When I was at university I shared a flat with three other girls and we lived on really cheap food, mostly toast, bread, potatoes, pasta, cheese and cereal. We ate so badly that only when I had been living there for a year and my boyfriend brought over a chicken to cook did we discover the oven had never been connected, only the hob worked. Every night we would spend the whole evening sitting on the sofas watching TV, our jeans undone as our stomachs were so distended by the end of the day we could not sit comfortably.
Foods that originated as cereal are not only unhealthy because of the way they are processed, they can also be highly addictive for many people and disrupt, sometimes in an extreme way, our attempts to shed weight. In fact these very foods can cause our bodies to store excess fat. I will try to explain why as simply as possible. Refined and processed foods release large amounts of glucose very quickly causing a rapid rush in blood sugar followed by a rapid drop and consequently a craving for more of those foods. Blood sugar levels are believed to be one of the controllers of hunger and we know that protein cuts hunger very quickly. Processed foods are usually very low in protein and high in carbohydrate. There are some foods that cause our bodies to store excess fat and that lead to food cravings and even food addictions. It’s a vicious circle because eating refined foods in response to the cravings causes weight gain.
One side effect of being overweight is an impairment of the hormone insulin’s ability to correctly process fats and sugars. This impairment is called insulin resistance. Insulin resistance causes the body to store more fat than it needs to, especially around the middle. Hmm, is this reminding you of anyone yet, like you maybe? If the answer is yes then you are on the right track. You have to understand a problem to fix it. Adding to the problem, when your insulin levels rise due to an excess of carbohydrates, it sends your body a hormonal message telling it to store fat while holding on to the fat that’s already there. So not only do excess carbohydrates make you fat, they keep you fat.
Eating a diet high in refined carbohydrates is the equivalent of eating two cups of pure table sugar a day. Since some starches such as white bread, white rice and potatoes increase blood sugar levels faster than table sugar, the food pyramid is encouraging us to consume sugar in large quantities as a healthy food. How could that possibly be healthy? White bread is so processed it is as bad for you as eating biscuits. In fact there is not much difference between white bread and white cake in nutritional content or the amount of carbohydrates and sugars. To make white bread all the bran and fibre are stripped away. One of the reasons why people who are wheat intolerant find white bread causes them less stomach discomfort and distension than brown bread is because so much is removed and the parts of the grain that are left are then pulverised milled and ground. In the baking process it becomes full of air. White bread is inert dead food of zero nutritional value. When it enters your bloodstream is has the same effect as eating three spoons of sugar. White bread is full of sugar. The more refined and preprocessed the food is the more it encourages weight gain. When sugar goes into your bloodstream too quickly your blood sugar surges, your pancreas overproduces insulin and you crave more carbohydrates the way an alcoholic craves alcohol. The excess sugar in your bloodstream gets stored in your fat cells.
Fast breakdown of sugars and starches into the bloodstream = Fast weight gain.
It really is as simple as that. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, eat real food and eat it slowly. Cutting out processed food will cut out the primary cause of excess weight. Anything that speeds up the digestion of carbohydrates can lead to weight gain. Anything that slows it down will help you to become and stay slim
It is becoming recognised that for many people refined carbohydrates are absolutely addictive. If this is the case for you then like an addict you have to cut them out of your life. You won’t even miss them after a while. When you cut bad carbohydrates out of your diet you begin to reverse your body’s inability to correctly process starches and sugar. This inability is the cause of most weight gain because it has such a disruptive effect on your blood chemistry. When your blood chemistry changes you will stop having cravings for the very foods that caused your excess weight.
Sugar, fat, salt and refined carbohydrates are highly addictive. Fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds and protein are not addictive at all. Reading this book is systematically removing any painful thoughts you may have had about changing your diet and instead it is making you want to do it, ensuring you will like it, and feel good about it as the hypnotic content of this book is helping you implement powerful changes. The following exercise will reinforce your mind even more dramatically.
