You Can Be Thin: The Ultimate Programme to End Dieting... Forever (8 page)

Another way to look at it is to see that by restricting your diet you actually get to eat more. This is a long-term view, but it’s important. By choosing to eat differently you will live longer and live a fuller, healthier life. A longer life means you get to eat more than if, in the short term, you eat anything and everything because you hate feeling deprived. If you enjoy eating and you want to eat a lot, think about the years ahead of you and all the opportunities you will have to eat the foods you love rather than eating them in large quantities right now. When you make these small adjustments you are not eating less and suffering more you are actually eating more in the long term and not suffering at all. You will be free of feeling hungry, deprived or different and instead of feeling that you are fighting a never-ending battle you will know that you are already winning.

This may sound extreme but it is a reality. For example, I was scheduled to see a client after he had his stomach stapled. The day before his surgery he went on a bingeing feast and died on the operating table from heart problems. If he had eaten less he would still be here. He lost his life because he believed he loved food too much to cut down and that supposed love of food cost him maybe forty years of eating since he was only forty when he died.

My favourite comedian, John Candy, died aged forty-three because of his weight problems, and my favourite singer Barry White died aged only fifty-eight due to weight-related issues. Luther Vandross died from weight problems aged fifty-four. The soul singer Rick James was being considered for
Celebrity Fit Club USA
and died only weeks before filming because of a weight-related illness. We could have enjoyed so much more of them and they could have had a longer, fuller life if only they had taken control of their eating.

Not everyone can be naturally skinny. Some people are built bigger and will gain weight more easily, especially if they keep eating the wrong type of food. Even if that is you, you can still be a healthy weight and have a respectful, healthy and happy relationship with food. Limiting certain foods is not the same as going on a diet. You don’t have to go hungry or count calories. You can eat very well and eat very healthy food while shedding weight. You simply have to choose to make other choices.

If you want to change your actions you must begin by changing your thoughts. As John Drained said, ‘We first make our habits and then our habits make us.’ If your habit of action is eating chocolate and your habit of thought is chocolate cheers me up and makes everything better you have to give up the thought habit as well as the action habit if you want to reach and stay at your ideal weight. Of course, thoughts don’t start off as ingrained habits but once an idea has been accepted it tends to stick. The longer it is held the more it tends to become a fixed habit of thinking. Moreover, people on diets only focus on giving up the action while still believing the same thoughts, which is why they resume overeating and regain the weight. On this programme you are totally changing your thought habits, so changing your eating habits becomes a conclusion.

We have many thought habits that are incorrect but are still fixed in the mind. Some people believe that at critical times they must eat or have a drink to steady their nerves. Others believe a tranquilliser or cigarette is needed to calm them down. This is not necessarily true. The tranquilliser or drink they take could be a placebo, but the idea is there and it is a fixed habit of thought.

These are fixed ideas not fleeting thoughts, but no matter how fixed the ideas are or how long they have been held they absolutely
can
be changed. For example, in the West we believe we need lots of milk for calcium, whereas this belief does not exist in the East and people are not suffering with osteoporosis to the same degree. In fact, they have fewer bone fractures in the East than in the West. Another example is that many of us eat when we are tired because we believe the food will give us energy. However, digesting food takes up masses of energy so eating when we are tired at night is ineffective. If you come in late in the evening and are tired you don’t need to eat anything. Just go to bed and save your eating until the morning. You won’t get any benefit from late-night eating, the food will be much harder to digest through the night and you will wake up still feeling tired because your body has been working all night to digest food it didn’t want or need.

All beliefs can be changed if you introduce doubt. The minute you begin to question something you no longer really believe it. People in lots of countries don’t consume cow’s milk, nor do they believe it has any benefits. Many cultures don’t consume table salt or table sugar and again they don’t believe they are missing anything. I am amazed at how many of my clients tell me, ‘You need salt, it’s important’ or ‘My body needs sugar to function’, despite all the public health information initiatives over the past few years. There is so much salt in modern processed food we don’t need to add more – ever. Nor do we need sugar as we get plenty of it from fruit and other foods.

Look at all your beliefs about food, your weight, your eating habits and your body. You can introduce doubt into any belief, conviction or opinion you have that is negative about your body. This is especially true if you have a belief that you cannot lose weight. If you became ill and could not eat for a while you would lose weight, so it’s not physically impossible.

To change negative reactions in your body, i.e. overeating or continuing to eat when you are full or bingeing on chocolate, it is important to change the ideas responsible for the reaction both consciously and subconsciously. The brain and nervous system respond to mental images regardless of whether the image is self induced or from the external world. The mental image formed becomes the blueprint, and the subconscious mind uses every means at its disposal to carry out the picture. That’s why cinemas show us pictures of food and drink so we’ll want them. Every time you say, ‘I gain weight just by looking at food’ you are making your mind and body believe this thought and act upon it. Every time you say, ‘My metabolism doesn’t work properly’ or ‘I was born heavy’ you are doing the same thing.

