You Can Be Thin: The Ultimate Programme to End Dieting... Forever (7 page)

The irony is that junk food and processed food are very cheap but they cost you a lot in hidden costs. Being overweight will cost you a lot of money in increased life insurance. Overweight people can pay twice, even three times as much for life insurance and your health insurance premiums will triple – that’s assuming you can get insurance. Many overweight people can’t get any health insurance at all

Even holding onto a stone of excess body fat unleashes free radicals and triggers inflammation which accelerates ageing and poor long-term health. Hormones released in fatty deposits raise the risk of getting cancer especially for those of us who store fat around the waist. In apple-shaped people (those who store fat around the waist), the fat can press up against vital organs and blood vessels increasing blood pressure and the risk of strokes. Because being overweight brings with it a risk of horrifying related illnesses insurers expect the overweight to have poor health and will load their premiums accordingly. They also expect overweight people to die earlier.

Eating cheaply costs you a lot in the long term. It costs you hugely in terms of your quality of life, your happiness and your relationships. An obsessive relationship with food and an addiction to food will almost certainly disrupt other relationships, most importantly those with your children and partner. It will cost you in terms of your self esteem, your love life, your sex life, your assertiveness, maybe even your career aspirations. If you look long, hard and honestly at what being overweight is costing you, you will understand that eating cheaply is a false economy and is costing you everything.

Once you’ve finished your list, I want you to focus on the next exercise. Don’t just read it and move on. You must
do
it. This is not just a book for you to read, it’s a book for you to use. If just reading a book worked you could read a diet book and get results. The results you will get from this programme will come about as a result of you processing the information and doing the exercises. Fully participating in them forms part of that process. So for real results, read through the next paragraph, memorise it and then go back and do it and do it fully, give it 100 per cent and that’s what you will get back.

Your body would never ask you to eat like this. The cravings don’t start in your body because it hates being overfed with indigestible, processed food. Your body would prefer not to have to work so hard, so unnecessarily. The cravings come only from your mind, and the good news is that since it’s
your
mind you can change these cravings for good and you are already doing so as you work your way through this book. Your body is like a small baby depending on you to put the right food in it and paying the price when you don’t, so make a commitment to your body that you will look after it and respect it from now on.

Nothing you can ever eat, will ever eat or have ever eaten can give you that satisfying feeling of being a normal weight, liking your body and looking good in your clothes. Being able to put on a pair of jeans or trousers or a little black dress, wearing beach-wear without cringing, not having to wear jackets in the stifling heat to cover up, buying clothes off the peg from any shop and knowing they will fit and you will look good in them – is a wonderful feeling. Even more so if you have not experienced it before. It’s a feeling you cannot and will not ever find in food.

Enjoying good food is delicious and eating with friends is a wonderful thing, but you cannot find lasting comfort, companionship and joy in food. If you could, believe me, you would have done so by now. Instead, it is more likely that you have become excluded from so much, including activities, relationships, careers and mostly from living a full, long and active life due to poor body image and poor health.

One of my clients had never worn boots in her life because her legs were too large so I asked her to imagine becoming slimmer and then buying some boots, trying on different styles and fashions and looking good in them. I next asked her to imagine being in a restaurant or food shop and trying to find a food that could give her the same feelings she got from imagining wearing the boots. She looked for a long time before she told me there was no food that could match it. Another client had never been able to buy a pair of jeans and when she finally could fit into jeans she was so ecstatic she bought three different pairs. She had never found that ecstatic feeling in any food; she had never even come close to it.

I want you to do one more exercise for me. These exercises are designed to safely change the neural pathways in your brain, which will change your attitude to food. Please take the time to do them rather than just reading them as the effects are very powerful and a key part of this programme. Again, read through and memorise the next exercise then do it.

You will always have another day to eat cakes, chocolate and biscuits but you only have a certain amount of time to wear the things you want to wear and do the things you want to do. When you are ninety you can eat as many chocolates and crisps as you want to but it will be too late to wear tight jeans, fitted tops, shorts and anything else you are longing to fit into. It will also be too late to do many of the activities you might be putting off as you wait to get thinner – things like running, dancing, cycling and skiing. Putting some restrictions on yourself is not going to take anything away from you; it’s actually going to give you so much more back. You won’t feel deprived because you will be so focused on all the benefits coming your way.

I am not virtuous. I still eat chocolate sometimes, I enjoy desserts occasionally, I like chips with salt and vinegar, and I enjoy warm bread on the odd occasion but I don’t see them as everyday foods. I used to find it really hard to resist chocolate and desserts, but what worked for me was reminding myself that I have all my life to eat them. I was in a restaurant several years ago when I was handed the dessert menu. It listed rhubarb crumble – my favourite. I was thinking along the lines of, ‘I have to order this, it’s my favourite’, when I stopped and told myself, ‘I have all my life to eat rhubarb crumble. I can buy it in a supermarket any time I choose and when I am eighty I can eat it every day. I don’t need to eat it today just because it’s on the menu.’ That really worked for me and was a sign that I was succeeding in taking control of how I ate.

It is important to remind yourself that you will always have another day to eat. Many of my clients tell me that when they are confronted with cakes or sweets they eat them as if they will never come across them again. They are at a party with birthday cake, or a friend comes over with chocolate, or their partner brings home a pizza, and they say things to themselves like, ‘I have to eat this because it’s here, it’s free, it’s my favourite, etc.’

What works is to tell yourself something different like, ‘I have all my life to eat a piece of pizza/cake/chocolate. This is not the only time I am going to be offered it. It’s not free, it will cost me a lot to eat it’. That thinking will also allow you to eat a little of something and then put it away. Knowing you can eat it whenever you choose to will stop you finishing everything in front of you just because it’s there.

Pizza, cake, biscuits and chocolate are so cheap you will never be denied them and eating them as if you might be is crazy. It isn’t going to get you to your ideal weight either. You don’t need to eat biscuits just because they are given away free, you have the rest of your life to eat them. For years after I gave up eating sweets I would still take some if they were offered and put them in my bag then put them in a tin when I got home. In doing this I didn’t ever feel that I couldn’t have them or had to deny myself. So if I was in a restaurant and they brought a bowl of sweets with the bill I would put some in my bag or pocket, I just didn’t feel I had to eat them. One day I just chucked the whole lot out as they had been accumulating in the tin for so long.

I didn’t ever imagine I could be indifferent to chocolate or cake. I was a true chocaholic. Once I could not even keep it in the house without eating it all, I even ate all the chocolate decorations from the Christmas tree within a day of hanging them up. At my daughter’s christening when all the guests had left and we were clearing up my au pair and I decided we should immediately eat all the cakes that were left over so they were out of the way and could not tempt us. Having to eat them to be free of them meant the cakes were more powerful than me. Now I can eat chocolate but I don’t need very much of it, it doesn’t taste that special any more because I no longer tell myself it’s special and after one or two pieces I have had enough. You will find that you can do this too, not just with chocolate but with all junk food.

Remind yourself of this fact when you come across foods you have told yourself are hard to resist: