Freedom from the Diet Trap: Slim for Life

This book is not just for people who are overweight either; it’s for anyone who has ever had the slightest issue with food, which – in today’s processed food and image conscious world – pretty much covers everyone I think. And it’s also not what I call a ‘state the obvious’ book either. What I mean is, I’m not going to spend the time we have together stating the mind-blowingly obvious to you about certain foods or treating you like some kind of moron. That was one of the things I hated about eating the wrong foods, being overweight, feeling tired, lethargic and unhealthy myself – people assuming that just because I was thick physically, it automatically made me thick mentally. My doctor at the time was one of the worst for this and was head of what I call ‘The State The Bloody Obvious Brigade’. He would say things like, ‘You’re eating too much of the wrong types of foods, you don’t exercise enough and you should lose weight. If you changed your eating habits and exercised more you would feel better and be slimmer.’

Well no shit Sherlock! It was the same when I used to smoke 40–60 cigarettes a day; my doctor would say, ‘It’s killing you and costing you a fortune, you’d be richer and healthier if you quit.’ Once again – no really, what a revelation doc, hadn’t figured that one out, now you’ve pointed that out I’ll just extinguish this last one and I’ll call it a day.

Some doctors are not the only members of the ‘State The Bloody Obvious Brigade’ either; it appears most health books, diet clubs and people in general are also lifelong members of it. We’ve even got people like Gillian McKeith who, when confronted with a 5 ft (1.5 m) woman weighing in at 20 stone (127 kg), feels the remarkable need to see a sample of their poo before suggesting the appropriate measures. The appropriate measures not surprisingly being to eat less crap, increase fruit and veg intake and exercise more. Information which would hardly come as a surprise to anyone who hasn’t been on another planet all of their lives and information which would hardly be a surprise to the 20 stone (127 kg) woman either.

Then you have some members of the ‘diet guru’ world saying you can actually eat anything you like and be ‘thin’ as long as you ‘eat when you are hungry’, and ‘stop eating when you are full’ – as if anyone who is overweight doesn’t try to do this all the time. Is it possible that our compulsion to overeat just may be caused by the type of foods we are eating? Isn’t it also possible that it takes a shed load of food for some people to ever feel full?

What all members of the ‘bloody obvious’ fail to realize is we’re not stupid. We all know that things like chocolate, cola, coffee, cakes, crisps, ice cream, alcohol, milkshakes, and things like fast-food burgers and fries are not good for us and make us tired, ill and fat. We are also aware that fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, fish etc. are all good and would keep us slim and healthy. We also know that a good dose of daily exercise makes us feel good and helps to keep us trim. I’m not being funny but who on earth doesn’t know this? However, my point is: does just knowing this help you to actually stop the unhealthy foods and change your eating habits in favour of the good stuff? Does the knowledge that daily exercise is wonderful for you help you actually to get up and do some? No. If it did you wouldn’t be reading this book, you would have already done it. And that’s the problem. The instinctive knowledge that these foods are bad might make you think more about how much of them you are eating and thus make you try to control your intake of them on a consistent basis, but it doesn’t stop you wanting them or, most of the time, having them. It certainly didn’t stop me.

That is why I was 30 lb (13 kg) overweight, badly asthmatic (took both the blue and brown inhalers, taking up to sixteen puffs a day), covered from head to toe in a skin disorder called psoriasis (at one stage I didn’t have an area of skin which wasn’t affected in some way) and had all the genuine energy of a comatose dormouse. The only reason I didn’t get even bigger and sicker was because I was always on a diet. The yo-yo king, that was me – always fighting a constant battle not to eat too much of the wrong kinds of foods; always using a degree of willpower, discipline, and control to keep my health under some kind of control; always doing spats of ‘healthy eating’ and exercise to ‘keep the weight off’. I hated it every time and always rewarded myself at the end of the nightmare with the very same stuff that caused the problem in the first place. I was more than fully aware that the foods I was eating were causing my physical problems – fat, lethargy and asthma – but the truth was I was psychologically hooked at the time and simply didn’t know what to do in order to escape. On the surface it appears obvious and logical, but addiction and logic have nothing in common. As already stated, logically we know what to do, but addiction totally transcends any degree of logic.

