DIETING MAKES YOU FAT!

Why do we bother eating?

What a ridiculous question I hear you answer, we have to eat, to stay alive.

Yep, I agree.

So how come, something that is such a life giving force gets treated with so much contempt?

What do I mean by that, well lets see, there’s the eating of instant junk food, the mindless filling ourselves with food as fuel. The really horrible pigging out whilst doing something else, so we don’t even notice what we’re eating. The I’m so bored I’ll just eat behaviour. I’m so angry I’ll show them, eating. I’m so unhappy food is the only thing that makes me feel OK, it’s my friend.

NO, NO, NO, NO.

What ever happens to food is something special, it is a gift for our bodies, that we should respect and enjoy every mouthful, knowing that we are giving our bodies something that will help sustain life?

Where did we loose our way?

We lost our way, I believe because of rationing during the Second World War and afterwards. Those of us old enough to be affected by rationing, not that we may have any memory of it but it affected our childhoods. In that, because there was so little food, everything on your plate had to be eaten. That is in the western culture, this is not the same the world over. There are countries where you have to leave something on your plate to respect local customs, which I’m not familiar enough with to write about other than this.

So there we all were eating all the food on our plates, the nation had just gone through a time of deprivation food wise, as the majority of the available money had gone into the war effort.

When suddenly in 1953 rationing stopped 8 years after the end of the war, and food started appearing more and more in the shops. Suddenly there started to be a selection of foods, prior to unknown. Added to that supermarkets started appearing, which offered all foods under one roof. So stopping the need to walk the length of the high street going into each shop to get whatever particular food it sold.

I remember well as a child, I was born in 1954, walking around Walsall going from the greengrocer, to the fishmonger, the butchers and the special treats of either going into Marks and Spencers for a little luxury item or Sainsburys for cheese. They were both such exciting shops to go in. The selection of shelves laden with all sorts of magical food. Must explain why I still love and use both shops today!!
But the attitude of our parents remained the same, eat everything! They had just lived through a period of near starvation, there were no obese people back in the 1940/50s at all!

The world economy started thriving, food production became, and still is very big business. And we carried on eating, and we haven’t stopped since!

There is of course a socio-economic discussion that could happen about why various people eat various things, which I don’t think is appropriate here, as we have all moved on and it’s only people of my generation who were the first in line for the eat everything attitudes from our parents.

That’s not to say it wasn’t a lesson that went deep inside our psyches and that we have continued to say the same things to following generations, but it does not have the same meaning as it did when I was small.

British food back then was not renowned throughout the world for having high culinary standards! Roast beef being the traditional dish of our country, and over cooked at that, so as a country we were much maligned by other countries that took their food more seriously, such as France or Italy.

Relatively slowly foreign food has entered our culture, I can remember the excitement of getting food from a Chinese take away for the first time, and as for sitting down in a Chinese restaurant well I did that when I was 17years old! The discovery of curry was a wonder, even if my first experiences were after a skinful of lager and the local curry house when I was around 18. You’ll notice there the correct age being used to describe drinking alcohol!!! May not have been entirely true that I didn’t drink it before, but I‘m not admitting that here!

Nowadays every town and large village has a plethora of food outlets selling an amazing array of food from different nationalities. And it seems inconceivable to my sons that there hasn’t always been that much choice as they have grown up with. Equally they are pretty astounded when they find out about mobile phones and computers not being around when I was a child!!

Added to that the high streets have also changed. When I moved into the country town I currently live there were grocers, green grocers, bread shops, butchers, fishmongers; everything could be purchased there, now we still have the bread shops, but only one butchers and the only way you’ll get fresh veg is on market day, as for wanting a tin of beans, forget it, you have to go to a supermarket.

Enough, already what has this got to do with dieting making you fat? Oh yes I was coming on to that honest, just having a bit of a rant first!

So that was really just to set the context of the availability of food and why we may have some of our attitudes to it. But moving on now.

As I stated before we eat food for all sorts of reasons and not all of them to do with being hungry. So if we can almost ignore the idea of eating food when we are really hungry till later and I’ll come back to it at the end, if of course I remember.

One of the main reasons that people overeat, whatever it is the are eating is because they are unhappy. Could be sadness they are feeling, certainly could be anger, and just a general malaise and boredom with their lives is another reason.

So I’ll start with how to change our eating habits and go on to the reasons again later. The first thing that has to be digested (pun intended!) is to learn to respect food, as a life giving force. This means absolutely no more mindless eating at all. Every bit of food that you consume from now on has to be thought about and treated properly.

What do I mean by these statements, well this is where the change comes, you can eat exactly what you want, you can eat as much of it as you want, but it has to be put on a plate and eaten sitting down at a table, preferably using a knife and fork. And whilst you are eating that is all you should be doing, no television, no computer, no book, newspaper…. Nothing!

