small but continuous improvements and adjustments, which is extremely powerful, because small changes come without the risks and disadvantages of a radical
overhaul of what you’re doing. Radical, big changes have great disadvantages. They’re risky, they’re hard, they’re often unsustainable, and they come with a natural resistance from other people involved. Small change doesn’t have any fear association, and there’s no risk. If something goes wrong, you can simply reverse the change, and with a small change you can’t fail. There’s no shock value, it’s extremely motivating when you start to see the improvements, and it encourages a view of the big picture.

To make small changes, you need to learn about what’s going on.
Kaizen
is a philosophy of effortless change, and the tiny changes which are sustainable, and which solve problems, tend to have a great effect, far bigger than the effort put in. But where did
kaizen
come from?

Despite its name,
kaizen
is, in fact, an American invention. In 1940, wartime manufacturers in America were having problems meeting the demand, and the US Government offered a course called ‘Training within Industries’. One section of this course was called ‘Continuous Improvement’, and this small section is the seed of what we now call
kaizen
.

The Americans found that this small and ongoing subtle adjustment policy was the most powerful tool in their arsenal. This was taken on by the Japanese after the war with great passion, and it perfectly suited their cultural temperaments. It also suited the position they were in. They had no resources to spare or spend on big change.

Why does
kaizen
work so efficiently? Small changes don’t cause a fear response in the mind. They don’t cause
a fear response, both in the person forming them or in a group: for example, if we have an aim and we divide it into small steps, we find those steps far easier to do than trying to make one big jump. As it’s easy, we can let the change become permanent before we move on to something else.

Kaizen
is an easy way to change your behaviour because you just need to make something small – so small that it almost seems silly that it becomes something permanent.
Kaizen
changes don’t get in the way of your lifestyle, and they don’t cause problems in a big organization. It’s about using the power of habit to advantage, rather than trying to use willpower. It makes a small but permanent change.

This book is all about using the
kaizen
approach as a tool to lose weight and to gain health. The
kaizen
diet is about permanently solving the problem. Your small changes add up until you have a new lifestyle, a new diet, a new way of life – and, most importantly, a new weight.

Other diets fail by thinking in the short term. They focus on big changes which are simply unsustainable and often unhealthy. Nobody wants to live on protein alone or eat cabbage soup three times a day for the rest of their life.

The
kaizen
diet is about changes you can keep up forever. It doesn’t involve anything unhealthy or unbalanced. And indeed, I don’t believe that any diet should involve something unhealthy and unbalanced, even as a temporary measure.

Every dietary adjustment should be healthy. It should be a daily joy to make a change to your diet and make an improvement to your health. Your dietary changes should
be something that you can look forward to and something you can relish; but most of all, something that you can feel positive about.

And as you incorporate each change into your life, imagine how much fun it will be to see the improvements to your life, your health and your energy levels. With the
kaizen
diet, you can look at your life as a whole and enjoy all the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. It’s about taking the long-term view and enjoying the journey rather than rushing.

No one would choose a big fancy solution that was only temporary. If, when buying a television set, you were offered a giant flat-screen TV that only lasted four days, you wouldn’t be interested. So why do people keep choosing diets that are only quick fixes?

For so many people weight-loss goals are chaotic. As soon as they feel they have made some progress, something happens to disrupt the routine, the old habits creep in, and it’s back to square one. It can be very disheartening when everything you build keeps getting knocked down. Wouldn’t it be great to learn how to make permanent progress? Learn the art of making new habits – permanent positive changes! The Zen Diet will teach you the art of change and the secrets of effortless attitude adjustment.

How motivating would it be to wake up slimmer every day? The Zen Diet combines ancient spiritual wisdom with the most cutting-edge research into fat loss. It is perhaps the first diet to work in harmony with how your body burns fat, and makes subtle adjustments to how you eat, so that the nutrients feed your body while starving your fat stores. It includes dietary adjustments, supplementation and advice that are clinically proven amongst other things to actually decrease the number of fat cells in your body – all without any calorie counting.

Every change in the Zen Diet is synergistic; the changes work together to bring about a change to your physical health, lifestyle and mental outlook, and bring a positive change to your view of yourself and evolution in your interaction with food. By starving the fat and feeding your health, the changes to your weight and eating patterns will be continual
and
healthy.

