a touch of ‘stating the bloody obvious’ would somehow help her. If anything, trying to scare any kind of addict off their drug rarely if ever works, in fact it usually has the opposite effect. For example one of the times a smoker will reach for a cigarette is when they are stressed and uptight. I remember my doctor telling me that if I continued smoking my lungs would collapse. I was so scared and stressed when I came out what do you think was the first thing I did? Yes – light a fag to help calm me down! The same principle applies to drug food. You tell someone like Georgia that she will die unless she changes, it won’t help her. She will simply find somewhere to cut off from the world and eat. Why? Because, as I will repeat, addiction and logic have no place together. Georgia said, ‘I can’t walk any more than a few steps without getting out of breath and a few months ago I developed type 2 diabetes. When I look in the mirror I feel sad and go to my bedroom and cry. I know it’s partly my fault. But it’s so hard to stop eating.’
But it’s not hard to stop eating apples, bananas, grapes, cucumber, sardines, or spinach – even when people love these foods. Why? Because they are not drug-like foods and they don’t create a hole, they genuinely feed the body. Georgia went on to say, ‘Food is like a drug. Some people choose heroin but I’ve chosen food and it’s killing me.’
But that’s the point; no one actually chooses to be a heroin addict any more than they choose to get hooked on certain foods. The more you try to fill the hole with the substances creating the hole the bigger the hole gets. All that has happened to 33 stone (209 kg) Georgia is the hole has got out of all proportion and the only thing which appears to give any degree of satisfaction is an enormous amount of the same. This poor girl knows it’s killing her, knows it has caused her to have diabetes and even knows she could drop down dead at any moment, yet she still continues to struggle. This is because telling her what she is doing is killing her is the same as telling someone in quicksand they are in fact in quicksand and should get out. SHE KNOWS! This girl knows all the reasons why she shouldn’t eat all this rubbish daily, what she doesn’t know is what compels her to do so against her rational judgement. And that is precisely what makes this book so very different to any ‘diet’ book you have ever read and is precisely what will enable you to break totally free.
It is interesting to see that Georgia Davis said that eating is ‘like a drug’ to her. What I am saying is that it’s not simply ‘like a drug to her’, it is a drug and it is a drug to millions of people all over the world. This is due not to some inherent weakness in those millions of individuals, but the addictive nature of the drug-food itself. It is true that not everyone who smokes cigarettes becomes heavily addicted, but nearly all are addicted to some degree. The same applies to drug-like foods and drinks. Not everyone is this heavily addicted, but millions are certainly addicted to some degree. This is not the nature of the people but the nature of the substances themselves. And it’s not ‘food’ per se that they are overeating and ‘using’ as an emotional crutch, it’s drug-like food that people become addicted to and use to try and feed an emotion. After all I don’t see too many people attending Apple Anonymous or going to weekly meetings to try to stop eating broccoli do you?
This is why I disagree so vehemently with people like Paul McKenna. While I admire much of his work in other areas, I cannot agree with his ‘I Can Make You Thin’ principles due to the addictive nature of the foods themselves. Paul suggests you can eat whatever you like as long as you eat only when you are hungry and stop eating when you are genuinely full. But that’s like saying to a smoker on twenty cigarettes a day that all they have to do to avoid cancer is to cut down to one cigarette a day. While the advice itself is correct – after all I don’t believe anyone would actually get cancer smoking one a day – if you have ever smoked you will know that actually trying to smoke just one a day when you have been on twenty is virtually impossible. And if you did manage it, you wouldn’t be happy, you would just be wishing your life away waiting for that one cigarette. It’s the same with drug-like food. Anyone who is already hooked on a certain amount can’t just ‘cut down’ or ‘eat slowly’ and ‘stop when they feel full’. In fact these drug-like foods often trigger an almost uncontrollable urge to binge and overeat. How many times have you thought ‘just the one’ chocolate or biscuit and before you know where you are you have polished off a great deal more?
Georgia Davis cannot stop eating when she is full because she never feels full. In the same way your body builds up an immunity and tolerance to a drug, it does the same with drug-like food and drink. You end up needing more and more in order to try and fill the hole and void the drug itself has created. Georgia’s problem is she does eat when she feels hungry, the problem is she feels hungry most of the time due to the addictive nature of these foods and drinks. What Georgia ultimately needs is to starve the false hungers and create a genuine one. Once that happens then and only then can the advice of ‘eat when hungry’ and ‘stop when full’ be effective.
MILLIONS TRAPPED
I need you to realize that the trap you find yourself in, the one I found myself in and the one millions are in all over the world is simply a result of clever marketing and chemicals designed to make you feel ultimately dissatisfied. They create a hole, which appears to be filled with more of the same, yet in reality the hole gets bigger till in the end you don’t ever truly appear to be able to fill it. The irony is we believe this empty feeling can only be filled with more of the same rubbish, which is perhaps the biggest aspect of the illusion – as you will discover.
The ‘food’ business is the same as any other and BIG FOOD simply wants to sell more. They will only do this by removing genuine nutrients (to create a malnourished body which always demands more in a desperate need for the right nutritional requirements) and adding chemicals, which compel an otherwise intelligent person to eat certain things and eat more than they would ever do in their rational mind. Despite 15-year-old Georgia’s immense size, the main reason for her insatiable hunger is malnutrition. She, like millions, is overfed but undernourished.
If you change your diet and don’t go on a diet – in the same way as when a person gets used not to having sugar in their tea and coffee – you never have to think about your diet again. You will be free to genuinely choose what you put into your body and you won’t be a slave to, or victim of, the BIG FOOD system.
I want to make this point clear: I am not being ‘good’ drinking freshly extracted vegetable juice daily and skipping the junkie food in favour of good wholesome foods, I choose to do it – it’s my regular diet now. The people who no longer take sugar in their tea have no desire to go back and I have no desire to go back either. This whole ‘being good’ is a nonsense way of thinking anyway and is part of the ‘diet trap’. For example, are you being good for not taking heroin? Do you feel proud of yourself because you haven’t sniffed glue today? If you did feel proud then it would mean that you indeed have a glue problem. I am not proud of myself for not stuffing myself with crap today, I just don’t want to eat this stuff as my main diet any more. Unlike a conventional diet (in the restrictive sense), I can eat and drink whatever I want, whenever I want, I no longer have to put restrictions on myself. The difference is that I just do not want them any more. I am not being ‘good’ for eating what I do, it is now my genuine choice to. I am not continuing to do what I do to lose weight, because I’m already slim, and I’m not doing it to stay slim – I’m doing it because it is now my brand and I love it!
YOU WILL LEARN TO ENJOY ANY FOOD OR DRINK YOU HAVE ON A REGULAR BASIS
A few years ago I would never have believed that I could literally train myself to love fruits, salads, vegetables, and their juices. I even love avocados now, a fruit I absolutely detested before. However, as macrobiotics has been teaching for years, you will adapt and learn to love any food or drink you have on a regular basis (I am unsure if Brussel sprouts are included in that mind you). That is something I would have dismissed in an instant a few years ago, but there is a great deal of truth in it. Years back I tried some Chinese herbal medicine in an attempt to clear my skin of psoriasis. The best way I can describe the medicine is tree bark. I had to boil what looked like bits of tree and forest detritus in water twice