and instructions, otherwise in no time at all you could very easily switch to what I call ‘diet’ mentality. You need a full understanding of all junkie foods and drinks first and how they affect your body and mind. Only then will the mental instructions that will guide you out of the food trap make sense and prevent you from having to use your willpower, or as I call it ‘the diet recipe’. That way you will not just be free, but you will feel free from the start and love the journey. So – in case I haven’t yet mentioned it enough – please finish the entire book if you want true freedom from the food trap without having to diet ever again. And while I’m on that subject let me explain why diets (in the long run) do not work, can never work, never will work, so that you can finally feel totally free to …
The method has a 95 per cent failure rate
Would you still be interested in trying it? In fact, would you invest incredible amounts of time, energy, and money in anything that guaranteed a 95 per cent failure rate? I would have thought nobody in their right mind would do such a thing, and that is exactly the problem – many people are not in their right (frame of) mind. That is why millions of highly intelligent people ‘diet’ despite knowing that at the end of their ‘hard work’ and misery there is a 95 per cent chance it will all have been for nothing – and most are fully aware of this fact before they begin.
I’m not knocking them either, for I am certainly in no position to do so. After all, I tried many, many diets myself. When I look back, I wonder why? Did it not dawn on me after my second diet that this mental approach to getting slim and healthy for life was not going to work? A definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. ‘But I’ve tried several different diets’ you say. But have you? I thought I had tried many different diets but are they ever really that different? They all involve feelings of sacrifice, misery, and deprivation. They all involve varying degrees of control and willpower. They all make you feel guilty when you’re eating and down when you’re not. They nearly always fail. They usually make you gain more weight than you had to begin with (if you’re on a weight-loss diet). This is not one specific diet that I’m talking about – it’s all of them. All diets are shining examples of the fly syndrome.
Despite knowing this, we still think that the next diet will be ‘it’ and seem willing to try anything, no matter how ludicrous or life threatening it may seem in our often desperate need to get to the land of the thin. Since the original F Plan diet (and we all know that the F doesn’t stand for fibre) we have tried eating grapefruits before every meal on the ‘grapefruit diet’ and even reached (or perhaps retched would be a better word) for that delightful smelling and tasting cabbage soup first thing in the morning on ‘the cabbage soup’ diet. Then we had the ‘wedding dress diet’ (but what happens after the big day?), the ‘Champagne and caviar diet’ (you don’t lose any weight, but you’re so plastered you don’t actually care) and the ‘egg diet’ (which involved eating eighteen eggs a day – no I am not kidding). Then, of course, there was the Hay diet (where you should never mix protein and carbohydrates together or you will internally combust) and the numerous ‘eat nothing but protein diets’. This is where we were expected to believe that eggs and bacon swimming around in fat was in some way better for us than a piece of fruit. As mad as it sounds, even some rational thinking people went for this one. Do you lose weight eating nothing but protein? Yes. Is it healthy? NO IT IS NOT. You can often spot a high protein diet follower, they often have a giant head on a twig like body. After the nothing but protein came The South Beach Diet, and once again we were allowed to eat fruit and some carbs, hooray!
Then came the hugely popular GI (Glycaemic Index) diets, but keep up because GI is already ‘so last year darling’, and it’s now been replaced by the many GL (Glycaemic Load) diets. It appears GI didn’t work after all and it’s the Glycaemic Load that’s important now. (Hope you’re keeping up with all of this). At least South Beach, GI and GL have some good basis in nutrition, but all sorts of mad ‘quick fixes’ have entered the fray. Have you heard of The Baby Food Diet? Yes we have intelligent grown adults eating baby food to get slim. It appears that whatever a ‘celebrity’ does, we all blindly follow, even if logically it’s completely bonkers. Take the Thumbnail Diet. Of all the ones I have spoken about so far, this perhaps takes the biscuit. This is where you get to eat anything you want (sounds good so far but wait) … providing it is no bigger than your thumbnail and you must eat every fourteen minutes. Who worked out the precise science behind eating a thumbnail of food every fourteen minutes (not fifteen, heaven forbid don’t round it up!), I will never know – but the word crackers springs to mind.
And let’s not leave out things like the Cambridge diet, Slim Fast and all the other ‘nutritious’ shakes that promise weight loss in supersonic time. Then we have the many calorie-counting diets; the Kensington diet, the ‘see’ food diet, the Eat Fat Grow Slim diet (where you had to drink oil before each meal – again not joking), the ‘sex diet’ (yes there is one – best of a bad bunch I’d say, and more fun than eating cabbage soup). I could go on and on and on, but all of the above, even the Thumbnail seems incredibly sane compared to, wait for it – the ‘Fresh Air’ diet. Yes, let me repeat that –
THE FRESH AIR DIET
I wish I was joking, but it is perfectly true. This really is ‘Extreme Dieting’ and I believe the most dangerous ‘food movement’ (or non food movement) on earth. It isn’t actually called ‘The Fresh Air Diet’, but ‘Breatharianism’. It is a lifestyle popularized by an Australian woman called Ellen Greve, or Jasmuheen, as she is better known. Greve claims she hasn’t eaten since 1993; yet, she admits ‘she drinks herbal teas and confesses to the occasional “taste orgasm” involving chocolate or ice cream’.
She claims not to eat the food but simply every now and then get the ‘taste’. The fact that three of Greve’s followers have starved to death while adhering to the Breatharian way of life, doesn’t appear to dissuade her. In 1999 the Australian television programme 60 Minutes tested her ability to live on ‘prana’, the ‘Light Of God’. After just four days, Dr Berris Wink – president of the Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association, urged her to stop the test. He wanted to stop the test because, according to Dr Wink, Greve’s pupils were dilated, her speech was slow, she was dehydrated and her pulse had doubled. Funny how when tested she couldn’t live without food or water for four days yet claims not to have eaten anything since 1993! Believe it or not she’s not the only one at it either. One Wiley Brooks, who heads up ‘The Breatharian Institute Of America’, is equally as bats in my opinion and there are many, many more. This is obviously the ultimate diet and I am amazed they haven’t been shut down. How on earth can you encourage people to ‘live on light’ and not be accountable if anything happens to them? In a world where the holy grail appears to be a Size Zero, surely these people need bringing to book.
Clearly ‘Breatharianism’ is beyond extreme and obviously mental, but I think we have all been guilty of trying some pretty ludicrous diets over the years. But why do we do it? Why do we jump on one diet after the next, regardless of how irrational they are? In truth, don’t we already know exactly what we need to do in order to drop the weight and get healthy? Wouldn’t it be fair to say that you could write down at least ten different ways to lose weight that – if you followed them – would all work? Could