Grip Testing
1. To do this, put your thumb against your middle finger and push them together really, really hard while someone tries to pull and prise your finger and thumb apart. You should be able to resist very well.
2. Now hold a suspect item of food in your other hand – chocolate, white bread, cake or a biscuit and get the same person to try to prise apart the finger and thumb of the opposite hand while you push them together. You will find that your strength diminishes and your fingers can be pulled apart much more easily.
3. Now swap the bad food for something healthy like fruit or an avocado. Repeat the test and you will find that your grip strengthens as you hold healthy food in your hand.
4. Again to make this more powerful hold the item of food under your nose as you repeat stages 1, 2 and 3.
In doing this grip test you are proving to yourself again that your body knows the foods you should be avoiding. You lose all your strength when holding bad foods – your body has a negative reaction just holding them, let alone eating them.
This is a great exercise to do when you have children and want to teach them that some foods are bad for them. It is great fun to walk around a supermarket with your children and do ‘the grip test’ as they hold grapes or pears and again as they hold fizzy drinks, confectionery and crisps. In doing this you are making your children feel that they are making these choices rather than having them forced upon them by an overbearing parent.
Now that you have done these tests it does not mean you can’t eat bread or pasta anymore, you can still eat them occasionally and still enjoy them too but recognise they are not a foods to be eaten all day and every day. The reason these tests are so important are that they prove to
you
what
your
body likes and dislikes. You are going to come up against people who say, ‘Cereal is so healthy, bread is so good for you’, I hear it all the time. Some of my relatives don’t agree with my way of eating, and I have even been told ‘Jesus ate bread’. Well, yes he did but it was made from spelt, a very healthy young sprouted seed that is nothing like modern wheat.
When I am doing interviews the interviewer often says to me, ‘I don’t have a problem with wheat so how can what you say be true?’ My favourite reply is, ‘Well, guess what? I don’t have a problem with nuts or fish but if I meet people who do I don’t say to them, “I don’t have a reaction to nuts so you can’t either”, I accept that we have different bodies and different reactions to food.’
It’s becoming more accepted by many healthcare professionals that overweight people generally can’t digest wheat products or dairy very well and it makes them gain more weight and hampers their ability to shed weight. You don’t need to prove this to anyone or to convert anyone, just do this for yourself.
STEP NINE
Keeping It Off Forever
Time For Action – Simple Steps, Massive Results
This is one major step that contains many small steps that will give you fantastic and lifelong results. If you want to look different you have to
do
different and it has to be all the time; dieting to lose weight then resuming the habits that got you overweight is pointless. We don’t just want to drop weight for a short while, we want to keep it off forever, and these steps will enable you to keep off the weight you have shed. At this very important stage of the book you have replaced many habits of thought that got you overweight and now you are ready to replace some actions that also got you overweight. This time you are doing it the right way round, replacing the negative thoughts and then replacing the negative actions.
Ten Actions to Keep It Off For Good
1. TO CHANGE WHAT GOES INTO YOU, CHANGE WHAT YOU KEEP IN THE HOUSE
One of the most important changes you can make is changing what you keep in your house. If you go into the kitchen of a celebrity or anyone who successfully controls their weight you will find they are as disciplined about what they keep in their house as they are about what they eat. Sometimes if I am working late, writing through the night, I know that if I had a big bag of nachos in the house I would eat them, but since I don’t I can’t. I can only snack on healthy food because I do not have an alternative to hand. Since I don’t have biscuits around I snack on tinned pineapple or berries instead.
You can stop buying junk food, sweets, biscuits, crisps and chocolate. You don’t need to keep them for visitors or for your children. Give your children money to buy themselves treats but do not have tempting things in your house. If they are not there you can’t eat them. Throw them all away and don’t replace them. If I do buy biscuits for my daughter I deliberately buy the ones I don’t like, the same with ice cream and crisps. It is so much easier for me to avoid them this way.