People with weight issues frequently say, ‘I can’t leave food’, ‘I can’t say no to it’ or ‘I don’t know when I have had enough, I don’t know what full is.’ Slim people will say the opposite: ‘I can’t finish it’, ‘I have had enough’ or ‘I couldn’t eat another mouthful.’ Just as some people eat when they are upset as they believe it will comfort them, others cannot eat when they feel upset because they don’t hold that belief. You are able to choose what you say and to choose how you eat. Changing your eating habits is not enough, you must change your thoughts, beliefs and words as well.

Work through the following quick exercise to see the power of your thoughts.

If something as simple as imagining you were eating a lemon can cause your body to react physically then something as simple as imagining you are eating selectively and shedding weight can and will cause your body to react physically too.

Words do not just reflect reality; they can create reality – like the flow of saliva you just caused by doing the exercise. The subconscious mind is no subtle interpreter of your intentions, it receives information and it stores it, it believes without question everything you tell it since its job is not to question but to act immediately on your instructions, which to your subconscious mind are commands. Tell your subconscious mind something like ‘I am eating a lemon’ and it goes to work. That experiment was neutral, so physically no good or harm can come from it, but good as well as harm can come from many of the words we use.

If you are on an aeroplane waiting to fly to California you may be filling your mind with images of the shopping you are going to do, the beaches you are going to visit, the weather you are going to enjoy and you will respond to those images. The person next to you may be filling their mind with images of fear. They may believe that some of the passengers look like terrorists and as they focus on the fact that the plane may crash they will respond to those images by becoming agitated and nervous. So two people on the same flight are responding differently because of the words and images they are creating.

The way we feel at any given time is due to what we focus on and what our focus comes from:

The good news is that we can change those words and pictures at any time and we can learn to make them more positive all the time.

Scientists and doctors have noted that patients respond very well to positive suggestions. They reason that each of us has two selves – a conscious and a subconscious self. The conscious self that you are aware of has an unreliable memory, whereas the subconscious self has an amazing memory. It registers without our knowledge the smallest events and it accepts without reasoning whatever we tell it.

If your subconscious believes that your metabolic system is functioning successfully then it will. However, if it has accepted a suggestion that you come from a fat family and are helpless to do anything about it, then notwithstanding the fact that you were born with a normal weight and metabolism you are much more likely to remain overweight.

These suggestions caused by negative beliefs, which you may not be consciously aware of, form blocks in your mind. By changing your belief system as you work your way through this book and repeating your new affirmations, as well as playing your audio content, you can and will overcome them.

Our subconscious presides over all our actions, whatever they are. This is what we call imagination; contrary to accepted opinion, imagination always makes us act, even against our will. It is a rule of the mind that your imagination always beats your willpower, in a battle between willpower and imagination the imagination will always win without exception. One of the rules of the mind is that imagination is far more powerful than knowledge and that emotion is more powerful than logic when dealing with our own minds and those of other people. For example, if I asked you to stand on a small narrow coffee table you could do it easily. If I asked you to walk a plank of wood placed a few inches off the ground, you would walk along it effortlessly because you would imagine it to be easy. You would see yourself walking across without difficulty. Now, I want you to imagine walking that same plank of wood while it is placed between two very high buildings, within two steps you would begin to tremble and you would be very likely to fall off. Imagine the coffee table is now the window ledge on the top floor of a sky scraper; can you stand on it easily? You could stand on that amount of space when it was a table because your imagination told you it was okay. Now your imagination is telling you that you could fall, you could die, this is dangerous and crazy and your same imagination will stop you doing it.

So why is it that you would not fall off the plank nearer the ground? When the plank was on the ground you believed that you could do it. When the plank was placed between the high buildings you imagined that you could not do it, even if you were offered a lot of money, because your imagination sees you falling. In the scenario with the high buildings your will is powerless against you imagination. If you have been on many diets and had no long-term success your imagination will now see any diet failing to work for you. It is the rule of the mind that your imagination will always win.

The aim of my programme is to train your imagination so that you will win. Your imagination is like an untamed horse, it is immensely powerful but you have to train it to go where you want it to go. Your imagination and your ability to see yourself as slimmer, to believe you can become and stay a lighter weight and to be indifferent to food is more powerful than any outdated data that says it can’t be done. Modern science has now proven that the way you think can physically change your body. Changing your thinking can and does change your body.

I know you don’t just want to hear this, to believe it you need to see it and experience it for yourself. The following test will do that for you. Many of my clients find this very useful because it gives them absolute proof that our thoughts affect our bodies. Once you have that proof you can never again say, ‘I can’t help it, it’s just the way I am’. The truth is it’s the way you think not the way you are and the following test will really change your thinking which in turn will change your body.