The difference is that the Zen Diet is not
just
another diet: it is a way of living. The small but permanent changes mean that the ‘yo-yo effect’ of other diets does not occur – making the changes YOU need means it is tailor-made to
your body and your routine in a way that other diets cannot offer. Weight loss will be steady and permanent, and your health will get better and better; it is a perfect way to look after your body at any age and
forever
! By creating positive habits that will stay with you for life, you will not only achieve the body you desire, but also keep yourself in great shape mentally and physically. But we are not just focusing on random changes, we are focusing on the changes that have been proven to bring about the most dramatic change for the least amount of effort.

This is a book you will want to read again and again. Why? Because each time you read it, you will be inspired to make some more improvements to your diet.

Here’s how it works – as you read, choose a
small
improvement to your diet. It has to be such a
small
change that it seems simple and almost silly to make. If it is not so small that it’s laughable, you’re thinking too big.

For example: you could choose to cut out all caloric drinks. Maybe that’s not small enough. Maybe you could choose to cut out one fizzy drink a day. This may seem like an extremely small change, but if you stop downing a can of fizzy drink every day, it would make a significant change to your life. An average can of cola has 140 calories. Now imagine that you drank one of those every day for a year. That’s 365 times 140. That’s 51,100 calories a year.

That may sound like a huge number, but wait …

If you were to cut out a fizzy drink every day for a year, you would have saved 51,100 calories. Now, there are 3,270 calories in a pound of body fat. That means, you would lose almost 15lbs of body fat just by cutting out one fizzy drink a day. Now that’s powerful! That’s spectacular! Think of that as a challenge. You cut out one fizzy drink and you hold on to that change until it becomes automatic. By doing so, you could lose 15lbs of body fat; and look at that as a result from that very small change.

What other diet could offer that? Sounds too easy! Doesn’t it just?! But it works dramatically and permanently. In fact, using this method you can continue to make miracles in your own body and in your life by making small adjustments. It’s just so simple.

To summarize, you choose a change that’s so easy that anyone could do it. You repeat it until it becomes a habit, and then you enjoy the results.

In the chapters that follow, I will take you through some of the most powerful changes you can make with ease. But of course, you’ll also be able to find your own ones.

It’s simple – read all the advice and take what is relevant to your life and goals. There are four chapters; each has several parts that give you information and advice on how to deal with all the things you need to do to make
small but permanent changes
to your daily life, which will help you
achieve not only a healthy weight loss but a stable weight for life!

If you need a concrete schedule, you can follow the basic weekly plans and use the recipes at the back of the book or even make your own and find which things work for you. Each weekly plan offers ways of changing your dietary and lifestyle habits already discussed in the easyto-follow sections of each chapter. Not all of the changes will resonate with you, so apply the ones that personally work for you – remember, these are meant to be permanent changes and not for just one week!

There is also space for you to track your progress in a journal at the end of the book – feel free to photocopy the pages to make a bigger journal. You may also like to have a look at some of the suggested schedules of change that I have put in Appendix One at the back. These include an ideal course of suitable adjustments and different courses of change for people with different tastes and life situations, including those who are unable to exercise.

O
NE ASPECT THAT IS OFTEN
completely overlooked with conventional diets is the need to change not only your attitude but also what can amount to a lifetime of bad eating and thinking habits. From the time we are children, we are given ideals and habits connected with food that are handed down to us by those around us. Meals might have been a big thing in your family, either from a positive point of view whereby you had relaxed and happy family meal times, to a more negative experience such as being given irregular or poor meals, or where your parents gave you a hard time over food and your eating patterns. All this can have a detrimental effect on eating habits in later life. If we have a positive attitude to food and our health, then we are more likely to be willing and able to make changes; but
if we have been brought up eating whatever we pleased, whenever we wanted, it may reflect in our adult lives.

This chapter includes the key mental changes needed to lose weight, build good habits and develop health in your mind and body. We will also show you powerful mental tactics to improve your relationship with food. With these tools you can create a fit and healthy body; with the power of the mind you can effectively think yourself slim.

This, in my opinion, is the most powerful discovery I have ever made in my journey of fat loss. As I mentioned in the Preface, I love food. After a hard day’s work I used to love nothing more than a curry or a Chinese takeaway. I lusted after junk food and things strong in flavour and high in calories. If I sat in a restaurant with others, every time I chose the healthy option, I had a terrible feeling of resentment when I was eating salmon salad, while someone had a giant burger and chips. As soon as I lost my belly fat, I used to celebrate by going back to my old habits and putting the weight back on. Basically, I was failing to make any change permanent because I was not enjoying the change. This is very important because it emphasizes the underlying cause of our problems when changing our habits. It’s the reward that makes us stick to our change. Indeed, this is
not just emotional as our brain is wired to form habits based on reward.

