Читать книгу Freedom from the Diet Trap: Slim for Life - Jason Vale, Jason Vale - Страница 33

What is your body fat ratio? What is your resting heart rate? Do you know? What is a bioflavonoid? What is riboflavin? Do you know? How many calories are there in a banana? How much protein do you need daily? How many vitamins are there? What is the best source of calcium? What does vitamin K do for you? Which has more vitamin C – an orange or a green pepper? What is a ketone? How does ketosis work? Do you know which foods contain vitamin P? What is your body mass index? What is your metabolic rate? If you do not know the answer to these questions – good! We don’t need to know.

A little over one hundred years ago we didn’t even know what a vitamin was, but we still got here didn’t we? A gorilla doesn’t know how many vitamins or minerals there are in a banana or whether it contains any calcium or protein: why don’t they know? Because they don’t need to know!

There are no nutritionists or dieticians in the wild, how do they cope? How do animals manage to keep so fit and excess fat free without knowing things like ‘their resting heart rate’ or without ever wearing a heart rate monitor to show what ‘zone’ they are in? With no dieticians on hand or fitness instructors, it almost makes you wonder how on earth they know what to eat to be healthy or how to stay trim and fit. Well I say it makes us wonder, but that’s not true. We fully expect all wild animals on earth to instinctively know what to eat, when to eat and what to do to be fighting fit. We don’t expect them to have to read books on the subject of food or to seek ‘qualified’ advice. We are under no illusion at all that their intuition, provided by whoever or whatever created us, is the best guide to health and healing foods.

So this begs the question, why do men and women, who are apparently the most intelligent beings on earth, not expect to know these simple things for ourselves? Why is there so much confusion over what we should eat and how to get fit? The answer is simple really; too much knowledge; too much advertising; too much peer pressure; too many conflicting books; too many people with letters before and after their name; and too much brainwashing and conditioning from people with vested interests as their number one focus.

There is no advertising, brainwashing or ‘intellectual’ knowledge in the wild. Animals eat foods that were specifically designed for them. They also eat when they are genuinely hungry and they stop when they are full. They are perfectly happy eating the diet laid down by nature for it fully furnishes their body with everything it needs and they love the taste and smell. Wild animals are also not concerned about how much they weigh on a daily basis, nor what size fur they are. Why? Because all of their own kind are the same size and shape. If a giraffe became extremely abnormally fat would we need to test its blood pressure, put it on a scale or take a sample of its poo (Gillian McKeith!) to see if something was wrong with it? Or do you think that intuitively we would just know?

When I look back it seems strange that despite being what I consider to be a reasonably intelligent person, I would do things like jump on a set of scales to see if I was packing a bit too much on the weight front. Did I not already know? The only reason I jumped on them in the first place was because I already knew I had, I just wanted to know by how much. Again, could I not see by how much? Did my bulges not tell me? Did the fact my shirt buttons were popping not tell me enough or the fact I couldn’t squeeze into my jeans? All weighing scales do is confirm the obvious to us and to everyone else around us. As mental as this sounds I would even get on the scales slowly sometimes in a desperate, nonsensical attempt to weigh less. Did I honestly think that by getting on the scales slowly I would not be as fat as I was? What the flipping hell was wrong with me? After working with hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world over the years it was somewhat of a relief to see I wasn’t the only one who did such incredibly bizarre, irrational things. I believe all the ‘intellectual’ knowledge we are bombarded with makes us do things that are flipping bonkers. When I see your average bloke running around the park or on a treadmill with a heart rate monitor around their chest and looking at their special watch to see if they are keeping in the ‘fat burning zone’ I do wonder if we have all taken leave of our senses.

Talking of which, here’s a perfectly true story which illustrates what I mean. A friend of mine was on one of her many ‘diets’ some years back. On visiting her about a week or so into her ‘new’ diet, I noticed that there was a large chocolate cake, half eaten, on a plate next to her. To be honest I was quite glad because I know what a complete waste of mental torture time diets are. I asked her if she was still on her diet (assuming she wasn’t) and to my surprise she said ‘yes’. I said what about the half-eaten cake? What I heard next has gone down in history: ‘It’s okay’, she explained ‘because I weighed myself before I ate it and I weighed myself afterwards and guess what? – there was not an ounce of difference’. I wish I was joking, but that really is a true story.

I realize that most people haven’t done something as bats as that in order to justify their intake of food, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of perfectly intelligent people going places on a weekly basis and actually paying for someone to weigh them – paying for someone to tell them what is already painfully obvious to them and everyone else. Although it may not seem like it at first glance, weighing yourself all the time is certainly on a par with the half a cake thing.

I went to Weight Watchers many years ago for a couple of meetings. The ‘leader’ was actually very good. But seriously, what the hell were we all doing there? We were standing in line waiting to be weighed. At the time I attended if someone had lost weight from the week before, they would ring a bell and the group would do what I call a ‘Ricky Lake’; they would literally clap and yell. Now I am all for encouraging and giving praise, but what about those who hadn’t lost any weight. You feel bad enough as it is going in to one of those places – the last thing you need is to be made an object of pity. I am aware that Weight Watchers no longer do the bell thing, but they do still weigh you, along with nearly every other diet group.

Scales chain you to a diet mentality and they can be deceptive. Sometimes people look slimmer and feel healthier, but when they jump on the scales they see little or no change and so start to feel depressed. But we should sod the scales, it’s how you look and feel that is the real measure of success. What many people fail to take into account, and the reason I am so against the antiquated BMI scale, is that:

Fat takes up five times more room on the body than muscle but muscle is a lot heavier than fat

If you drop fat but increase your muscle, your scales could well stay the same, but your shape is so much thinner. Weight is not the issue, it’s all about the physical shape you are in. To free yourself of diet mentality you will also need to free yourself from the scales. Go for the ‘look and feel’ measure of success, it’s a lot more accurate. Throwing away your scales can be one of the most liberating processes in gaining freedom from the diet trap.

We not only use scales to weigh ourselves, but also to weigh the food we eat in order to try to control our calories – and again we have been doing this for so long we don’t question the sanity of it. But seriously, what are we doing? You don’t ever see a gorilla weigh bananas before it eats them to check it’s not overeating and you certainly never see a squirrel weighing its nuts (OK perhaps a bad analogy).