Your kids will thank you for not surrounding them with junk as you will be teaching them not to eat it and ensuring they do not grow up addicted to junk foods with the accompanying disrupted blood chemistry. You are doing them a favour, helping them for life and being a good parent by denying them high-calorie, low-nutrient foods. Of course, they won’t thank you immediately, but they will later. I have never denied my daughter sweets but she has to go out and get them. I have also never made her finish food and she has a really healthy relationship with food and therefore won’t ever be overweight. She takes a little then goes back for more and she leaves food when she’s had enough. I work with many overweight children and it is heartbreaking to hear of how they feel inadequate and are bullied and diminished because of their weight. You can still allow your children ice cream, cakes and crisps and sweets, but if they are not kept in the house they will get eaten a lot less.
So many people I work with buy junk for their partners and children and eat it all themselves. The excuse that they are buying it for others is redundant. If you keep junk food in the house for your children and they end up with the same weight problem as you then you have not done them any favours. People who have stopped drinking don’t keep alcohol in the house for other people, and people who have quit smoking don’t have a packet of cigarettes on the coffee table, just in case a guest might like one, they banish the items that were their weaknesses. My friends who are vegans would never have animal protein in the house and when I go to their house for dinner I eat what they eat.
You need to be organised about buying the right food, buying enough of it and always having it to hand otherwise you will give in to temptation. Keep the right foods in your cupboard and fridge and buy good alternatives to the things you used to crave. I always have tinned, dried and fresh pineapple as it works for me when I crave something sweet and it contains a natural digestive enzyme. I buy bags of frozen prawns three at a time so I can make a prawn and tomato omelette in minutes if I come home really hungry. Years ago I would have made cheese on toast or eaten biscuits but those days are long gone and never missed.
By following the suggestions for ideal fridge and pantry staples in this book you will always have the right foods to hand. Eating badly creates such a vicious circle that you may not feel you have the energy to stock up. However, buying and eating the correct foods will give you so much more energy. We all have to shop, so just shop more effectively and banish the wrong foodstuffs from your home.
2. LIMIT VARIETY
Another very important step is limiting the variety of food you eat at each meal. We need to eat a varied diet but too much variety at mealtimes causes overeating which causes weight gain. We should have a variety of healthy food over a period of each day but have less variety at every meal. Less is more. Too much variety makes us fat because we gain weight when our appetite drives us to eat too much, so we don’t know when to stop, especially when faced with masses of variety at all-you-can-eat buffets or parties and functions with lots of varieties of food.
Appetite is created by five triggers:
1. Production of stomach acid.
2. An empty stomach.
3. Sight and smell of food.
4. Action of the appetite centre in the hypothalamus area of the brain.
5. Conditioned reflex – eating even if we are not hungry just because its a mealtime or food is in front of us.
This last point happens on long-haul flights. I fly to America frequently and on the flight the airline serves afternoon tea at 4 p.m. local time when for everyone on the plane it is 2 a.m. which really isn’t the kind of time we would want afternoon tea, and on the return flight they wake us at 4 a.m. London time to serve breakfast. If we had to pay for these meals we would pass on them but because they are free and put in front of us they get eaten.
Constant overeating stretches the stomach wall so that it takes longer to feel full. Your stomach will shrink back when you consistently eat less.
We overeat junk food when our appetite is overstimulated with taste enhancers and chemicals, and when our senses are overstimulated with too much choice. All humans have an inbuilt ‘sensory specific satiety’ which means there is only so much of one food we can eat before we get bored and naturally stop eating. This innate appetite control is overridden by variety and newness in textures and flavours which is why we can be absolutely full after a big Sunday lunch but still get tempted by the desserts. You know how it is when we are in a restaurant and say, ‘I couldn’t eat another thing, I am absolutely stuffed’ and then the desserts come out and we are tempted by something different, a new taste, texture and flavour. Limiting the variety of food available naturally limits our intake of food and keeps us slimmer.