Читать книгу Freedom from the Diet Trap: Slim for Life - Jason Vale, Jason Vale - Страница 46

The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as, ‘A dietary condition resulting from the absence of some foods or the absence of essential elements necessary for health; insufficient nutrition’. This is exactly what I was suffering from when I was over 30 lb (13 kg) overweight, and it is what every junkie food addict is suffering from whether they are overweight or not. They have a severe deficit of nutrients going into the body. Without nutrients feeding the cells, the body will of course be starving. It is no wonder many junkie food addicts feel hungry and dissatisfied a lot of the time: it’s because they are. If the body doesn’t get what it needs it stays hungry for nutrients. Hunger is not a pleasant feeling, it’s an empty, insecure, dissatisfied feeling. What do you do when you feel hungry, empty and dissatisfied? EAT!

It is this simple: The less food you eat containing live nutrients, the hungrier you will become. The hungrier you become the more dissatisfied and incomplete you will feel. The more dissatisfied and incomplete you feel the more you eat to try and feel satisfied and complete.

This, in itself, of course is bad enough. However, an even greater problem we have are the additional hungers we experience on top of a genuine hunger for the right nutrients. These are caused by the additional chemicals often added to junkie-type foods designed to cause an even bigger hole. They are designed to cause an empty, insecure feeling, an identical feeling to a normal genuine hunger. Such feelings are the result of the withdrawal effects from certain junkie foods, or the effects of low blood sugar – which, again, are caused by the drug foods themselves.

These junkie foods really are a double whammy. Not only are they void of some genuine nutrients, they ultimately create a set of false hungers which feel exactly the same as a normal genuine hunger. And because they are sold as food, and not drugs, people remain none the wiser to the fact they are hooked. Instead, people who are caught in the food trap because of drug foods are called ‘pigs’, and are often ostracized and given no sympathy whatsoever. The people who are caught also believe it must be some flaw in their own character rather than a result of a very clever confidence trick – the food trick.

It is the false physical hungers, along with the false advertising, that cause people to have mental and physical cravings for drug foods.

This is ultimately why people attempt to ‘use’ drug foods in much the same way drug addicts attempt to ‘use’ drugs: i.e. reaching for them in times of boredom, loneliness, or for comfort etc. What frustrates me most is that the people who make and distribute drug foods even have the front to advertise the fact that their product will not end a genuine hunger. They have the audacity to let us know that their ‘food’ will only seemingly satisfy a false mental and physical hunger. Our problem is that we don’t question it because we believe it’s our genuine choice and that we derive some genuine pleasure from it. A great example of this was an advert for a chocolate bar which claimed you could, ‘Eat it in-between meals without ruining your appetite’. So what’s the point of eating it then? I thought the whole point of eating was to satisfy your appetite, to end your hunger. With this advert they are blatantly telling us that their ‘food’ will not satisfy a genuine hunger. In other words it won’t genuinely feed you. Another old ad that did this was the finger of fudge one. If you cannot recall, allow me: ‘It’s full of Cadbury goodness and very small to eat, a finger of fudge is just enough until it’s time to eat.’ First of all what the hell do they mean by ‘full of goodness’? Isn’t it full of sugar? The second part says, ‘it’s just enough until it’s time to eat.’ In other words it’s just enough to take the edge off the false hunger, but it won’t ruin your genuine appetite.

The reason we are so easily fooled is not because we are stupid, but because such products do feed the false hungers; in the same way nicotine feeds a smoker’s hunger for nicotine and heroin feeds a heroin addict’s hunger for heroin. When you end any kind of hunger you feel a sense of relief. A feeling of relief from any type of aggravation is pleasurable and this is where the confidence trick really kicks in. The makers and advertisers of these so-called foods try to give the impression that there is a genuine pleasure in eating, even if you are not genuinely hungry. But it is a false sense of pleasure created by a false hunger and it’s just a trick. On top of that you’ve got every diet and ‘health’ book giving the advice over and over again that you should simply, ‘eat when you feel hungry’. But the point I am making is that the drug food eater has additional hungers and is hungry, but it is a false hunger created by the rubbish itself – they are effectively in a loop.

Until the junkie food addict realizes exactly what’s going on, statements like ‘eat only when you feel hungry’ are ludicrous at best. Someone like US born and bred Terriny Woods – who, at the age of just 15, weighed in at 41 stone 12 lb (over 260 kg) – was no doubt following the advice to eat only when hungry, but she was such a drug food addict and had built up an immunity to drug foods to such a degree that she probably felt the false hungers even when she was stuffing herself with drug foods in her desperation to relieve her false hungers. At this stage she would be in a constant state of withdrawal, would be hypoglycaemic and have a constant level of insulin in her blood (which, as I will explain in simple terms later, can cause a permanent state of dissatisfaction). And this condition was seemingly only lessened to some degree by more drug foods. She had created a monster of a hole and was simply desperately trying to fill it with the very things causing the hole in the first place. The more she tried the bigger the hole became … and the bigger it became the more desperate she became to fill this empty insecure feeling. The bigger the feeling, the larger the sense of relief when drug food hits the bloodstream and the bigger the sense of pleasure.

The more aggravations BIG FOOD creates, the MORE PLEASURE we appear to get from them, the BIGGER the Sacrifices we believe we are making when we stop and the HARDER we find the change.

This is why we feel such a sense of loss and missing out when we try to cut down or cut them from our diet completely. It’s a trick – and requires a very open mind to see through it.

Eric Schlosser in his wonderful book Fast Food Nation wrote a small passage on gambling, which I feel works just as well for any form of addiction and works brilliantly to illustrate the food trick: ‘It is the ultimate consumer technology, designed to manufacture not a tangible product, but something much more elusive: a brief sense of hope. That is what Las Vegas really sells, the most brilliant illusion of them all, a loss that feels like you’re winning.’

That is also what BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK is selling – the most brilliant illusion of them all, a loss that feels like you’re winning. When you give yourself a ‘lift’ from drug-like foods it feels like you have just won, when in reality you have in fact lost – in many areas of your life.