Only Fat People Skip Breakfast: The Refreshingly Different Diet Book. Lee Janogly
you think I’m labouring this point—I am! If you don’t accept accountability, if you insist that you ‘can’t help’ being overweight, nothing will ever change, plain and simple. By convincing yourself that you are a victim and ‘can’t stop eating’ (of course you can), that you ‘really try’ (obviously not hard enough) and that you ‘hardly eat anything’ (who are you kidding?), you will stay stuck on the diet/binge seesaw for the foreseeable future.
The only person you can rely on to change your life is you. You have free choice. You make the decisions about what you are going to eat; you take responsibility for your shape, your health, your level of fitness and the thoughts that govern all of the above. Once you acknowledge that you are in charge of your life and your eating, it will happen.
Self-choice isn’t deprivation – it’s freedom.
Get Positive
To get a clearer picture of how things will be, you have to move towards something positive, not just away from something negative. Create a picture in your mind: in this corner there is ‘you’—overweight, feeling heavy and lumpy and hating yourself. This is a very painful state to be in. Over in that corner is ‘you’ as you want to be—slim, light and attractive and feeling good about yourself. No pain there. When you have embarked on a weight-loss programme before, you have simply gone on a restrictive diet without a clear plan or strategy. At the beginning, your motivation is obviously high. As the pounds disappear you begin to move away from the ‘fat you’ corner and the pain lessens slightly. Then when the hunger and cravings start to kick in, you go back to your old habits and begin to eat a ‘little bit’ of the fattening foods you ate before. Soon you get sucked back into the fat corner because nothing has really changed. You have simply gone on a diet without changing your behaviour or your lifestyle, without including any extra activity into your life, without a specific strategy for change.
If you keep on doing the same, you will keep on getting the same. However, once you stop being reactive and make a definite commitment to change your way of life, you will gradually and steadily start to move towards the positive corner, and become the slim ‘you’ that you want to be. In this way, you are not just moving away from something negative—the ‘fat you’—but towards something positive—the ‘slim you’.
To do this you have to be very clear about how your life will be different once you have lost the excess weight. What aspects of your life would you have to overcome or change in order to become the person you want to be? What are you doing right now – or not doing—to impede your efforts to get slim?
Negative thoughts produce negative results. Positive thoughts produce positive results.
Be Mentally Slim
To be a slim person, you have to live like a slim person. You have to see yourself as a slim person. This means having a very clear picture in your mind of what it is like to be a slim person, how to behave like a slim person, how to present yourself as a slim person, all the time. You have to mentally turn into that person. Even though you are not there yet, by pretending that you are, by acting as though the weight has already gone, you are programming yourself to succeed.
A slim person is not someone who is on a diet. She does not wake up and tell herself that she will be ‘good’ today. Acting slim means that when you look in the mirror you don’t dwell on the rolls of fat round your waist and hips. You simply check that the clothes you are wearing look OK and move on. It means you don’t call yourself names like ‘greedy pig’ and tell yourself you look ‘fat and revolting’.
Slim people see themselves as attractive and energetic. They automatically veer towards healthy food and limit their intake of the more fattening varieties. They would rather eat two squares of good quality chocolate than gorge on several bars of the cheaper kind.
Slim people do not have a problem making food choices. They do not agonize over whether they should or shouldn’t eat some fattening item of food in case it starts them eating for the rest of the day. They simply avoid eating obviously fattening food because they know it will make them fat. Fat people know this too but always seem to be amazed and depressed when it happens.
The rules for living like a slim person are very simple:
Once you know what you really want—a slim, healthy body—getting there takes resolve and commitment. If you have spent most of your life just moaning about what you don’t want— how you hate being fat, how you can’t stop eating—then simply making the commitment to be slim will seem unnatural.
Lose the ‘fat’ thoughts in your head and you © will lose the fat on your thighs.
Stop Lying
All bingers lie – to themselves and to others. Seventeen-stone clients swear to me that nothing passes their lips except lettuce and cottage cheese. Come on now, you know biscuits make you fat and you also know that one biscuit won’t do that. But taking the view that ‘one biscuit won’t make a difference’ leads to ‘just a few nuts/an ice cream/one slice of pizza/two squares of chocolate—won’t make a difference’. Individually, maybe not—if you are already slim. But collectively, every day, they do. So why are you surprised when this happens?
‘I’ll start again tomorrow.’ Why? What makes you think it will be easier tomorrow, especially if you are planning to activate your sugar-craving with an almighty binge for the rest of the day? Stop kidding yourself. Are you going to wait until you are another stone heavier before you start doing something about it? There is only one life; this is not a dress rehearsal for the slim life you should be living. Only you can bring that about.
As Professor Ben Fletcher of the Framework of Internal Transformation (FIT) says: ‘You get what you expect. If you are not getting what you want, you have to change your thinking slightly. Because we are such habitual creatures, we cocoon ourselves in the world that we had yesterday. We like the comfort of what we know. People have the illusion that they are flexible, and this is especially true of leaders, politicians and chief executives.