My aim to lose weight at the beginning of the year was, in some ways, my attempt to step aside from that defining experience and to live the life of a ‘normal person’. (By which I mean someone who doesn’t contemplate their own mortality on a daily basis.) I’ve discovered that isn’t possible. Putting body image at the top of my priority list created a massive internal rebellion. It started well but after a while striving to be slim seemed to be a shallow goal; I realised that dieting doesn’t begin to get to the root cause of why I have always allowed myself to weigh a little more than is socially acceptable. I recognised that slim does not equal happy and that, if I had to choose, I’d go for happy every time!

So as I’ve become lighter I have also become more enlightened: the struggle to be slim is not my battle ground. With my particular circumstances I am better served struggling to be happy. And my belief is that we probably all are. Our food battles have much more to do with finding comfort in busy lives than they do with feeling hungry and needing to eat. It follows that the answer to being a healthy weight – and to living a happy life – is to seek a more comforting existence and discover that food is just one aspect of that, rather than the only self-nourishing part of the day. And the answer for our society lies in a similar place. It’s about building worthwhile lives, honouring our planet and our food production methods, striving to be happy rather than rich/slim/famous/insert your particular craving here, and recognising that life may well be shorter than we think. The time to be happy is now.

If you’re interested in being healthy and happy with a wider perspective than weight loss then I’d love it if you’d follow me to The Happy Diet so that we can continue to learn from each other.

For now, I’m signing off from The Dawn Diet. This will be the last post (so to speak). Thank you for being there and for all your encouragement and support.

Just walking through the door felt a bit strange as it’s difficult to distinguish it from its somewhat seedier neighbours along Brewer Street The music was booming, the window was neon, the staff were young and hench (yes, in a cake shop!) We (almost) felt young again! In this sparkling black granite palace, Chris and I consumed a very good cup of coffee and each chose a beautifully seductive cupcake. Predictably, my husband fell for the blonde bombshell version with the Marilyn motif while I went for the dark chocolate Valrhona cake, pumped-up with black butter frosting and topped with a Gothic black chocolate skull.

It was fun, but it will definitely be a one-off. Even as a child I was never really tempted by fairy cakes and, to me, cupcakes are like fairy cakes on steroids. Just a bit too much of everything.

And here’s my point. Sometimes it pays to satisfy your urge to eat cake (cheese/bread/ice cream). Eat as much as you like until you’re physically and emotionally full up. Let yourself get to the point where you no longer feel deprived and can say ‘It’s only cake’. Listen your body tell you it really has had enough. Because today, even if you offered me the most delicious cupcake, even if it had a life size photo of John Hamm on it, I’d say no. Because yesterday was more than enough. Honest.

It’s only a cake. Now… anyone fancy a lettuce leaf with Elvis Presley printed on it?

So what do you do when it’s raining, the nights are drawing in, you feel a bit crap, your best friend hasn’t picked up the phone, there’s nothing on TV and you feel the lure of that particular kind of hunger that only one thing can cure. You can reach for the Ben & Jerry’s, or maybe you can hang on to your resolution and reach for an aphorism…

My lovely friend (who’s also trying to lose weight) shared this with me. It struck an immediate chord. It goes like this:

Who’s in control: you, or Ben & Jerry’s?

I love it! It appeals to me because I hate to think of some overpaid marketing exec sitting in some feng shui’d ivory tower  designing the product that will overwhelm my personal goals and make me cave in and stay fat. I so don’t want that person to have any influence over my life. Another side of me kicks in and reaches for the teapot instead.

OK, you’re feeling smug now because you don’t ‘do’ ice cream as a diet buster. But we all have habits that undermine our resolution and keep us from reaching our goals, and the world is full of people rubbing their hands in glee when you fail, because they need you to buy their chocolate bar, doughnuts, crisps ice cream, chips, cheddar cheese, sourdough bread, luxury cupcake, gourmet treat,______ insert your favourite binge food here. No one who sells food wants you to consume it moderately. They want you to scoff the lot! Of course they do.