So, if you thought you’d picked up a health/slimming book that was simply going to tell you that you should eat more fresh fruit and veggies, drink their fine juices, do more exercise and cut out the crap from your diet, you are very much mistaken. The reason? You already know you should do this and so does every one else.

THE FOOD AND DIET TRAP

What you need, therefore, is not a lecture on the bloody obvious, which will get you nowhere, but a full understanding of what I describe as ‘The Food and Diet Trap’. You need a full explanation of why you do eat the foods you eat – even though at times it goes against your rational judgement – not why you shouldn’t. You need to know exactly how the physical effects caused by certain ‘foods’ and drinks affect your thoughts – how they cause cravings and additional hungers and how to rid yourself of them. You need to know exactly what is happening, both physically and mentally, when you eat things like refined sugar, refined fat, cakes, muffins, chocolate, coffee, cola, diet drinks, dairy products, etc. You also need to know precisely how the BIG FOOD companies manipulate and condition you into buying what I describe as ‘drug foods’, yes drug foods. You need to know how these drug-like food and drinks companies will do whatever it takes to get you – and keep you – hooked on their ‘brand’ of junkie foods and drinks. You also need to fully understand that many of the foods which we have been told by those we trust to do the right thing – governments in particular and their ‘food groups’ – are excellent for our health, are in reality causing us harm. You need to realize that BIG FOOD have BIG POCKETS and what is going on in the BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK world will astonish you. Much of what I know I am not even allowed to print and it’s more than a bugbear I can assure you. If I put down half of what I knew I would get hammered (perhaps even literally). But what I can print will give you at least enough incite to make an informed decision as to whether you continue to give BIG FOOD your hard earned money.

DIGGING OUR GRAVES WITH OUR FORKS

It’s worth knowing that what we put into our mouths in the name of food and refreshment is now the biggest cause of disease and premature death in the Western world. And BIG FOOD, BIG DRINK and BIG PHARMACEUTICALS aren’t really that troubled, as long before you are spent, you have spent … a lot! BIG FOOD makes you sick and BIG PHARMACEUTICALS have plenty of people to sell to, in the name of making you better of course.

And that is what this book is about – everything you ever needed to know about The Food and Diet Trap. The manipulation, the con tricks, the addiction, the control, the false advertising and everything you genuinely need to know to break free from it.

And when I say free I mean really free: free to move; free to eat what you genuinely choose to (instead of that choice being subconsciously made for you) free from restrictions; free to think for yourself; free to look at people eating junkie foods without any desire to do what they are doing; free from eating a load of crap and then wishing you hadn’t; free never to go on a diet again; free from having to exercise control over certain foods on a constant basis; free from having to use willpower; free to wear what you want; and totally free to live the rest of your life in a slim, sexy, vibrant, and energy-driven body. It’s the kind of freedom no amount of money can buy; it’s the kind of freedom many dream of but never reach. It’s the kind of freedom which can be easy to achieve, but only once the brainwashing and conditioning has been removed and you have a clear route out.

The Past Doesn’t Equal The Future

It also doesn’t matter what you have tried in the past or what you have been through, anyone – and having dealt with thousands of people of all ages from all over the world – I do mean anyone can find it easy and enjoyable to change what they eat and be slim and healthy for life. All you need is an open mind and the conviction to finish the entire book. Most people who buy books of this nature don’t even finish them and then complain that it was ‘something else that didn’t work for them’. This book really is different from any other food/diet/health book you’ve read on this subject and I am very, very excited to share this information with you and I know it will make a difference. However, the only way it can make a difference is if you do three things:

A) Read the book with an open mind

B) Finish the book

C) Follow the simple set of instructions at the end

Many of the points in the book are repeated at various times. This is deliberate. I ran an addiction centre for many years and addiction psychology is what this book is all about. The only reason why I repeat certain points is to help remove the years of brainwashing and conditioning by BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK. It may jar at times, but please have faith in the fact I know what I am doing. The book is a form of hypnosis. I make sure that the key messages are placed at precise intervals in order for you to make the change effortlessly. Many people can’t even pin-point what it was about the book that made the difference, they just know that after reading it they felt completely differently about certain foods and drinks (as the short selection of reviews and testimonials in the introduction to this book shows). So please don’t get caught up with what some in the U.S of A would annoyingly describe as ‘Analysis Paralysis’ – where you get so caught up trying to analyse something that it prevents you from getting the message and thus the result you are looking for. The book has many chapters, most short and punchy and all designed to keep you reading. I am not here to win any awards with the written word and yes plenty will be repeated throughout and my style will bug some for sure; just have faith and all will fall into place.

