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The Food Philosophy
Losing weight seems to be the most difficult task anyone can undertake.
Women, for example, can expect to spend more than £150,000 during their lifetime on trying - and failing - to get in shape.
A huge 98 per cent of dieters fail to lose weight in the long term and the average UK female spends £807 per pound of lost weight - only to regain the weight, and then spend another £807 on losing it again!
This might sound overwhelmingly negative, but don't lose hope because there is an answer - and one that's so much easier and more pleasant than dieting.
Break Free
If you have problems with controlling what you eat and are stuck on the yo-yo dieting treadmill, there are several things you can do to break free and start looking to a future where you're mentally and physically healthy, in control of food and feeling good about yourself - at the same time as losing weight.
Here's how you can begin to let go of dieting and make some real changes in how you think and feel about food and weight.
You don’t have a weight problem: you have an overeating problem
The first step in succeeding at 'losing weight' is to look at the real problem, as most people never actually do this. You'll probably have always measured your success in weight loss but if you are to find a real solution, you will have to understand and acknowledge that being overweight is just a symptom of the real problem. The actual problem itself is the action of overeating.
Most overeaters eat compulsively. Compulsive overeating can't be dealt with by dieting to lose weight. That's why so many try and fail.
The only sane and sensible thing to do is to stop concentrating on trying to lose weight and focus your efforts on learning how to stop overeating. Your weight (and your health) will take care of itself.
Paradoxically, dealing with overeating - not weight - is the ONLY way to lose weight in the long term.
Become self responsible
Another problem with dieting is that it takes away your self-responsibility and you end up not making ANY decisions at all. The 'diet police' decide what you should eat and how much you should eat and you follow the instructions like a robot.
If you've been dieting for a long time, you might have no idea how to choose how to eat for yourself. This means that you're always looking for instructions from outside about what and how much to eat.
You might have no real idea, for example, when your body needs food, might not even know what hunger feels like or if you are hungry you might feel panicky because your diet says you're not 'allowed' to eat until later.
Whenever you make a choice about anything in your life what do you do? You weigh up the pros and cons. You think: 'I could do this or that.'
Then you ask yourself: 'What's the best outcome for me? Which one of these is better for me?'
Then you decide which one you want to choose based on which one has the most advantages for you.
Imagine if someone else took over all of your other decisions and you couldn't choose anything without some sort of instruction book or some method that you have to live by.
By the book
Imagine if you took the same amount of self-responsibility as you do about eating when you're deciding who to marry, for example?
'Darling, will you marry me?'
'I don't know, hold on a minute I'll have to flick through my copy of the South Beach Lifestyle to find out. Plus, my counsellor says I should abstain from all marriage because once I start I won't be able to stop.'
That's how odd it is that we live in this strange 'diet' world because all of our decisions about food are taken from something OUTSIDE of us. We are not deciding anything for real.
All real decisions are based on free will and choice. If you don't act on your own free will, you will continue overeating for the rest of your life, constantly looking for someone else to give you some sort of solution to your problem.
