Lorraine Kelly's Next Big Fat Challenge Lorriane Kelly's Next Big Fat Challenge
How to Think Yourself Thin
Psychotherapist Phillip Hodson has valuable advice for anyone who is trying to lose weight.
If you want to stay thin you need to change your lifestyle not just monitor your food intake. Diets help only when you have first confronted the feelings that make you over-eat.
For most of us in good health the simple cause of gaining weight is always eating too much food! It is neither a moral nor a feminist issue, just a plain biological fact.
If you consume more calories than you burn, you will tend to lay down fat. Any superman confined to a wheelchair will tragically acquire a paunch.
Lay down more fat while eating eat fewer calories, you will eventually lose weight. You must. Even then, because of biology, your ultimate size greatly depends upon the motivation to exercise.
For instance, in the nineteenth century, it was not unknown for men attending lavish dinners in Cambridge to walk back to London afterwards – a distance of 56 miles! If you had to pull a sledge across the North Pole you could eat 10,000 calories a day and still lose weight!
From the point of view of fat retention, special diets are neither good for you nor bad for you. Because they only tackle symptoms, however, they are always self-defeating unless you first address your demons.
Whether you go in for food-combining, allergy reduction, grapefruit juggling, high fats, low fats, meals in a biscuit, slimming drugs, death by bottled water - none will work unless you change your underlying attitudes. Why, then, does the diet industry flourish? The unpalatable truth is that we’d always rather tackle symptoms than causes.
What drives so many people to want to lose weight is a mixture of anxiety and depression. What causes them to use diets and tackle symptoms instead of changing their lifestyle is this same anxiety and depression. It’s really emotionally painful to change your basic patterns.
Any of the following can be responsible for this difficulty: shyness, lowered self-esteem, divorce, carping parents, romantic rejection, injury, ignorance about healthy eating, excess stress, loss of job or personal status. Some of these problems may have a genetic content but the net result is that the majority of those who abuse food are trying to satisfy a hunger that could never be met by the entire output of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory!
The crunch question about comfort-eating is precisely what needs ‘comforting?’ Have we ever considered expressing our feelings of inner emptiness to others? Perhaps to ‘Dear Diary’ if not to some real people? Or have we always decided on little or no evidence that people never listen to us? How can you be so sure? Have you tried communicating lately? Is it beyond human wit to recognise that sometimes low blood sugar only signifies a need to lie down and rest?
I ask these questions because they crop up when people consult therapists about their out-of-control appetites. Yet nothing is wrong with the appetites as such – they
are always ‘healthy’. Put simply, the problem lies with the mismatch between self-image and ‘approved-image’, leading to varieties of negative thinking, and the adoption of self-defeating diets. What a therapist does is listen out for the problem cues, as I have been trying to do when talking to the Chawners and assessing whether they should try therapy.
It’s not compulsory to consult a therapist if you want to stay thin but you WILL need to start with that idea of changing your life for good. Sort out your life first; then change your diet.
So here’s the five-point programme:
1. Plan to change your size over 18 months not 18 days.
2. Examine the depression triggers in your life. Ask yourself what gives you pleasure (apart from food). Then do more of it.
3. What consumes the greatest amount of your time and energy? Is it time and energy properly spent or could you try to make it more rewarding?
4. Look at your skills and talents and choose to learn something at which you could become absorbingly skilled – even cooking.
5. Obey the human givens – rest, sleep, good food, exercise, work, friendship, love and good sex. We all need them – and tend to overeat if we miss out.