So first things first, before we get into the real juicy aspects of the book it is important to understand fully …

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THE FLY SYNDROME (#ulink_bd4bc16d-a9dd-5f29-9100-32ecc36e99c3)

‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got’

I don’t know who originally said this now overused saying but they were bang on. I call it The Fly Syndrome.

Have you noticed how flies keep banging themselves against the same pane of glass in a desperate attempt to get out? And they continue to do it even when there is an opening just above them. Why don’t they just fly slightly higher and set themselves free? The answer is very simple – they cannot see that there is a simple way out and believe that what they are doing will eventually set them free. And this is exactly the same for the overweight/unhealthy person who keeps going on diets or special exercise programmes that they hate in order to be slim and healthy. They simply cannot see that there is an extremely easy alternative. They honestly think that if they just keep doing the same thing for long enough that this approach will eventually set them free. But, just like the fly, simply doing the same thing over and over again will not produce a different result and will not set them free. I know because I did more or less the same thing over and over again expecting to get a different result.

However, what if the fly decided to go to a ‘positive thinking fly seminar’? What if they went on a motivational fire walk to get all … motivated and stuff? What would happen then? Well nothing. All that would happen is you would now have a very excited, determined and positive fly who still couldn’t break the glass. It doesn’t matter how many times the fly repeats a positive mantra to itself along the lines of, ‘I CAN DO ANYTHING I SET MY MIND TO’, unless it sees the gap at the top, physics mean the fly will NEVER break the glass, regardless of what the bloody hell it says to itself and no matter how determined and positive it is. What the fly needs is clear to anyone observing the poor bugger banging its head on the glass over and over again. It simply needs to understand the position it’s in and simply change its approach. It’s not difficult for the fly to get out, it’s only difficult while it tries to escape by thinking it can break through the glass.

Exactly the same goes for anyone in the food trap. Whether you know it or not at this stage, the likelihood is you are in the trap yourself (to whatever degree) and you can do all the affirmations, positive thinking and be as determined as you like, but it won’t set you truly free – as you’ve no doubt experienced in the past. You may get slimmer and healthier at times using this approach but it won’t stop you wanting junkie foods and therefore having to exercise constant control not to have them. In other words, you will still be mentally locked in the food trap.

I used to think that if I was managing to exercise control over my intake of certain foods it meant I was in control. I now see that if you are having to exercise control on a consistent basis it means you are in reality being controlled, and if you are being controlled you are not free. It’s the constant need to exercise control on a daily, weekly or monthly basis that is one of the nightmares of the food trap (more on this later).

What you require is an incredibly easy escape route, and the exciting news is you’re reading it. I know it’s hard to believe a book can make such a difference, particularly if in your mind you have tried so many things in the past, but I promise you it can. The truth is it’s actually frighteningly simple to change what you eat and get slim, in the same way it’s simple for the fly to escape. The main problem is not only have we been conditioned and brainwashed to eat certain foods and drinks, it is almost taken as read that the whole business of losing weight is difficult. It isn’t – IT’S EASY!

I totally agree that it may be hard to believe at this stage, but again, it’s time to stop being a fly and open your mind to the fact that it’s more than possible when you approach it in a very different way. The reality is it’s feeling sluggish, living with excess fat and ill health and constantly either trying to control your food intake or bingeing that is hard work.

BACK TO FRONT

This is where most people have got it wrong, as I did for many years. We believe that health is hard work – that we will have to go through some degree of torture to achieve the body of our dreams. Many of us think that it’s just easier to eat junk foods and stay unfit rather than go through the tremendous amounts of willpower, discipline, and dedication – not to mention pain and hard work – we believe are necessary to achieve good health. That’s why we don’t get excited and look forward to getting slim and healthy – we assume that we will have to suffer in some way. We have been conditioned to believe that, and every time we try and fail we simply confirm this false belief. That is exactly what I used to believe too. I now realize that a life of junk food, being unfit, hating the way you look and feel on an ongoing basis, and lacking in confidence is not easier – and it’s certainly nowhere near as enjoyable as feeling alive, clearheaded, healthy, physically and mentally vibrant, and loving the way you look and feel.

We have a lot to get through and a lot of subjects need to be covered in order for you to break free. I want you to feel fantastic and live a quality of life, health-wise, that many people simply dream of. This book really is a catalyst to you getting there. There will be points in the book where you will want to stop, where you think you’ve read enough and that you ‘get it’, but please, please …

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CHANGE YOUR EATING HABITS

UNTIL YOU HAVE READ THE ENTIRE BOOK

Do not go off ‘half cocked’ – you need to be armed with all the correct information and instructions, otherwise in no time at all you could very easily switch to what I call ‘diet’ mentality. You need a full understanding of all junkie foods and drinks first and how they affect your body and mind. Only then will the mental instructions that will guide you out of the food trap make sense and prevent you from having to use your willpower, or as I call it ‘the diet recipe’. That way you will not just be free, but you will feel free from the start and love the journey. So – in case I haven’t yet mentioned it enough – please finish the entire book if you want true freedom from the food trap without having to diet ever again. And while I’m on that subject let me explain why diets (in the long run) do not work, can never work, never will work, so that you can finally feel totally free to …

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NEVER GO ON A DIET AGAIN (#ulink_05474b5c-f96d-53b1-8258-06d223c31ef4)

Let me ask you a question. If I told you I had discovered a way to lose weight and gain health, would you be interested? Well, perhaps. However, if I explained that the method involves months of physical and mental torture, that you would have to opt out of life on a regular basis and feel miserable and deprived for months, that it would make you irritable, and involves incredible amounts of willpower, discipline, and control – and, oh yes, I nearly forgot the best bit:

The method has a 95 per cent failure rate

Would you still be interested in trying it? In fact, would you invest incredible amounts of time, energy, and money in anything that guaranteed a 95 per cent failure rate? I would have thought nobody in their right mind would do such a thing, and that is exactly the problem – many people are not in their right (frame of) mind. That is why millions of highly intelligent people ‘diet’ despite knowing that at the end of their ‘hard work’ and misery there is a 95 per cent chance it will all have been for nothing – and most are fully aware of this fact before they begin.

I’m not knocking them either, for I am certainly in no position to do so. After all, I tried many, many diets myself. When I look back, I wonder why? Did it not dawn on me after my second diet that this mental approach to getting slim and healthy for life was not going to work? A definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. ‘But I’ve tried several different diets’ you say. But have you? I thought I had tried many different diets but are they ever really that different? They all involve feelings of sacrifice, misery, and deprivation. They all involve varying degrees of control and willpower. They all make you feel guilty when you’re eating and down when you’re not. They nearly always fail. They usually make you gain more weight than you had to begin with (if you’re on a weight-loss diet). This is not one specific diet that I’m talking about – it’s all of them. All diets are shining examples of the fly syndrome.

Despite knowing this, we still think that the next diet will be ‘it’ and seem willing to try anything, no matter how ludicrous or life threatening it may seem in our often desperate need to get to the land of the thin. Since the original F Plan diet (and we all know that the F doesn’t stand for fibre) we have tried eating grapefruits before every meal on the ‘grapefruit diet’ and even reached (or perhaps retched would be a better word) for that delightful smelling and tasting cabbage soup first thing in the morning on ‘the cabbage soup’ diet. Then we had the ‘wedding dress diet’ (but what happens after the big day?), the ‘Champagne and caviar diet’ (you don’t lose any weight, but you’re so plastered you don’t actually care) and the ‘egg diet’ (which involved eating eighteen eggs a day – no I am not kidding). Then, of course, there was the Hay diet (where you should never mix protein and carbohydrates together or you will internally combust) and the numerous ‘eat nothing but protein diets’. This is where we were expected to believe that eggs and bacon swimming around in fat was in some way better for us than a piece of fruit. As mad as it sounds, even some rational thinking people went for this one. Do you lose weight eating nothing but protein? Yes. Is it healthy? NO IT IS NOT. You can often spot a high protein diet follower, they often have a giant head on a twig like body. After the nothing but protein came The South Beach Diet, and once again we were allowed to eat fruit and some carbs, hooray!

