Freedom from the Diet Trap: Slim for Life

In order for you to see this clearly, and before we even attempt to make any changes, we need to debunk the clap-trap that you’ve been bombarded with for years about food and health. ‘Stuff’ that is now stored in your head and your conscious and subconscious doesn’t even question it as fact, it just takes it as read that it is. The biggest problem is we believe a lot of what we have heard over the years about nutrition, diets, and health because it is put across by ‘experts’. The question I want you to ask is: is it possible that some of the experts were taught incorrectly themselves? Is it possible that we just have too much information about food and nutrition? Is it possible that we have literally been blinded by science? Is it possible we have over complicated the issue so much that we can’t see the wood for the trees?

I ask you to set aside what you believe to be ‘fact’ and read what I am about to write with an extremely open mind. It is time to simplify the whole business about what we should eat, what quantity we should eat, what time we should eat and what is best for us by unloading our minds of pieces of so-called vital health information, which, plain and simply …

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WE DON’T NEED TO KNOW! (#ulink_be39382f-d97f-55fc-8c7e-05d231e93eec)

What is your body fat ratio? What is your resting heart rate? Do you know? What is a bioflavonoid? What is riboflavin? Do you know? How many calories are there in a banana? How much protein do you need daily? How many vitamins are there? What is the best source of calcium? What does vitamin K do for you? Which has more vitamin C – an orange or a green pepper? What is a ketone? How does ketosis work? Do you know which foods contain vitamin P? What is your body mass index? What is your metabolic rate? If you do not know the answer to these questions – good! We don’t need to know.

A little over one hundred years ago we didn’t even know what a vitamin was, but we still got here didn’t we? A gorilla doesn’t know how many vitamins or minerals there are in a banana or whether it contains any calcium or protein: why don’t they know? Because they don’t need to know!

There are no nutritionists or dieticians in the wild, how do they cope? How do animals manage to keep so fit and excess fat free without knowing things like ‘their resting heart rate’ or without ever wearing a heart rate monitor to show what ‘zone’ they are in? With no dieticians on hand or fitness instructors, it almost makes you wonder how on earth they know what to eat to be healthy or how to stay trim and fit. Well I say it makes us wonder, but that’s not true. We fully expect all wild animals on earth to instinctively know what to eat, when to eat and what to do to be fighting fit. We don’t expect them to have to read books on the subject of food or to seek ‘qualified’ advice. We are under no illusion at all that their intuition, provided by whoever or whatever created us, is the best guide to health and healing foods.

So this begs the question, why do men and women, who are apparently the most intelligent beings on earth, not expect to know these simple things for ourselves? Why is there so much confusion over what we should eat and how to get fit? The answer is simple really; too much knowledge; too much advertising; too much peer pressure; too many conflicting books; too many people with letters before and after their name; and too much brainwashing and conditioning from people with vested interests as their number one focus.

There is no advertising, brainwashing or ‘intellectual’ knowledge in the wild. Animals eat foods that were specifically designed for them. They also eat when they are genuinely hungry and they stop when they are full. They are perfectly happy eating the diet laid down by nature for it fully furnishes their body with everything it needs and they love the taste and smell. Wild animals are also not concerned about how much they weigh on a daily basis, nor what size fur they are. Why? Because all of their own kind are the same size and shape. If a giraffe became extremely abnormally fat would we need to test its blood pressure, put it on a scale or take a sample of its poo (Gillian McKeith!) to see if something was wrong with it? Or do you think that intuitively we would just know?

When I look back it seems strange that despite being what I consider to be a reasonably intelligent person, I would do things like jump on a set of scales to see if I was packing a bit too much on the weight front. Did I not already know? The only reason I jumped on them in the first place was because I already knew I had, I just wanted to know by how much. Again, could I not see by how much? Did my bulges not tell me? Did the fact my shirt buttons were popping not tell me enough or the fact I couldn’t squeeze into my jeans? All weighing scales do is confirm the obvious to us and to everyone else around us. As mental as this sounds I would even get on the scales slowly sometimes in a desperate, nonsensical attempt to weigh less. Did I honestly think that by getting on the scales slowly I would not be as fat as I was? What the flipping hell was wrong with me? After working with hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world over the years it was somewhat of a relief to see I wasn’t the only one who did such incredibly bizarre, irrational things. I believe all the ‘intellectual’ knowledge we are bombarded with makes us do things that are flipping bonkers. When I see your average bloke running around the park or on a treadmill with a heart rate monitor around their chest and looking at their special watch to see if they are keeping in the ‘fat burning zone’ I do wonder if we have all taken leave of our senses.

