Читать книгу Only Fat People Skip Breakfast: The Refreshingly Different Diet Book - Lee Janogly - Страница 16

First, though, you have to realize that no-one and no ‘dietary method’ can do it for you. Although most diets don’t cause eating disorders, most eating disorders begin with a diet. Going on a diet can disrupt your physical sense of when and how much to eat, and can lead to bingeing. Sticking to a restricted eating plan can in itself promote that ‘Oh sod it’ response of bingeing on vast quantities of food when anything disrupts your strict sense of being ‘good’.

The typical dieter’s mind-set is that if eating makes you fat then not eating must make you slim. But trying not to eat is not being in control because your body perceives this as starvation and will set up an enormous craving until you give in. This is simply your body’s way of making sure you stay alive.

Even on ‘Eat-as-much-as-you-like’ weight-loss regimes like the high-protein Atkins diet, there are pitfalls, as described by writer Allison Pearson in the Evening Standard. She, ‘like half of London’, is ‘doing Atkins’ and says it goes something like this: ‘Atkins, Atkins, biscuit, oops (not very Atkins), Atkins, white wine, oh God, sorry. Atkins says eat cheese and butter, but how can you eat cheese and butter without crackers? I am allowed to eat double cream but no berries. Atkins, Atkins, croissant…’

Those who are not on the Atkins diet seem to be on a ‘counting’ diet. I have had it up to here with counting! Everybody I meet is counting something: points, calories, sins, fat units, stones, pounds, kilos, dress sizes, days (‘I’ve been good for four days now," I haven’t had chocolate for two weeks’, ‘This week I’ve done three red days and four green days’. What are you going on about, woman?). Is this some sort of endless numbers game? Stop counting!

The overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction my clients express with commercial diet plans comes from the realization that they simply do not work in the long term. It’s not that surprising, though. If you were a research animal, maybe a kindly scientist could deliver you precisely the amount and type of food that would achieve the weight-loss you want—and you could just lie around in a cosy cage while it happened. But you are a human being and your life is not lived in a laboratory.

You probably already know from bitter experience that following a particular diet theory may produce startling weight-loss results while you stick to it. But if, in a year’s time, you are back where you started, was it worth it? And once you climb on the dieting seesaw, it is very difficult to get off. The diet habit becomes deeply ingrained as a way of life and the ‘language’ is imprinted on your brain.

You are always thinking about food, evaluating the calorie content, having those ‘Shall I, shan’t I?’ conversations in your head about some fattening item of food, usually ending with ‘Oh well, I’ve blown it now. I might as well go on eating for the rest of the day and start my diet again tomorrow’.

Bear this in mind: dieters always eat much more when they think they have ‘broken their diet’ than people who never diet at all. The urge is to cram it all in now so they can start tomorrow with a clean slate (plate?). The only way to stop this is to get off it. Lose the dieting mentality. If you want to be permanently slim, you have to change the way you think, act and behave.

It is no accident that some people are fat. This is a disease of choice. People carrying a lot of extra weight may have a slower metabolism but they are still making choices. You can either choose to eat something fattening or choose to eat something non-fattening. Maybe you choose the fattening option every time? If so, why? You have to acknowledge that if you choose to behave in a certain way, you also choose the results of that behaviour. It may not be ideal but it’s the only deal you’ve got. There is no point in saying ‘I’m going to do this or that’—you have to activate the plan and start doing something.