Читать книгу Freedom from the Diet Trap: Slim for Life - Jason Vale, Jason Vale - Страница 24

When I was unhealthy, tired, lethargic, and fat, I knew, as we all do, that if I ate plenty of fruit, vegetables, and salads I would be slim and healthy. The problem was I actually hated vegetables and salads. I had fruit every now and again – summer mainly – and even then only the odd orange. As for salads, somehow I don’t think the token side salad, which I hardly touched, really counted. The main difficulty I had was that I simply didn’t like the taste of vegetables and salads and they just never seemed to satisfy. Even the fruits I did eat didn’t seem to satisfy me the same way as steak and chips. Besides which, I had always been conditioned to believe that if you ate that ‘rabbit food’ you were being boring. No, my regular diet was comprised of steak and chips; McDonald’s; Burger King; chocolate; crisps; a big ‘hearty’ breakfast; tons of tea and coffee; loads of white bread and butter; big helpings of white pasta; egg or beans on toast; hot dogs; Sunday roast. In fact, you name it I ate it – as long as it wasn’t green! I often looked at well-prepared, beautiful-looking salads and thought, ‘I really wish I liked that, but I just don’t’. If I could get as much pleasure and satisfaction from eating fruit, salad, vegetables, and drinking carrot juice as I do eating steak and chips and drinking Coke, then I would do it – who wouldn’t?

Well it transpires you can and the change really is simple. I know at this stage that may sound like rubbish, especially for those who have tried ‘everything’ in the past, but I did say at the start that an open mind is vital for success here. Not only will you get just as much pleasure and satisfaction from your new way of eating, but infinitely more so. These days I wouldn’t even let you pay me to eat a McDonald’s or Burger King, yet for years these were my ‘brand’ of food and I ate them daily.

When I wake up in the morning now and head straight for my juicer and blender, I do so not because I ‘have to’ or because I need to lose weight due to some restrictive diet. I do so because I wouldn’t dream of doing anything else now, it has bizarrely become my choice; I actually want to do it. When I choose a meal at a restaurant now I actually look for tasty salad!

I am writing this with some surprise because a few years ago, the first thing I ‘had’ to do in the morning was stick the kettle on to give myself a caffeine ‘boost’. I now know this was to try and get me over my junkie food hangover (more about that later). I would then eat a big bowl of cereal, several rounds of toast and maybe a couple of boiled eggs. At the weekends my breakfast consisted of everything that was on offer at JJ’s café. The great British breakfast – the bedrock of a good heart attack as they say.

I used to have images of people who owned a juicer, drank carrot juice and ate leaves. One which perhaps you have at the moment. I would think ‘What sad, boring people – what on earth do they do for fun?’ But how deluded was I? As if I was having enormous amounts of fun being a fat, tired, and lethargic person, hating the way I felt and looked on an almost daily basis. As if I was enjoying a life where I was constantly battling with my intake of food or the latest ‘diet’. I believe this is where we all have got it wrong. I always thought that if I stopped eating the junk I would be making a sacrifice and if I did eat overeat and/or eat junk it was somehow a wonderful life. I thought if I drank fresh juice, ate good food, created the body I wanted, felt light, and had the energy I required to live my dreams that I would somehow be missing out, I would be making massive sacrifices to get what I wanted. But the question is, what sacrifices? I don’t think we ever stop to actually ask that very important question. Whenever I overate it would always be followed by thoughts of, ‘I wish I hadn’t done that’ or ‘why did I do that’. I never really enjoyed the food either as it would be gone in seconds. I was eyeing up the next mouthful before I had eaten the one on my fork! I was setting myself up for a lifetime of misery, lethargy, and being overweight all for literally seconds of what I thought was genuine pleasure – even though I hated myself soon afterwards. I would hardly call that a fair trade off.

I often felt bloated after eating a pile of what I deemed as ‘the most pleasurable food on earth’. My physical problems were clearly caused by the amount of the foods I was eating and the quantities I consumed. These foods would always seem nice in my mind before I ate them, but as soon as I did, I wished I hadn’t. That’s not true satisfaction; it’s the complete opposite.

Since changing my diet I now see the truth – there was nothing special about these foods at all, it was one incredibly clever illusion, one which I believe has deluded millions around the world. Like any illusion, it appears extremely real until it gets shattered. That is precisely what this book is about; page by page it will gradually chip away at the illusion until it is completely shattered and that ‘light-bulb’ moment will be yours for the taking.

Contrary to what we have been conditioned to believe it is extremely easy to switch your diet as opposed to going on one, we have all simply been looking at the wrong way for so many years we find it hard to believe it can be ridiculously easy.