Читать книгу Freedom from the Diet Trap: Slim for Life - Jason Vale, Jason Vale - Страница 27

Coincidentally as I write this book a teenager has made front page headlines in the Sun newspaper in the UK. Georgia Davis has the unenviable title of being ‘Britain’s Fattest Teen’ weighing it at 33 stone (209 kg) at only 15 years of age. Consuming between eight to twelve thousand calories a day it’s easy to see how she got to be that big. The big mistake people make, including Georgia herself, is that it is not her choice to eat like this. There is no way on earth this poor and desperate girl genuinely chooses to eat the amount she does and be the size she is. If she had genuine freedom of choice she would simply stop eating so much rubbish and switch to fruit, veggies, and salads. Doctors have told her ‘she could drop dead at any moment’, no doubt believing a touch of ‘stating the bloody obvious’ would somehow help her. If anything, trying to scare any kind of addict off their drug rarely if ever works, in fact it usually has the opposite effect. For example one of the times a smoker will reach for a cigarette is when they are stressed and uptight. I remember my doctor telling me that if I continued smoking my lungs would collapse. I was so scared and stressed when I came out what do you think was the first thing I did? Yes – light a fag to help calm me down! The same principle applies to drug food. You tell someone like Georgia that she will die unless she changes, it won’t help her. She will simply find somewhere to cut off from the world and eat. Why? Because, as I will repeat, addiction and logic have no place together. Georgia said, ‘I can’t walk any more than a few steps without getting out of breath and a few months ago I developed type 2 diabetes. When I look in the mirror I feel sad and go to my bedroom and cry. I know it’s partly my fault. But it’s so hard to stop eating.’

But it’s not hard to stop eating apples, bananas, grapes, cucumber, sardines, or spinach – even when people love these foods. Why? Because they are not drug-like foods and they don’t create a hole, they genuinely feed the body. Georgia went on to say, ‘Food is like a drug. Some people choose heroin but I’ve chosen food and it’s killing me.’

But that’s the point; no one actually chooses to be a heroin addict any more than they choose to get hooked on certain foods. The more you try to fill the hole with the substances creating the hole the bigger the hole gets. All that has happened to 33 stone (209 kg) Georgia is the hole has got out of all proportion and the only thing which appears to give any degree of satisfaction is an enormous amount of the same. This poor girl knows it’s killing her, knows it has caused her to have diabetes and even knows she could drop down dead at any moment, yet she still continues to struggle. This is because telling her what she is doing is killing her is the same as telling someone in quicksand they are in fact in quicksand and should get out. SHE KNOWS! This girl knows all the reasons why she shouldn’t eat all this rubbish daily, what she doesn’t know is what compels her to do so against her rational judgement. And that is precisely what makes this book so very different to any ‘diet’ book you have ever read and is precisely what will enable you to break totally free.

It is interesting to see that Georgia Davis said that eating is ‘like a drug’ to her. What I am saying is that it’s not simply ‘like a drug to her’, it is a drug and it is a drug to millions of people all over the world. This is due not to some inherent weakness in those millions of individuals, but the addictive nature of the drug-food itself. It is true that not everyone who smokes cigarettes becomes heavily addicted, but nearly all are addicted to some degree. The same applies to drug-like foods and drinks. Not everyone is this heavily addicted, but millions are certainly addicted to some degree. This is not the nature of the people but the nature of the substances themselves. And it’s not ‘food’ per se that they are overeating and ‘using’ as an emotional crutch, it’s drug-like food that people become addicted to and use to try and feed an emotion. After all I don’t see too many people attending Apple Anonymous or going to weekly meetings to try to stop eating broccoli do you?

This is why I disagree so vehemently with people like Paul McKenna. While I admire much of his work in other areas, I cannot agree with his ‘I Can Make You Thin’ principles due to the addictive nature of the foods themselves. Paul suggests you can eat whatever you like as long as you eat only when you are hungry and stop eating when you are genuinely full. But that’s like saying to a smoker on twenty cigarettes a day that all they have to do to avoid cancer is to cut down to one cigarette a day. While the advice itself is correct – after all I don’t believe anyone would actually get cancer smoking one a day – if you have ever smoked you will know that actually trying to smoke just one a day when you have been on twenty is virtually impossible. And if you did manage it, you wouldn’t be happy, you would just be wishing your life away waiting for that one cigarette. It’s the same with drug-like food. Anyone who is already hooked on a certain amount can’t just ‘cut down’ or ‘eat slowly’ and ‘stop when they feel full’. In fact these drug-like foods often trigger an almost uncontrollable urge to binge and overeat. How many times have you thought ‘just the one’ chocolate or biscuit and before you know where you are you have polished off a great deal more?

Georgia Davis cannot stop eating when she is full because she never feels full. In the same way your body builds up an immunity and tolerance to a drug, it does the same with drug-like food and drink. You end up needing more and more in order to try and fill the hole and void the drug itself has created. Georgia’s problem is she does eat when she feels hungry, the problem is she feels hungry most of the time due to the addictive nature of these foods and drinks. What Georgia ultimately needs is to starve the false hungers and create a genuine one. Once that happens then and only then can the advice of ‘eat when hungry’ and ‘stop when full’ be effective.