Then came the hugely popular GI (Glycaemic Index) diets, but keep up because GI is already ‘so last year darling’, and it’s now been replaced by the many GL (Glycaemic Load) diets. It appears GI didn’t work after all and it’s the Glycaemic Load that’s important now. (Hope you’re keeping up with all of this). At least South Beach, GI and GL have some good basis in nutrition, but all sorts of mad ‘quick fixes’ have entered the fray. Have you heard of The Baby Food Diet? Yes we have intelligent grown adults eating baby food to get slim. It appears that whatever a ‘celebrity’ does, we all blindly follow, even if logically it’s completely bonkers. Take the Thumbnail Diet. Of all the ones I have spoken about so far, this perhaps takes the biscuit. This is where you get to eat anything you want (sounds good so far but wait) … providing it is no bigger than your thumbnail and you must eat every fourteen minutes. Who worked out the precise science behind eating a thumbnail of food every fourteen minutes (not fifteen, heaven forbid don’t round it up!), I will never know – but the word crackers springs to mind.

And let’s not leave out things like the Cambridge diet, Slim Fast and all the other ‘nutritious’ shakes that promise weight loss in supersonic time. Then we have the many calorie-counting diets; the Kensington diet, the ‘see’ food diet, the Eat Fat Grow Slim diet (where you had to drink oil before each meal – again not joking), the ‘sex diet’ (yes there is one – best of a bad bunch I’d say, and more fun than eating cabbage soup). I could go on and on and on, but all of the above, even the Thumbnail seems incredibly sane compared to, wait for it – the ‘Fresh Air’ diet. Yes, let me repeat that –

THE FRESH AIR DIET

I wish I was joking, but it is perfectly true. This really is ‘Extreme Dieting’ and I believe the most dangerous ‘food movement’ (or non food movement) on earth. It isn’t actually called ‘The Fresh Air Diet’, but ‘Breatharianism’. It is a lifestyle popularized by an Australian woman called Ellen Greve, or Jasmuheen, as she is better known. Greve claims she hasn’t eaten since 1993; yet, she admits ‘she drinks herbal teas and confesses to the occasional “taste orgasm” involving chocolate or ice cream’.

She claims not to eat the food but simply every now and then get the ‘taste’. The fact that three of Greve’s followers have starved to death while adhering to the Breatharian way of life, doesn’t appear to dissuade her. In 1999 the Australian television programme 60 Minutes tested her ability to live on ‘prana’, the ‘Light Of God’. After just four days, Dr Berris Wink – president of the Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association, urged her to stop the test. He wanted to stop the test because, according to Dr Wink, Greve’s pupils were dilated, her speech was slow, she was dehydrated and her pulse had doubled. Funny how when tested she couldn’t live without food or water for four days yet claims not to have eaten anything since 1993! Believe it or not she’s not the only one at it either. One Wiley Brooks, who heads up ‘The Breatharian Institute Of America’, is equally as bats in my opinion and there are many, many more. This is obviously the ultimate diet and I am amazed they haven’t been shut down. How on earth can you encourage people to ‘live on light’ and not be accountable if anything happens to them? In a world where the holy grail appears to be a Size Zero, surely these people need bringing to book.

Clearly ‘Breatharianism’ is beyond extreme and obviously mental, but I think we have all been guilty of trying some pretty ludicrous diets over the years. But why do we do it? Why do we jump on one diet after the next, regardless of how irrational they are? In truth, don’t we already know exactly what we need to do in order to drop the weight and get healthy? Wouldn’t it be fair to say that you could write down at least ten different ways to lose weight that – if you followed them – would all work? Could you not also design yourself an exercise programme that – if you followed it – would make you lean and fit? I think that we are intelligent enough to realize that if we ate nothing but cabbage for three weeks we would lose weight (and most of our friends probably) and that if we ate loads of fruit and veg and drank the fine juices they contain, we would all be extremely healthy.

I knew exactly what to do to get into shape and get healthy, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t. What I didn’t know was how to stop eating crap and be happy about it. I knew how to stop eating rubbish and be miserable about it – I had a Gold medal in that one – but how the hell do you change what you eat and be happy about it? The problem is, we have all simply been going about it the wrong way.