Talking of which, here’s a perfectly true story which illustrates what I mean. A friend of mine was on one of her many ‘diets’ some years back. On visiting her about a week or so into her ‘new’ diet, I noticed that there was a large chocolate cake, half eaten, on a plate next to her. To be honest I was quite glad because I know what a complete waste of mental torture time diets are. I asked her if she was still on her diet (assuming she wasn’t) and to my surprise she said ‘yes’. I said what about the half-eaten cake? What I heard next has gone down in history: ‘It’s okay’, she explained ‘because I weighed myself before I ate it and I weighed myself afterwards and guess what? – there was not an ounce of difference’. I wish I was joking, but that really is a true story.

I realize that most people haven’t done something as bats as that in order to justify their intake of food, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of perfectly intelligent people going places on a weekly basis and actually paying for someone to weigh them – paying for someone to tell them what is already painfully obvious to them and everyone else. Although it may not seem like it at first glance, weighing yourself all the time is certainly on a par with the half a cake thing.

I went to Weight Watchers many years ago for a couple of meetings. The ‘leader’ was actually very good. But seriously, what the hell were we all doing there? We were standing in line waiting to be weighed. At the time I attended if someone had lost weight from the week before, they would ring a bell and the group would do what I call a ‘Ricky Lake’; they would literally clap and yell. Now I am all for encouraging and giving praise, but what about those who hadn’t lost any weight. You feel bad enough as it is going in to one of those places – the last thing you need is to be made an object of pity. I am aware that Weight Watchers no longer do the bell thing, but they do still weigh you, along with nearly every other diet group.

Scales chain you to a diet mentality and they can be deceptive. Sometimes people look slimmer and feel healthier, but when they jump on the scales they see little or no change and so start to feel depressed. But we should sod the scales, it’s how you look and feel that is the real measure of success. What many people fail to take into account, and the reason I am so against the antiquated BMI scale, is that:

Fat takes up five times more room on the body than muscle but muscle is a lot heavier than fat

If you drop fat but increase your muscle, your scales could well stay the same, but your shape is so much thinner. Weight is not the issue, it’s all about the physical shape you are in. To free yourself of diet mentality you will also need to free yourself from the scales. Go for the ‘look and feel’ measure of success, it’s a lot more accurate. Throwing away your scales can be one of the most liberating processes in gaining freedom from the diet trap.

We not only use scales to weigh ourselves, but also to weigh the food we eat in order to try to control our calories – and again we have been doing this for so long we don’t question the sanity of it. But seriously, what are we doing? You don’t ever see a gorilla weigh bananas before it eats them to check it’s not overeating and you certainly never see a squirrel weighing its nuts (OK perhaps a bad analogy).

‘A CALORIE IS A CALORIE’ IS A LOAD OF OLD TOSH

The problem is that we have seen people doing these things for years so we just tend to follow suit without questioning what we are doing. Calories are a great example. Calories are one of if not the most meaningless gauges for health we have ever obsessed over. Unfortunately, the ‘how many calories does that contain’ mantra is so ingrained in us, that many people find it difficult to nigh on impossible to let it go. What is a calorie anyway? Do you know? Does anyone who hasn’t studied this subject in depth know? It’s actually the amount of energy (heat) needed to raise one gram of water by one degree centigrade. In other words – we really don’t need to know. Again there is not one wild animal alive that knows how many calories are in the food they are eating for the same simple reason – they do not need to know. They don’t know the recommended daily calorie intake for a female or male version of their species either, they just seem to know what to do – how very odd. I wouldn’t mind if the amount of calories we consume is a guaranteed way of controlling obesity, but it isn’t. Between 1976 and 2000, Americans lowered their fat consumption by 11 per cent and also lowered their calorie intake by 4 per cent. Yet what has happened to the weight of that particular nation? Obesity has risen by 31 per cent in the same period, proving two major misconceptions:

A) The fat you eat doesn’t add up to fat on you, and

B) The more calories one eats doesn’t always mean more fat on you

I do realize that because we have been in the ‘calories are king’ mentality for so long there will no doubt be many people (particularly those in the nutritional field) who will be barking at the book at this moment. I did say an open mind was required for this book and that I would be challenging some strong beliefs. The point, however, is not so much to disprove the calorie theory, but to illustrate the nonsense of it all: intelligent humans staring at packets of snacks at lunch time declaring to whoever will listen its calorie content. In truth, knowing about calories, even if it were true, hasn’t got us anywhere. Other than obsession and obesity.

If you are thinking that we are better off knowing about all aspects of nutrition and calories, ask yourself why? We apparently know more about ‘nutrition’ now than ever in history, yet heart disease is still the number one killer disease in Western society and we suffer from more self inflicted diseases than any wild animal on earth.