But why didn’t the healthy food fulfil me?

I asked my father this very same question and was astounded at the response. He had undertaken studies which showed that obese people when asked to eat low-calorie, high-roughage food rejected them as unpalatable, saying, ‘I can’t eat rabbit food’ or ‘I’m not eating that’. He discovered that the enjoyment from high-fat, high-carbohydrate food was as much a chemical effect as it was an emotional one. The pleasure chemicals released in the brain and the ‘high’ caused by the giant leap in blood sugar had become their food aim. The overweight person had become addicted to food: no longer eating for health but for the fun of eating and the high.

That was exactly the world I was living in. No wonder I was getting increasingly overweight. The only time I felt satisfied was when I had eaten enough to be laying down some blubber round my middle!

Not a nice situation. The trouble was that it was so hardwired; without it, I didn’t really enjoy what I was eating and found it hard to stick to things. I started exercising more, just so I could eat what I saw as a decent meal.

I needed to replace the pleasure I got from the chemical high in my food with something else. I tried imagining my perfect body whenever I ate my healthy alternative, but it didn’t help. Then I stumbled over the answer.

I noticed I
did
get a kick when I ate something I knew had proven health benefits. In the morning, when I had a
mixture of berries with my oatmeal, I really enjoyed the knowledge that the berries contain anti-ageing antioxidants and that the oats were proven to have a calming and regenerative effect on the nervous system.

At that moment, I knew the path I was about to embark on was irreversible and that it would completely change my food values. I knew that if I was going to move my focus from the pleasure I got from my food to the health value, I was making a simple replacement. I was going to become a health freak rather than a food freak. Since then I have never regretted a single moment. Nowadays, I focus on making sure that every meal I have has an amazingly healthy effect on my body. I get great pleasure making sure that I only put the loveliest healthy food into my body with knowledge of the health benefits and even healing effects of everything I consume. Yes, people can accuse me of being over the top and of being self-focused and smug, but it is far less indulgent than eating 4,000 calories of junk food a day. I also happen to believe it allows you to have a far better effect on the world around you.

Once you make this change, you will be able to see an important switch in your body response. What I didn’t know was that it had taken many years of practice for me to train my body to be able to eat such high-calorie and fatladen food. After a few months of living on a correct diet and enjoying correct food, you will find your body starts to reject anything unhealthy. A few weeks ago I tried to have some fish and chips as a treat, but I found the amount of oil totally overwhelming and felt ill. I just don’t think it
is natural to eat something like that. Nowhere in nature would a food with this level of calories occur!

So if you only take one change from the first reading of this book, it is this: start to make an effort to enjoy the health benefits of the foods you eat and/or the supplements you take. This habit has so many benefits on so many levels. For example, studies have proven that people who know, or rather
think
they know, the benefits of the food they are eating do indeed demonstrate a placebo effect. So
thinking
about how healthy your food is really helps you to be healthy! But here is the most powerful point of all. One Australian study showed that if people who were eating a meal focused on the idea that they would be losing weight, then their body stored less fat than those who just ate a healthy diet. This principle also works for exercise. So by focusing on the healthy value of food, you really benefit; you also start to get as much enjoyment from the food as you used to from its calorific value. Then you will be able to make the habit stick as your brain learns that it’s a good thing to do.

So here is your mission. You want to remember this phrase: ‘Make food your medicine and medicine your food.’ This viewpoint of Hippocrates really sums up your mission. You want to start to enjoy your meals for the health value, not for the taste or the treat factor. It seems like a hard mission, but you will be surprised how quickly you make the change if you start small. So your first mission is this:

Make sure every day you eat something just for its health value. Make a conscious effort to enjoy it and imagine what good it is doing to your body.

Every time you do this, you are changing the way your mind works. It is about reprogramming your mind with repetition.

It always seems as if it is easier to build bad habits than good ones, but it is about knowing your goals and making small but permanent changes to achieve them. Throughout the book, I show you how to make good habits and break bad ones using techniques that have been proven to work in the field of psychology.