Don’t give them the satisfaction. Next time you reach for your personal weakness, ask yourself who’s really in control of your diet.

While boring my friends with my dieting progress and even more with my lack of it, I’ve heard a very wide range of vehemently held views about what you have to do to lose weight. Even my skinny friends know exactly what you have to do. The italics are intentional because, as you know, we are failing spectacularly on a national level to keep fat off our bones, despite being highly knowledgeable in what wehave to do.

So let’s look at the common ones:

1. Fats are the enemy: stick to a low fat diet.
2. Exercise for 20 minutes 3 times a week and build up to 3 hours a week.
3. Only eat protein or starch at any meal – not both.
4. Eat only what Stone Age man would have eaten.
5. Carbs are the enemy: stick to a low carb diet.
6. Only fat people skip breakfast.
7. Eat lots of fibre – it’ll fill you up.
8. Avoid coffee as it raises your blood sugar.
9. You have to go into ketosis to lose weight efficiently.
10. The more you drink the more you shrink.
11. Just cut out a meal every day.
12. Nuts, avocado and cheese are fattening, avoid.
13. Just eat 2 ‘replacement cookie bars’ a day and then have a ‘normal’ evening meal.
14. If you starve yourself your metabolism will shut down and you’ll stop losing weight.
15. Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper.
16. Just don’t eat bread and potatoes.
17. Eat nothing but cabbage soup, boiled eggs and grapefruit.
18. Ketosis is a dangerous body state that damages your kidneys.
19. It’s important that you are never hungry on a diet.
20. Only eat sitting down.
21. Drink plenty of coffee, it speeds up your metabolism.
22. Just eat normally and increase your exercise.
23. Cut out the alcohol and the weight will fall off.
24. Eat little and often – 3 small meals interspersed with 3 small snacks each day.
25. It’s all about thinking thin…

Confused? The chances are your own diet beliefs are a combination these statements. Some of them directly conflict, some are rubbish, some should work but don’t, some are just a marketing mirage. Most of them are dogma, unquestioned truths that have merged into a religious diet mantra for many of us. There’s so much written about this subject, and there’s so much money to be made by those who come up with a new ‘method’, that it’s very difficult to get at the facts…

… which are

1. You have to eat less on a sustained basis.
2. See rule 1.

Quite simple then! Not simple to do, but simple to know. It means that you can eat cake all day and still lose weight, as long as you don’t eat too much cake; you can also eat lettuce all day and put on weight if you could physically eat enough lettuce. There is no magic formula, there are no demon foods, if you want to weigh less than you weigh now you have to eat less food than you do now.

Beyond this baldly stated fact there are some other ideas you might want to consider:

1. Exercise can help. Despite the research published last week which showed that exercise doesn’t lead directly to weight loss, it does help  to build muscle which increases your metabolic rate, and being active is a good way to use up a few calories. Perhaps most importantly it can really lift your mood if you find something you enjoy.
2. Learning to tolerate mild hunger is a liberating life skill. Many overweight people have developed elaborate rituals to avoid ever being hungry, often as a result of childhood deprivation or comfort factors. If you eat whenever you’re hungry you stop your body releasing fat stores to plug the energy gap. Learning to surf the early signs of hunger to allow your body’s metabolism to kick in is an important part of sustainable weight loss.
3. A balanced, nutritious diet you will help you to be healthy as well as slim. Of course you can get slimmer on replacement meals and shakes, skinny lattes and take-aways but you risk malnutrition along the way. Apart from damaging your health, low nutrient levels can set up strange cravings that wreck your food strategy and make dieting much harder. If you have a lot of weight to lose, consider taking a good quality multivitamin every day like Solgar VM75.

