Читать книгу Only Fat People Skip Breakfast: The Refreshingly Different Diet Book - Lee Janogly - Страница 6

I am a diet counsellor.

If you came to me for dietary advice I would assume that you wished to lose your excess weight and remain slim for the rest of your life. Obvious? Not exactly. Most people are looking for a quick fix and want instant results – and why not? That’s how we approach a lot of the difficulties we encounter in our daily life, both at home and at work: identify the problem, find the solution, apply it and move on. Unfortunately, that won’t work with your weight. If you’ve got rather more fat reserves than you need, well I bet they were there yesterday, a week ago, maybe years ago. Building them up has taken a lot of time and loving care, so it will take more than a few days of low-fat food to reduce them.

But we live in a fast-track world. Many of us are drawn to short-term, intensive deprivation diets—cabbage soup for a week, for example—in the hope of quick weight-loss, even though the weight lost on such diets is usually just water. Few people these days seem to have the patience to aim for slow, steady weight-loss that will last for life.

Many people are so eager to shed their excess pounds quickly that they become vulnerable to the allure of unhealthy or unsustainable diet regimes. There seem to be two main ‘start-slimming’ periods each year: the first is from the beginning of January, after the boozy excesses of Christmas, and the second starts around the end of May, with the expectation (dread?) of appearing by a pool in a bikini. In both cases, the motivation of all participants would seem to be ‘How quickly can I get down to a size 10?’

Any weight you lose during this period is likely to go straight back on again. To succeed at a restrictive diet you have to ignore hunger pangs, which means you also end up ignoring feelings of satiety. Your eating ‘cues’ get confused and you start looking for food in response to emotional rather than physical prompts. When you follow a diet formulated by someone else, your relationship to food can be disrupted and even break down, causing you to eat in a chaotic manner.

If your most recent dieting effort ended in failure, then I’m pretty certain that the programme will have contained one of the following words or phrases: Atkins, protein-only, detox, calorie-counting, red day, points, sins, colonic, food combining, blood group, eliminate wheat/dairy/tea/coffee/alcohol. But don’t despair: we’ve all done the same. Chalk it up to experience and now…get real!