Habit formation is an interesting subject, and a lot has been achieved in the field of behaviourism to find out why we find it hard to change some habits and others seem easy to drop. Most people have heard of Pavlov’s dogs, which were fed whenever a bell rang. After a few months they salivated when the bell rang even if there was no food present.

The 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson (1709–84) dramatically lamented that ‘the chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken’; of course, it is possible to break bad habits and form new positive ones, but
how hard
is it in reality?

When I was younger, I heard a saying that ‘it takes 7 days to make a habit and 21 days to break it’, but is this really true? There was a bestselling pop-psychology book written in the 1960s called
Psycho-Cybernetics
by a plastic surgeon called Maxwell Maltz. According to Maltz, amputees he observed took an average of 21 days to adjust to their loss of limb(s), and so he wrongly concluded that it must be the same for all habit formation or big changes to a person’s life.

Since then, with various forms of research it has been shown to take anything from 21–245 days to break or form habits, so I think we can conclude that it depends on a huge variety of factors such as the type of habit to be formed or broken and the intensity of the habit already formed. A study by a team at University College London led by Phillippa Lally, a psychologist and expert in habit formation (particularly related to dieting and weight loss), showed that it not only depended on the individual but on the habit they were trying to create, and the range of time to ensure the behaviour became automatic. They also concluded that missing a day made no difference to the formation of the eventual habit; this enduring myth that a day missed means that you either have to start again or that it will be harder to continue, has effectively been debunked.
¹

Another person who really knows about habit change is psychologist Ian Newby-Clark, who emphasizes that although change is difficult (and rightly so in some respects as a habit is often there for a reason, irrespective of good or bad), it is repetition and persistence that really works when
attempting to create or break a habit. He writes an inspiring blog on the formation of positive traits and some of the pitfalls that can be experienced on the way at:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/creatures-habit

So even if changes in habits can be difficult, they are not in any way impossible, and what we do know is that there are some well-known, tried-and-tested principles that we can apply to make sure that the changes you make in your Zen Diet journey are easy and enjoyable. We’re not talking about making huge sweeping changes, as that is a recipe for disaster and motivational meltdown; we mean having just one extra piece of fruit a day – every day – or swapping one frappuccino a week for a green tea; you won’t even notice the changes, but they become bigger by themselves. Soon you will be easily having your 5-a-day
and
saving the money spent on your super-chocca-mochaccino to do or buy something much more fun instead (
see
page 64).

What can we do to make those habits easier to make or break? Well, there are a few simple rules:

•   
Work on one habit at a time
– this book aims for you to make lots of small but permanent changes, but they are, on the whole, deliberately ones that don’t require broad sweeping changes. We don’t expect you to do a total makeover in a week, but each weekly plan does require you to make very subtle, simple changes. However, there are a few that require a real change of habit, and those will be the ones you have to do one at a time.

•   
Choose your habit
– there is a saying that ‘he who chases two hares, catches none’.

•   
Repetition
– this is the key to all habit formation – just keep on doing what you are doing and you will soon see results. A habit is effectively something we do again and again, whether it is a good or bad habit – that is the method of formation. People often groan and say that bad habits are harder to break, and they certainly can be because we have often spent years, decades even, building the darn things. Conversely, a new and good habit to replace the old one is merely a product of that same process – so repeat after me, ‘Repetition is the mother of all learning!’

•   
Persistence
– Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933), the 30th President of the United States, once said that ‘persistence and determination alone are omnipotent’, and he was right. Only through sticking to something will you succeed; sure, you may have the odd slip-up on the way but if you get up, dust yourself down and carry on, then you will get where you want to go. Don’t feel bad about the odd hiccup in your routine; it’s not the mistake or lapse that is important, it’s how you deal with it. You can either spend days beating yourself up for ‘falling off the wagon’ or you can shrug and say ok, I didn’t do as well yesterday, but today I can do better.

•   
Share it
– tell your friends, tell your family – heck, write it in big bold letters on your wall. The process of telling people what it is you are trying to achieve is a potent
motivator – they can be your allies, your cheerleaders and support crew, but also be aware that a change in habits can be met with resistance. After all, your friends and family know you very well, a few of them definitely grew up with you! So if you suddenly announce that you are going to lose weight, there are a few who may be somewhat scathing or cynical about your new changes; they will probably mutter that they’ve seen it all before, etc. If this is the case, use this as a spur to prove them wrong – you can do it, and with support and your own motivation, repetition and persistence, you will be the master (or mistress) of your destiny. What an amazing thing!