Then there are some interesting theories which may have some merit:

1. Eating your calories erratically – e.g. eating more one day and much less the next – seems to confer a metabolic and immune advantage. (The Alternate Day Diet)
2. Eating for your body biotype can help your digestion and energy levels while dieting. (The Adam & Eve Diet)
3. Drinking lots of water seems to help with weight loss and detox – especially on low calorie days.
4. Foods which are nutrient rich and calorie poor are better ‘value’, mainly vegetables, fish and meat.
5. Polyunsaturated fats, especially omega 3 and 6 fats and conjugated linoleic acid, assist with weight loss.
6. Protein slows stomach emptying and can delay the onset of hunger (so does fibre).
7. Sugar and starch convert into fat more easily than anything else you eat and block the release of stored fat.
8. Some foods trigger an addictive biochemistry which can be managed with nutritional help.
9. Being happy and fulfilled in other ways can help to reduce your dependence on food.
10. Changing cognitive behaviour patterns in combination with reducing food intake can work wonders.

It’s a long post to make a simple point: if you’re failing with your weight loss have a look at your beliefs and automatic behaviour around food, question what you hold as true and consider ditching the dogma and going back to basics. Try taking small steps towards eating less and don’t over-complicate it.

What could you do today to make that happen? And tomorrow…?

The world’s most acceptable poison, alcohol is an absolute requirement at almost every social occasion. People who want to give up alcohol for health reasons are scared to do so for fear of being, or being seen as, boring. We all know ‘it’s not good for us’ but we cling to it as the most reliable way to relax and unwind and switch off from the stress, tedium, irritation, despair and _____ (add your own particular negative state that you want to avoid here) that life tends to contain.

We do it because it makes us feel better.

So what if it doesn’t? Make us feel better, that is.

I first noticed that alcohol had a very specific effect on my brain about 10 years ago. As part of my regime to recover from breast cancer, and to give myself the best possible chance of survival, I cut alcohol out completely. After a couple of years, when I was back to work, I started to include the odd glass of wine again. After a difficult work day that might stretch to 2 or 3 glasses. After a few of these I started to notice that I always woke up the next morning feeling anxious, critical and grumpy. At first I blamed it on that back to work feeling but after a while I spotted that the pattern related to alcohol consumption: when I drank more I felt worse. Sure, the feeling while drinking was a great escape, but next day I started off lower than before. Not a good thing, I decided. Since then I make sure I don’t drink every day so it doesn’t become a habit. I value my happy head more than my sense of escapism.*

In a sense, I repeated the experiment in the first and second quarters of this year: for the first 3 months I didn’t touch a drop and I felt really good; once the builders arrived I started to have a drink most evenings; as the summer wore on and the holiday mood descended I was drinking more than I have done for some years. And guess what? I have been much grumpier and more anxious. Ask my husband!

Those of you of a scientific leaning will be crying out for some scientific research to back up my lonely observations here. While I have seen many clients with alcohol-related depression, I have nothing to give you except a very large social experiment called the United Kingdom. Almost everyone self-medicates to some extent with alcohol and, despite being one of the wealthiest, healthiest, freeest (can you say that and, if so, can you spell it like that?) nations on the planet we are also plagued with epidemic levels of depression, anxiety and mental health disorders. These problems are, of course, multi-faceted but I believe that alcohol is a significant factor.

(Oh yes, and it makes you fat too, because it acts as a disinhibitor in the brain. Which means that you lose your inhibitions about what you do when you drink it. So, because most of us drink it with food, we forget to watch what we’re eating. The combined effect of a couple of glasses of wine and a tiny little second helping through alcohol-tinted spectacles can easily add up to 300 calories. And that can easily be the tipping point between losing and gaining weight.)

If you want to see whether it’s true for you, join my experiment.

For the next 2 weeks carry on drinking as you normally do. Each day, record how much you drank and write down your mood on waking (and also if you wake in the middle of the night).

For weeks 3 and 4 avoid alcohol completely. Again, record how you feel every morning.

Compare the 2.

Simples!

For those of you who regularly drink quite a lot, the first 3 or 4 days of abstaining might result in rather a bad mood. But 2 weeks is long enough to start to see some benefits.

So here’s the thing. Are you willing to see if alcohol brings you down? Or would you rather bury your head in the sand for the short term ‘up’ it provides? Do you care? Or will you read all this and dismiss it as yet another load of killjoy baloney from a nutty nutritionist. You have a perfect right to dismiss it. But before you do just think about this too: What if this post was about cabbage rather than alcohol, if I was suggesting that cabbage was a depressant and made you fat? Wouldn’t you just avoid it for a couple of weeks to see if it helps? If that’s true for you then you already know that alcohol has more of a hold on your life than you want to believe.

Sorry. I’m feeling like a social pariah now. But I think that if alcohol is making you unhappy, you should know, and have the chance to do something about it.

Let me know how you get on…

* By the way, if you really are drinking on a regular basis to ‘escape’ you might find that life coaching solves your problems much more effectively. Call me to get a new perspective on 01892 512842.

So how’s it going?

The Ghana Cook Book has sold really well, doubling the original amount I hoped to raise. People have really enjoyed it too, finding new ways of eating and taking a more informed approach to their health, hydration and cooking. It has been an amazing win-win-win project: healthy recipes for willing cooks, great PR for me and Search Press, and a chunk of school for the Ghana Education Project. In that respect, the cook book has also helped me with plans to ‘get the message across’. Reaching more people and trying to help them deal with illness and take responsibility for their health (and weight) has been a central them for me in 2010. Writing it and launching it was a tremendous, unanticipated, task – but the rewards have been huge. The blog has been successful too, with over 3000 visitors this year.

The biggest project for 2010 was always going to be transforming our home. Now that we’re the other side of all the hassle I can look back and enjoy what we’ve done. We’ve used our resources really well to create a wonderful space to live in; a home where I’m hoping to be able to offer love, healing and hospitality for many years to come. You can see the 3 of us in the picture, waving from the balcony. We love it there! As a project it became all-consuming. In the middle it adversely affected my sleep and my sense of humour. There were some serious setbacks and hurdles to negotiate. About 6 weeks in, I decided to abandon all pretence of losing weight. The combination of high stress, no kitchen and eating out meant the struggle was just too much.

Certain areas haven’t had much attention. I haven’t managed to get outside every day and that means not enough exercise.  And I haven’t built up the coaching side of my practice as much as I planned (so far) – but it wasn’t easy with a team of builders on site every day.

The biggest lesson with all of this is that I always try to shoehorn too much into my life. I run round like a headless chicken feeling vaguely hassled and resentful, trying too hard, missing out on the feelgood factor. And it’s all self-imposed! My mid-year resolution is that this is going to STOP. But I’ve spent so many years of my life like this that I think it will be easier said than done. I have a strong, possibly grandiose, desire to make a difference in the world; too often this leads me to take on projects that feel arduous. I’m trying to persuade myself that a gentler, easier approach to life can be just as effective, that making a difference in a small way can be just as powerful in the end.

What does all of this have to do with losing weight? Yes, you knew I’d get round to it in the end

Too many arduous projects, no time to spare, too busy to focus, putting pressure on myself, is a way of life that becomes very distracting. It feels effective and important and rewarding (while it’s cosmically pointless) but it does nothing for my quality of life. On a personal level I often end up so overwhelmed that I want to compensate myself – with alcohol, food, relaxation and sleep – instead of nurturing myself. And this gets in the way of losing weight – and undermines my happiness.

So, my mid-year resolution is to return to my weight loss aims and give myself enough time and space to follow them. To date, I’ve lost 16 of the 50 lbs I set myself (4 lbs have crept back on since Easter). By Christmas I’m hoping to make it to 28. I hope you’ll stick with me to see what we learn along the way.

In the spirit of the blog, maybe it’s time to have another look at your own new year’s resolution and see if you still feel they’re working for you? There are still 3 months before the Christmas frenzy descends to make sure that 2010 is the year when you…… (insert your dream here!)

Ask yourself…

- do they still matter to me?

- what’s stopping me prioritising them?

- are they too arduous? (or too timid?)

- how can I get there and be kind to myself at the same time?

Have a good week!

I have a rather zany and untested theory that, if we ate only food we’d cooked ourselves from scratch, no one would be fat. If you had to make your own croissants, crisps, muffins, chips, chocolate… in your own kitchen… you simply wouldn’t eat them. Calorie consumption would plummet or you’d spend so much time running around in the kitchen that you’d be as thin as a slice of salami.

On the other hand, I’ve found that cooking basic good food takes hardly any time at all. I know the food processing industry and supermarkets want you to believe the opposite: they want you to believe that they’re making your life immeasurably easier by providing ‘food’ in plastic microwave cartons with cardboard outer sleeves; that they’re freeing you up to do bigger and more important things with your life, like tantalising your lover, playing games in the garden with your flawless children or climbing Everest in your spare time. (Not that you’d have the energy to climb anything if you lived on processed food – but that’s a different matter.)

It’s all a marketing lie. And it’s possible you believe it.

Our vast food processing industry applies advanced biochemistry to bring you the delights of packaged or processed food. They call it ‘added value’. They buy the raw materials (usually in high quantity which makes them very cheap, sometimes in low quality which makes them even cheaper) and turn them into meals. This is the added value. They turn food into meals so that you don’t have to. And they charge you money for doing that. They have little regard for the integrity of food, they’re just interested in getting the food to you before it goes off (which means they reject ingredients which are better eaten fresh). In fact, you are not really paying for the food, you are paying for their factory and labour. Imagine how cheap those ingredients have to be! Usually the meal you end up with isn’t as nice as the meal you could make yourself and it often has all sorts of things added to that you wouldn’t regard as food. But you’re happy to pay for it so that you can watch the box, chat on the phone, or sort the laundry while your dinner warms up in the oven. So much damage is done to food in pursuit of shelf-life and profit that it could fill a  book. Hydrogenation, hydrolysation, concentration, sterilisation, radiation, soil-free propagation. Some of these terms are just blinding us with science – while most of them have a detrimental effect on our food.

The truth is that it’s easy to knock up a great supper all by yourself (or if you prefer, with the help of your kids) in 45 minutes, night after night. It’s not a chore – it’s part of life. While I’m cooking I talk to my daughter; stare out of the window; remember that it’s my friend’s birthday next week; or simply stick a phone under one ear and chat away to someone while chopping and stirring.

That way you’re in charge of the calories and the nutrients and you’re likely to be a lot slimmer and a lot healthier. You’ll know exactly what you’re eating, you’ll save money and reduce your impact on the environment by cutting out unnecessary packaging.

So maybe it’s true. If we only ever ate food we’d cooked from scratch we’d be lighter. Why not try it for August and see what happens?

If you want to know what I cook when I’m at home you can buy my Help Yourself and Others Cook Book by clicking the link on the right. Every penny from the sale is going to build a girl’s school in Ghana.

NB No more blogging til September. I’m off to spend time with my family and catch up on some R&R. Have a great summer!

To me, the majority of items on the supermarket shelves can be divided roughly into 3 categories:

1. Food: as nature intended. This includes all whole fruits, vegetables, raw meat and fish, pulses, whole grains, nuts, seeds, eggs and dairy products.

2. Pseudo Food: things that look as though they belong to category 1 but score very low on the things that food should provide like vitamins, minerals, fibre, etc and often very high on salt, sugar and hydrogenated fats). All packaged food and most ‘diet’ food subsitutes fall into this category too.

3.  Drugs: things that are enjoyed primarily for their biochemical effect on your tastebuds or mood. This includes alcohol, confectionery, cakes, desserts and biscuits, deep fried, salty and sugary snacks.

In any quest to lose weight the more you eat from category 1 the more successful you are likely to be, because your body will have all the raw materials it needs to keep you functioning well. Categories 2 and 3 are non-food. They look like food, you can put them in your body, but your body doesn’t want them or need them. In fact it’s just a process of rubbish recycling: Junk in = Junk out. And the results can play havoc with your weight and your health. Even if they are designated as diet foods.

For some of us, the idea that the edible items in the supermarket can be non-food is a strange concept requiring a paradigm shift. The best analogy I can think of is the idea of pouring petrol into your diesel car and thinking, ‘It’s near enough, lets see if it will run on this.’ You just wouldn’t do it! So why do it to yourself?