We not only worry about this nutrition ‘stuff’ but industries have been built on our fears. We spend millions of pounds on vitamin and mineral tablets every year in the UK alone. And why are we popping pills and rattling down the street? Simply to try and counter the effects of the processed and de-natured food we are consuming. But what about the pills themselves, haven’t they also been processed in some way? Aren’t they also de-natured? I had a journalist from a famous magazine recently ask me as I was making a wonderful smoothie, ‘Is this a good replacement for vitamin pills?’ I thought she was joking, but no. It appears we are so far removed from nature that some people now think fresh fruit and veg are the ‘alternative’ to vitamin pills. I did point out that vitamin pills are indeed meant as an alternative to real nutrition, but it went completely over her head. I am not against all supplements or indeed all vitamin and mineral pills – with over farming unfortunately in twenty-first century Britain it’s often the only way to make up for the shortfall of vital minerals in our food. What I find crazy is the fact we have bastardised our food so much that we now have vitamin pills – when you think about it is kind of crazy. The danger here more than anything is that people believe as long as they get some vitamin pills down them they are free to eat crap. This is the real potential danger of such pills.

Blinded by Science

Did you know there are 40,000 phytochemicals in one tomato? What is a phytochemical? It’s a name for a vitamin that they haven’t formally named yet. Are there really 40,000 vitamins in one tomato? I don’t actually know and I don’t care because as long as I get it into my body, I don’t need to know. Who counted them anyway? Your body doesn’t care whether you call them vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, or zookinoids – it simply wants them and desperately needs them.

Fruits and vegetables, as a whole, contain every single vitamin and mineral that we have found a name for and God knows how many more we haven’t. They apparently keep finding new and amazing disease-fighting agents in all fruit and veg. Recently they’ve discovered some real beauties. Ever heard of beta-carotene? Well now they’ve found alpha-carotene. They have also discovered phenols, indoles, aromatic isothiocyanates, terpenes, and organo-sulphur: all of which are part of the new category of ‘anutrients’. NEW? These scientists can shove together whatever letters they like but what they have found is far from new. They seem to want to get the credit for something nature produces. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds have been the same since the dawn of time and everything we need to furnish our bodies is to be found within them. When they do discover a ‘new’ phytochemical in a particular fruit or vegetable they tend to try to isolate it, extract it, recreate it, process it, and put it in a pill. That is the equivalent of taking just one spark plug and the oil from a car in the belief you have found the most important components of the vehicle because it can’t run without them.

BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!

Most of the time they also try and blind us with science by using what I call blah, blah, blah language. I am talking about people who will use the longest, most obscure words available to describe something which is actually very simple. However, they have studied it for many years, have spent flipping great wedges of cash on their education and are going to let you know they have by completely losing you in whatever text they write. I call it blah, blah, blah language.

It is about time we all took our brainwashed heads out of the sand. We just do not need to know what our ideal weight is (according to some man-made scale). We should not be weighing our food to see how much we should eat. Nor do we need to concern ourselves with vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, our body fat ratio, our resting heart rate, nor how many calories are in the bag of crisps. It is time to simplify the whole business of eating and health, remove the fear of changing your diet, and find physical and mental freedom for life. We will not achieve this by worrying about vitamin K, B6, C, D, K, Z, protein, calcium, or what foods are low fat. We will achieve our goal for life by not concerning ourselves with all this nonsense, but rather by removing the many years of brainwashing, conditioning, and manipulation by BIG FOOD and tapping into our genuine freedom of choice.

You already know why you shouldn’t be eating the foods you are and why you should eat the foods you are not. However, that doesn’t matter because everybody with a food problem knows this too, yet this knowledge does not help them. It certainly didn’t help me. All it did was add pressure and make me feel stupid and weak-willed. And what would I do if I was under pressure, feeling down or a little stressed? Yep – EAT!

The problem is that although we know all the benefits of making the change, we also believe that we have to go through pain to get there and stay there. As I will repeat throughout this book, you will not have to endure any pain at all because it’s easy to lose weight, gain health, have the body of your dreams and all the energy to enjoy it. You simply need to get into the right frame of mind, then you can easily get into the right frame of body. You will only have to suffer a lifetime of pain if you don’t make the change – not if you do.

So now you know what you don’t need to know, but in order to remove all the brainwashing and release you from certain ‘junkie foods’, there is a lot you really do need to know. The first and most important thing is the nature of the diet and food trap. What really compels us to eat things that we then regret almost instantaneously? What makes us eat foods that we know for certain are causing excess fat, ill health, depression, stress, and premature death? In other words …

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WHY DO PEOPLE EAT JUNK FOOD? (#ulink_85fb009a-622e-58fc-a8a9-f2348830a7b4)

The answer is very simple. It is a combination of just two reasons:

1) The advertising, brainwashing, conditioning, and mind manipulation we have been subjected to since birth (the mental side).

2) An empty insecure physical feeling due to malnutrition, withdrawal, low blood sugar, or a combination of the three – caused by the ‘food’ and/or drinks themselves (the physical side).

These two factors add up to addiction.