We eat with our eyes, and our eyes are greedy, so whilst you are chewing whatever is in your mouth you are already getting the next mouthful ready.
This has to stop
From now on in, you’re going to have to eat like your grandmother told you, one mouthful at a time, putting your knife and fork down and only picking them up to get the next mouthful when your mouth is empty. We also have a need for a full plate, so how about starting to use a smaller plate. For example, taking the roast beef dinner, there you have a plate with a couple of slices of meat. hopefully loads if veg, five roast potatoes and four Yorkshire puddings. Do you need all that lot?…. No you don’t, but you do need a full plate, so using a smaller plate you can still have the beef and the veg,( you have to them they’re good for you!) but you can reduce down to two or three roast potatoes, and two Yorkshire puddings.

So now with your reduced food intake, plus eating and savouring each mouthful, you start to become aware slowly of when your stomach is full rather than your eyes. Result is you have to start loosing weight, because you are shrinking your stomach very slowly, controlling your food intake in this way means you should only loose about 1.5 lbs per week ( I’m too old to understand kilos here!) and more importantly it should stay off.

When we initially go on a diet, we cut out all the food we really love to eat, so we break the diet, when that bacon sandwich , chocolate bar, cream cake is just begging to be eaten. Which makes us hate ourselves for being so weak and either we are even more puritanical on ourselves, or we think sod it! I’ll give up.
Neither are going to work! If you go for fast weight lose, yes it works , but your body thinks that it’s been starved and the minute you start eating again it immediately lays down fat stores in case there is another famine and it needs to protect itself. So all your hard work is undone.
And if we give up, then our internalised emotions go into overdrive of self disgust.

If you learn to eat in this way, as I said, you can eat what you want. So if you want a chocolate bar have one, but, yep there had to be a but! You must cut the chocolate bar up into small individual slices , put it on a plate, sit at the table and eat one slice at a time…. Bet you don’t manage a whole ordinary bar of choc, before you start to be bored or feel sick. This means form here on in, when you buy choc you can buy snack size bars, cause you can get 5 slices out of most of them. Which is a perfect amount to eat without hating yourself.

When I eat fish and chips, I use this method, well actually I use it for everything, which is why I stay a size 10/12. But in relation to fish and chips, my youngest son and I have a fish each and a small portion of chips between us, and once I have eaten my handful of chips I’ve had enough. So although I’m eating a food that is not at all slimming, I’m being mindful of how I eat it, especially if I’m really good and leave of most of the batter as well! Now I’m no paragon of virtue, and there are times when I totally eat really badly, but because this is not a diet but a lifestyle change, then I know that if I’ve had a bad day it’s ok cause on balance during the week I’ll catch up.

So this means that yes there are days when neither a vegetable nor a piece of fruit touches my lips, Oh gawd! get the food police round here now! But another day I will eat nothing but fruit and veg. For me it’s about checks and balances and not being neurotic about food. I love food, I love cooking, I love food prepared for me, whether that is the delight of someone else cooking or whether it’s a supermarket dish. It’s all great as long as there is variety. And that I listen to my body tell me when it’s full and I take notice and STOP right then.

Which means that nowadays if I go out to dinner I give myself the freedom not to finish a meal if I‘m full, after all I’m paying for it and it is my duty to look after my own body. It does seem to me that food helpings have grown hugely over the years and I just can’t face that amount of food, so unless I stretch my stomach again to fit it all in, and do I want to get as big as a size 14? No I bloody don’t.

Although this may sound a really silly way to eat, compared to buying into al the diets around , and huge number of slimming foods available. Just ask yourself, would you rather eat a small helping of food you really enjoy following the rules, or a crisp bread with lettuce and a low fat spread? I rest my case!! This doesn’t mean you can’t eat healthily, so it is always a good idea to learn to use skimmed milk, low fat butter, less salt, more fruit and veg, drink less coffee, alcohol etc, etc. The answer is everything in moderation to get maximum enjoyment from it and slow controlled weight lose that stays off.

Lastly we must look at why people eat badly in the first place. We live in an instant fix society, we have a need , then get it fixed as soon as possible. Money is a good case in point, how many of us when we decide that we want a new ‘something’ spend time saving for that ‘something‘. No we go and get a loan, put it on the never, never. Don’t worry about how we’ll afford it, we’ll think about that later. Which goes someway to explain the rather amazing statistics we hear about occasionally, in which every one of us is X number of thousands of pounds in debt.

And when we live like this we treat food in the same way, I’m bored, well I’ll just eat to sort out the feeling….. Does it? No! If your bored, how about getting up of the sofa and going for a walk. Can’t do that I’ve got the kids here, Ok well how about running up and down the stairs till your out of puff. I guarantee you won’t still be feeling bored when you stop, knackered yes, bored no, and what you will have done is moved your brain from wanting to eat something mindlessly.

No stairs….. Oh please, go buy a skipping rope and stop self sabotaging. I don’t care if you’re fat, it’s not my problem, it’s your body. It’s your self disgust that you’re living with. You have to matter to yourself, cause if you don’t matter to you, then what’s the point.

If on the other hand you are sad or angry, then how about stop shovelling that feeling in your mouth and try owning what you feel and working with it in a more positive way by writing it down. How you feel, why you feel, what it is your feeling, who you are feeling it about. It’s so much more slimming than food and so much healthier for you. So a win, win situation all round.