If I could get as much pleasure and satisfaction from eating fruit, salad, vegetables, and drinking carrot juice as I do eating steak and chips and drinking Coke, then I would do it – who wouldn’t?
Well it transpires you can and the change really is simple. I know at this stage that may sound like rubbish, especially for those who have tried ‘everything’ in the past, but I did say at the start that an open mind is vital for success here. Not only will you get just as much pleasure and satisfaction from your new way of eating, but infinitely more so. These days I wouldn’t even let you pay me to eat a McDonald’s or Burger King, yet for years these were my ‘brand’ of food and I ate them daily.
When I wake up in the morning now and head straight for my juicer and blender, I do so not because I ‘have to’ or because I need to lose weight due to some restrictive diet. I do so because I wouldn’t dream of doing anything else now, it has bizarrely become my choice; I actually want to do it. When I choose a meal at a restaurant now I actually look for tasty salad!
I am writing this with some surprise because a few years ago, the first thing I ‘had’ to do in the morning was stick the kettle on to give myself a caffeine ‘boost’. I now know this was to try and get me over my junkie food hangover (more about that later). I would then eat a big bowl of cereal, several rounds of toast and maybe a couple of boiled eggs. At the weekends my breakfast consisted of everything that was on offer at JJ’s café. The great British breakfast – the bedrock of a good heart attack as they say.
I used to have images of people who owned a juicer, drank carrot juice and ate leaves. One which perhaps you have at the moment. I would think ‘What sad, boring people – what on earth do they do for fun?’ But how deluded was I? As if I was having enormous amounts of fun being a fat, tired, and lethargic person, hating the way I felt and looked on an almost daily basis. As if I was enjoying a life where I was constantly battling with my intake of food or the latest ‘diet’. I believe this is where we all have got it wrong. I always thought that if I stopped eating the junk I would be making a sacrifice and if I did eat overeat and/or eat junk it was somehow a wonderful life. I thought if I drank fresh juice, ate good food, created the body I wanted, felt light, and had the energy I required to live my dreams that I would somehow be missing out, I would be making massive sacrifices to get what I wanted. But the question is, what sacrifices? I don’t think we ever stop to actually ask that very important question. Whenever I overate it would always be followed by thoughts of, ‘I wish I hadn’t done that’ or ‘why did I do that’. I never really enjoyed the food either as it would be gone in seconds. I was eyeing up the next mouthful before I had eaten the one on my fork! I was setting myself up for a lifetime of misery, lethargy, and being overweight all for literally seconds of what I thought was genuine pleasure – even though I hated myself soon afterwards. I would hardly call that a fair trade off.
I often felt bloated after eating a pile of what I deemed as ‘the most pleasurable food on earth’. My physical problems were clearly caused by the amount of the foods I was eating and the quantities I consumed. These foods would always seem nice in my mind before I ate them, but as soon as I did, I wished I hadn’t. That’s not true satisfaction; it’s the complete opposite.
Since changing my diet I now see the truth – there was nothing special about these foods at all, it was one incredibly clever illusion, one which I believe has deluded millions around the world. Like any illusion, it appears extremely real until it gets shattered. That is precisely what this book is about; page by page it will gradually chip away at the illusion until it is completely shattered and that ‘light-bulb’ moment will be yours for the taking.
Contrary to what we have been conditioned to believe it is extremely easy to switch your diet as opposed to going on one, we have all simply been looking at the wrong way for so many years we find it hard to believe it can be ridiculously easy.
A Sweet Change For The Better
For example, I know many people who used to love sugar in their tea and at the time would never drink it without, but now wouldn’t pay you for a cup with even a grain in it. Why not? What has changed? The tea and the sugar have always remained exactly the same. The difference is they have simply trained themselves to like tea and coffee without sugar. The process is not hard; in fact it usually takes all of a week to get used to any new taste. The week is not painful, just a bit strange at first like any change. The coffee without sugar does not taste wonderful at first but after a while it soon starts to taste better to the person than it did with sugar in. The point that I am making is that the vast majority of people who make this change, would now never drink tea or coffee with sugar in it again. Not because they can’t, or because they are being forced not to, but because they have no desire to any more. This is an extremely important point to understand in order to reach ‘Food Freedom’ mentality. They aren’t on a ‘no sugar in tea diet’. In other words they don’t stare longingly at people adding sugar to their tea and feel envious because they can’t have it. The reason for this is simple. They can have sugar in their tea, but are now choosing not to. Diet mentality is one of, ‘I want, but I can’t have’ (which is enough to drive anyone of strong will, crazy. Yes strong will, I will expand on this later) but when you change your diet you have a, ‘I can, but I don’t actually want to’ mentality. When you have this mentality and have changed your diet as opposed to gone on a diet, there is no need to use any form of willpower, discipline, or self-control. In fact, those who do stop sugar in their tea and have done so for a little while, act as if you have poisoned them if you put some in (which in a way you have). The point is clear and simple: by changing their brand they will never have to use willpower, discipline, or self-control not to have sugar in their tea again. In other words – they are genuinely free to choose.
YOU CANNOT HAVE FREEDOM OF CHOICE WITHOUT THE FREEDOM TO REFUSE
This is a theme I will be repeating throughout the book – ‘you cannot have freedom of genuine choice, without the freedom also to be able to refuse’. It is interesting to observe that people who are mentally on a diet detest it so much because they feel their genuine freedom of choice has been removed. What they don’t seem to realize is that in many cases they aren’t actually genuinely choosing to eat the foods causing the health and excess fat problems anyway. They often want to stop the diet in order to get back to the freedom of choice they believed they enjoyed. This is an illusion for, as I will repeat, you simply cannot have genuine freedom of choice without genuine freedom to refuse. If people could simply choose to refuse, then diets would be obsolete and no one on earth would have a weight problem. People would simply exercise their genuine freedom of choice to refuse. If you could genuinely choose to have or not to have, then you wouldn’t be reading this book. The reality is our choices are being made for us. BIG FOOD and BIG DRINK – just like the tobacco companies over forty years ago – are adding chemicals to our ‘food’ and ‘drinks’ in order to make us feel hungrier faster. Haven’t you ever wondered why logically you just couldn’t simply stop eating certain things, even when it has gone completely against your intelligent rational judgement?
Addiction and logic don’t go together, if they did no intelligent person would have ever smoked after it became clear it causes cancer and nobody would continue overeating and/or eating rubbish knowing it makes them fat, ill, miserable and can cause premature death. Logically, if this type of eating made people happy, everyone who is overweight would all be leading blissfully happy lives.
BRITAIN’S FATTEST TEEN
Coincidentally as I write this book a teenager has made front page headlines in the Sun newspaper in the UK. Georgia Davis has the unenviable title of being ‘Britain’s Fattest Teen’ weighing it at 33 stone (209 kg) at only 15 years of age. Consuming between eight to twelve thousand calories a day it’s easy to see how she got to be that big. The big mistake people make, including Georgia herself, is that it is not her choice to eat like this. There is no way on earth this poor and desperate girl genuinely chooses to eat the amount she does and be the size she is. If she had genuine freedom of