The good news is that virtually any kind of addiction, contrary to extremely popular belief, is easy to kick. However, it is only easy to kick once you have a full understanding how that particular addiction works and the nature of that particular trap.

The main problem is the first of the two factors: the many, many years of conditioning, brainwashing, mind manipulation, and total misinformation that we have been subjected to by the advertisers and so-called experts on the subject of health. This is really the cause of the problem and this is what needs to be fully removed in order to gain freedom. The lethargy, excess fat, health problems etc. are simply symptoms of the cause.

Fat Profits

It is time to wake up and realize that the livelihoods of many people depend on keeping us none the wiser when it comes to just how harmful and addictive certain foods and drinks can be. It is often their job to keep you hooked – without your knowledge of course – on what I will continue to refer to as drug foods or junkie foods. They are constantly trying to change the way you think in order to give you the very false impression that you are choosing to eat and drink their druggy-like foods. As I mentioned earlier, and as I will repeat, you cannot have freedom of choice without the freedom to also refuse. When do we know it’s our genuine choice?

The tobacco companies played the same game for years. They kept very quite about the fact that their product is addictive, controls lives and kills people – and all the while it was advertised on television and radio (and of course the government got its share of the profits). Many doctors even suggested smoking to their patients as a good way to relieve stress from their lives. Doctors at the time were actually suggesting a known stimulant will relax a person. It is now known that many tobacco companies were deliberately adding chemicals to tobacco in order to make then even more addictive. My question is a simple one: is it possible the same thing is happening in some areas of the food and beverage industry? Is it possible that there could be some unscrupulous characters in the industry who would, like the tobacco companies, deliberately add chemicals to their food simply in order to make them less satiating and thus sell more to an unsuspecting public?

We have a situation where it is fairly widely accepted that the vast majority of ‘food’ sold in a McDonald’s isn’t exactly the healthiest on the planet. Yet some years back, planning permission was given to have a McDonald’s in the grounds of the Tower of London. BIG FOOD often have good contacts and, like the tobacco companies of old, they seem to be able to get their food sold in the most unlikely of places. Having a McDonald’s in a sacred place such as the Tower Of London is bad enough, but did you know there’s even a McDonald’s in Guy’s hospital in London? Yes, a McDonald’s in a blooming hospital!

You may think it’s unfair to put junk food in the same category as cigarettes. After all cigarettes kill people, often control their lives, cost them a fortune and are highly addictive. But where exactly is the difference? As a nation the UK spends £7 million a day on fast food. Second only of course to the good ol’ U.S of A. This money is spent on ‘foods’ that are known to be addictive and are known to cause all kinds of diseases, including cancer and heart disease – the two biggest killers in Western society. Just table salt alone is known to kill over 40,000 people a year in the UK, that’s more than 100 people a day. This is virtually the same number as alcohol. White refined carbohydrates and refined sugar are known to be a major cause of diabetes and a whole host of other diseases (which I will explain later). Aspartame (the artificial sweetener found in diet drinks etc.) has been linked to ninety-two different adverse symptoms and all kinds of health problems. This stuff is known to tighten blood vessels, cause additional thirst and has even been linked to brain tumours. Yet not only is it being sold as a ‘food’ stuff, but is promoted as a product that will help people who have a weight problem. (I will cover aspartame and products like it in depth later so you’ll never want to touch them again.)

The point is this, in my estimation the wrong kinds of food overall actually kill more people than all other drugs combined. And yes that includes heroin, crack, cocaine and even cigarettes. Yet there is not one single drug food product that has a warning on it.

We banned direct cigarette advertising, yet BIG FOOD spend literally billions advertising products that have been linked to major diseases and hardly any restrictions are put on them. These are ‘foods’ that can and do cause premature death, just like cigarettes; control people’s lives, just like cigarettes; and products which, I estimate, slowly kill two-thirds of those who are hooked on them (which is more than cigarettes).

You cannot open a magazine, switch on your TV, or go to the cinema without being bombarded with images of drug-type foods. The government of course is not about to do anything about it as they earn billions in tax revenue from people’s addictions to these heart-disease causing, stroke-inducing so-called foods. Their argument is always the same and runs along the lines of ‘people are not stupid, they know the facts, we advise them to eat five portions of fruit and veg a day. If they choose to eat junk, then it’s up to them’. Yet they make it law to wear a seat belt. Why isn’t it our choice then? Because people are not addicted to putting on or leaving off their seat belts, but they are addicted to trashy foods. To say to someone like Barry Austin, (reportedly the fattest man in Britain) who I believe, at the age of 29, was 50 stone (317 kg) in weight and had a 82 in. (208 cm) waist, that it’s his genuine choice to be like that is ludicrous. Given the genuine choice I imagine he would love to end his addiction to crap foods and he would love to be slim.

You Black Tar Nicotine Loaded Bastard