The Silliest, Most Unhelpful Response To Diets

As you know if you've been reading this blog recently, I'm doing Herbalife. With mixed results and another two weeks to go, I'm not making any final judgments until the end. You can read my Herbalife posts here.

However, I have to comment on what to me seems like the silliest response to anyone who announces they're on a diet. What overweight person hasn't heard it? As soon as you say, "not for me thanks I'm doing Atkins (or any of the other diet plan)," someone is going to respond with, "diets are all rubbish, all you need is to eat smaller amounts of healthy food." This is usually said by a slim person.

Whether it's Herbalife, The Cambridge Plan, Atkins, South Beach, Slimming World, Weight Watchers, Billy Connolly (it's not Billy Connolly - what's that woman's name who sells whole pre-packed meals and exercise dvds?), etc... I agree that all of them have a way of eating that you would not want to keep up for the rest of your life. Some are faddy and unhealthy for a long period, some too expensive, and some just too complicated to think about for more than a few months.

But how does it help to tell a fatty that all they need to do is eat smaller amounts of healthy food? Do you think they don't know that it wasn't a healthy diet that made them fat in the first place? Do you not think that if they were able to sustain a diet of smaller amounts of healthy food they would have been doing it for a while and not be fat?

It's not just a matter of willpower. I know fat Jewish women who, if you presented them with a sumptuous buffet and said, "by the way it's not kosher, everything's made with ham or cooked in lard," they would not touch a morsel. However hungry they were and however delicious the food looked, they would not even be tempted. It's not kosher so it's not for them any more than if you'd served a wonderfully presented dish of dog food. Yet they cannot restrain themselves from overeating in any other [kosher] setting.

Nor is it ignorance. Fat people often know more about nutrition than anyone due to years, lifetimes sometimes, of researching the solution to being overweight. They are not fat because they don't know that too many carbs result in too many kilos of fat. They don't eat those excess carbs because they think it's healthy. Fat people eat as compensation for something else in the way that an alcoholic or drug addict is tempted by their own particular poison when certain stress buttons are pushed.

If I'm upset, frustrated, angry (or even just a bit cross), nervous or agitated in any way, I find myself heading to the fridge for comfort. Under stress for long periods of time I've not had a heart attack, migraines, stomach problems, skin eruptions, a stroke, or a nervous breakdown. I've got fat.

The best antidote is to get into the right mindset and cure oneself by eating smaller amounts of healthy food. No Nobel prize for stating the obvious here. However, I bet a Nobel prize would be awarded to the billionaire (and they would become billionaires if they cracked this one) who discovered a sure way to get yourself into that mindset. I've done it a few times in my life and ended up slim and feeling great. In every instance I kept off the weight until I was sabotaged by extreme stress or upset. And every time it took me years to achieve the same mindset that enabled me to lose the weight in the first place. If I could only pinpoint the trigger I'd be writing the book as we speak.

In fact I did manage to lose a stone (14lbs) in the four weeks before I started a month of Hebalife. In my case it was desperation followed by ten days of a urine/kidney infection that left me without any appetite. Experience has taught me that a few weeks of eating smaller amounts of healthy food is not enough to keep me on the straight and narrow for the long haul.

I chose to do Herbalife because it would give me a strict programme to follow, without being complicated (involving too many choices or loads of preparation), for another month. Never mind how effective Herbalife is as a nutritional product, for me the success would come from knowing I'd paid quite a lot of money for it so I jolly well wasn't going to waste that, and from adding to my 14lbs of weight already lost as extra motivation to continue losing afterwards.

For those who cannot get themselves into the right mindset, diets like these (choose any of them, they all work if you stick to it) get you to the starting post without all the excess baggage. In the end if you want to stay slim and healthy, of course you must eat smaller amounts of healthy food. Nothing will take the place of changing your eating habits for life. But how much easier it is to do this from the starting line of being fit and healthy. How much easier it is to eat healthily without the added burdens of depression, low self esteem, ill health, restricted mobility and general sluggishness of being overweight.

So no we haven't been conned into paying for rubbish (rubbish is all the processed and fast food we might have been buying beforehand) or even wasting money on something we can do ourselves without paying for it (I clean my own home but I wouldn't ridicule those who employ a cleaner and don't do it themselves). Sometimes you need a little help to get started and you pay whatever takes. For me it's three weeks of guaranteed not falling off the diet wagon. And when I've reached my target weight, then it might be useful and helpful to remind me to eat smaller amounts of healthy food.