Читать книгу Freedom from the Diet Trap: Slim for Life - Jason Vale, Jason Vale - Страница 13

Due to our often desperate desire to lose weight, it appears we are willing to take advice from virtually anyone – regardless of whether or not they are ill and fat themselves. Many of the ‘leaders’ running the now over 12,000 slimming clubs in the UK are often ‘yo-yoing’ themselves. They are often still constantly having a battle with food, their health and their weight. One person who actually owns one of the biggest slimming clubs in the UK is reported to be overweight themselves – that’s the founder!

It is true that you don’t have to be a great football player to be an excellent football manager, but when it comes to this subject it is extremely important. For example, if you went to a ‘stop-smoking’ therapist to quit smoking and they had a cigarette hanging out of their mouth, would you listen to a word they have to say to you, even if the advice was correct? Clearly not. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not picking on these people (after all, I know what it’s like to be in the food and diet trap and it’s really not that funny to be constantly struggling with your health, weight, and food intake), I just think it’s very hard for anyone to get truly free from this whole diet and food struggle nightmare, when the people teaching haven’t done it themselves. Remember, it’s not about simply losing the weight, it’s about getting slim and free. That way the change is easy and is one for life.

The overall position of the ‘diet’ industry seems pretty clear then. When it comes to weight loss and changing eating habits we have only two choices:

A) Use willpower, discipline, and exercise control forever, or

B) Run out of the will to control, say ‘sod it’, binge – then after the binge go back to trying to control again for a while.

What a life!

It seems to be a no-win situation – miserable when you are allowed to eat the crap and miserable and deprived when you’re not. However, despite what we have all been conditioned to believe, there actually is an alternative and, as I have said, you are reading it. The best part of all is that when you see it clearly, when you see just how ridiculously easy it can be and indeed how obvious once pointed out, it will be one of the biggest ‘light-bulb’ moments you will ever experience

The diet mentality doesn’t just apply to people who are overweight either. There are many slim people who want to change their diet because they want to feel fitter and healthier and have more energy. But they too have the same problem. They want to be healthy, but they also want to eat crap. So they have to force themselves to do something which they do not want to do in order to reach their goal. Many overweight people think all slim people are happy campers, but often they are having the same mental battle with food as they are. They too believe life would be nowhere near as enjoyable if they ate healthily.

One of the main reasons for this false belief is often the diet itself. Diets often encourage us to believe that life is a nightmare and boring without our ‘usual’ foods and drinks and wonderful with them. But I feel a touch of amnesia sets in. Obviously when we are not on a diet we are happier than when we are on one; but we are still not happy. That is why we want to change isn’t it? It doesn’t seem to occur to us that even when we are not on a diet we are still more miserable than someone who doesn’t have to worry about their intake of food, their health or their weight. It wasn’t only when I was consciously on a diet that I had this ‘I want to eat, but I wish I didn’t’ mental tug-of-war. The truth is I always had it to some degree. I was constantly trying to control my intake of certain foods. On a diet I just had to try and control it even more than usual – which simply made me much more aware of it.

It is having to exercise control over your intake of food on a daily basis that is the problem.

You shouldn’t have to control what you eat, you should be free to eat whatever you want, whenever you want, without having to worry about your health or weight. We have all been doing it for so long we have come to accept it as the norm – but it’s not normal to have to exercise enormous amounts of control on a regular basis. For example, non-smokers can smoke whenever they want – they just don’t want to so clearly there is no problem. It is only smokers that have the problem of trying to control their intake that have a smoking problem, non-smokers have their freedom – the freedom of not having to smoke. Even those smokers who have stopped but still crave them all the time aren’t truly free either; they are still exercising control not to smoke. It is only those people who have smoked, stopped and don’t miss them who are truly free.

I can overeat whenever I want to, but I just don’t want to anymore. I finally have true freedom around all food. Wild animals have this freedom too. In fact we are the only creatures on the planet that do this control and dieting stuff. Why? Because we have television, radio, and so-called ‘experts’ telling us what we should eat and often when we should eat. Unlike us, wild animals rely purely on their natural instincts. We also instinctively know exactly what to eat and when to eat. Our problem is that we have an intellectual brain that can easily be ‘washed’ by people with all kinds of vested interests, either status or financial. However, if we were left to our own intuitive devices we would all be eating healthily and no one would have a ‘food problem’.