Another way to look at it is whether or not you would feed it to a dog. Bearing in mind that most of us are happy to feed our dogs on dry biscuits made with mechanically removed meat this is a very basic test indeed. We regularly feed them food we wouldn’t touch ourselves. BUT… and it’s a big but… no pun intended would you be happy to feed your dog on alcohol, crisps, cakes, biscuits, muffins, café lattes, apple pie, custard… or would you ‘know’ that it would lead to a very unhealthy animal, fat and lethargic.

One of the rites of passage in our society is that ‘adults’ are allowed to eat and drink all sorts of poisonous rubbish that children mustn’t. It’s considered normal. At the same time everyone gets totally hysterical about eating butter which has been in the food chain for hundreds of years and is a valuable source of Vitamin A, D and short chain fatty acids.

Wouldn’t it be great if achieving your weight loss goals included shift towards better health and biochemical balance in your body, and if achieving one automatically led to the other?

Eating from category 1 is your route to this. The foods in this category are densely packed with nutrients and lightly packed with calories. They are food. They are what your body has evolved to eat. They will support you in your quest for body balance. Of course, we all eat foods in the other 2 categories from time to time but once you think about them in this new way, I’m hoping you’ll understand that it’s a bit strange!

My net weight loss in the 3 months since April has been 2lbs. In the 3 months before that it was 16 lbs. I’ve written before about needing to be in ‘the zone’ for weight loss to happen easily but I’ve never really understood what that zone is – until now.

Apart from my weight loss success, the main difference between the first and second quarters of this year is that the builders moved in in April and they haven’t moved out yet. The chaos, stress, and sensory deprivation as a result of losing my ‘home’ has resulted in a much stronger urge to eat ‘the wrong things’. My calm, ordered, optimistic world in which weight loss is possible has been replaced by an environment where I’m not in control of what’s happening in my own kitchen, let alone beyond my front door, and where budgets have gone belly up, privacy has dematerialised, my right hand is holding the kettle even in my sleep and I feel like I’m working as a part-time cleaner in a cement factory.

Against this background I’ve started to give a ridiculous significance to my early evening glass of cold beer and the weekly curry on a Friday night. They are high spots in the day that mark the transition from work to relaxation. It means I can stop… stop thinking, stop worrying and stop trying so hard. They are compensating me for the chaos, tiredness, mess and stress and making me feel better.

This all sounds pretty normal, doesn’t it. Most of us behave like this to some extent. It’s very human. My consolation is that it’s a temporary state. In a couple of weeks I will say goodbye to my lovely builders and get my home back and start to work towards my weight loss goal again.

Why is this relevant to you though? If you’re not in the middle of a building project why would you give it any more thought?

I would argue that many of us live lives filled with chaotic events and stressful circumstances that are completely beyond our control most of the time. We call it normal. The majority of us have signed up for this to get a monthly pay cheque. The idea of being able to choose how we spend our day, create our own environment, play when we feel like it and sleep til we wake up is radical. For most of the year we get up in the dark, travel uncomfortably with strangers to places outside our communities, spend the best hours of our day in soulless buildings, working on projects that are for the benefit of someone else (or no one), with people who are not in our hearts. If this is something like your day then perhaps you can see that it’s not very rewarding; not in the deep inner sense of a life well lived. Years of living like this – without being able to choose what to do with your time, your talents and your passions – takes it’s toll. Our urge to create is stifled, we spend very little time in nature, we lose our sense of adventure and spontaneity. It leads to a deep inner lack of fulfilment that leads in turn to a desire for compensation.

So we compensate ourselves with the things we can control and the things that money can buy. Food and alcohol are top of the list (or street drugs, gambling and worse if it feels bad enough).

If you can see yourself in this it’s possible that you weight problem is linked. For you, an increased sense of fulfilment in daily life will be an important part of getting to the right body size. Perhaps you’ll be able to work that out for yourself  and start to put things in place to create a more fulfilling day. But if that feels too daunting then I’d love to help you. Give me a call.