Kitabı oku: «Drop a Size for Life: Fat Loss Fast and Forever!», sayfa 2

SECTION ONE

PREPARING TO DROP A SIZE

INTRODUCTION

Many people want to lose weight. What’s the first step? I guess you’d expect to hear something about reducing calories and getting down the gym, however, my experience with the thousands of people I’ve helped over the years suggests that the first step should have nothing to do with diet or exercise – instead it should involve sorting out your state of mind. Getting in the right ‘head space’ – being mentally ready – is something you’ll need to master for successful long-term weight management. Why? I see many clients with the keenness to achieve their weight loss goals, but they set off with false ideas – about how much they need to lose, how quickly it can be lost and how easy it will be. Attempting to achieve unrealistic goals means you are more likely to fail – either by not getting the result you wanted or by finding the plan too difficult to stick to and giving up. Either way, setting yourself up for failure in this way is bad for your self-esteem and confidence.

In contrast to those who are very keen, are the clients who have been through the weight loss mill so many times that despite saying, ‘I really want to lose weight this time’, at the back of their mind they are in fact saying ‘here we go again – don’t expect this will work but I’m desperate, so I’ll give it a go’. In effect, they are setting themselves up to fail. The subconscious mind is a very subtle but persuasive thing and you only need to suggest failure for it to become a likely part of reality.

Many individuals report feelings of great self-esteem once they have lost weight. Why is that? Does being thinner make you a better person? Or is it more to do with the good feelings associated with achieving what you set out to do? Obviously losing weight doesn’t make you a better person but whatever you think, I believe that building self-esteem initially is pivotal to successful weight loss. Self-esteem is not a product of weight loss but the foundation for it. After all, you have to believe you are worth the time, effort and work involved in achieving and then maintaining your goal size and weight.

Take your clothes off – go on, take them off right now. I’m absolutely serious! Go and take them off and stand in front of a full length mirror completely naked. Take a good look. Look at yourself from the front and then from the side and back. What do you see?

The chances are, what you see and the body you have are two completely different things. How you see yourself is described as your ‘body image’. This isn’t something fixed in concrete and it isn’t necessarily grounded in reality. In fact, body image can be affected by all kinds of things. For example, in one interesting study, subjects who were made to consume a bowl of ice cream before having to choose a body silhouette most like their own opted for a larger outline than the women who ate nothing. It’s as if those women felt they’d done something wrong by eating the ice cream and therefore judged themselves more negatively.

If you’re anything like the average woman, you aren’t at all happy with what you see in the mirror. A recent survey showed 95 per cent of women are unhappy with their body shape. What’s more, we think that our inability to look as slim and fit as we want to is down to our own failures. Most disturbingly, ‘failing’ in one area of life (i.e. not having the ‘perfect’ body) has a knock-on effect on confidence and self-esteem in other areas of life. A negative body image is closely linked to poor self-esteem. The point here is that deciding to accept your body, right here, right now, how it is, is crucial to your success. Okay, so you might want to make some changes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t think positive about some aspects of yourself.

See if you can guess which of these percentages goes with which question.

Such widespread dissatisfaction with our bodies makes shocking reading, doesn’t it? You are more than what you see in the mirror and to move beyond the crash diet–weight gain cycle, you need to accept yourself and value yourself enough to instigate some positive changes. Making an enemy of your body is a losing battle, as you will only be fighting yourself.

So, before we even begin to look at diet and exercise, we’re going to work on getting you into the right mental space to drop a size for life. This section is literally about stripping things back to the bare bones and then building back your self-esteem, layer by layer, in order to give you the appropriate foundation for dropping a size. And the great thing is, layering these simple skills and techniques will not only get you dropping a size, it will also have a knock-on effect in other aspects of your life, too.

60% 5% 90% 56% 0% 48%

1 A survey asked, ‘would you change anything about your body if you had the chance?’ What percentage said ‘I’m happy as I am, thanks.’

2 What percentage of women overestimate their size?

3 What percentage of normal weight women report themselves overweight?

4 What percentage of British women are dieting at any one time?

5 What percentage of the female population can achieve the current media ‘ideal’ of thinness?

6 What percentage of survey respondents when asked, ‘would you rather be thinner or smarter’ said they’d prefer to drop pounds?

The answers are

1 (0%),

2 (90%),

3 (56%),

4 (60%),

5 (5%),

6 (48%)

HOW TO USE SECTION ONE

This section takes you through seven strategies that will help you understand the importance of engaging your mind – and not just your body – in your weight loss efforts. Each strategy builds upon the next, making each new one easier to understand and implement. Layer by layer the strategies build up, leading you towards your goal of creating the sort of mindset needed to drop a size for life.

Because each strategy builds the foundation for the next, you will need to go through each one methodically, and feel happy with it, before you can successfully tackle the next. You may find some of the steps easier to master than others, but do not be tempted to skip any – each one is an important aspect of your journey to drop a size and keep it off.

This section isn’t something you’ll go through once and then forget about. As you go through life there will be times when your weight fluctuates – when events in your life may knock your confidence, affecting your mindset – and you need to get back on track. At such times, you may find you need to revisit this section, because what was originally an easy strategy to master, could, at a different point in your life, become more significant and challenging.

STEP ONE:

TRAIN YOUR BRAIN

The point of training your brain is to increase mind-body synergy – which basically means that your brain and body should be singing from the same hymn sheet! If you are trying to force your body to do something without your brain’s support, you are much more likely to fail.

We are all aware that in order to lose weight we need to make some big changes to our energy intake and expenditure. But for us to see a change in our bodies and to actually drop that size we need to work on the relationship between brain and body. For our bodies to lose weight, yes, we have to eat less and exercise more, but for the mind’s eye image in the mirror to change, we need to get our brain on the winning side, too.

The mind is a crucial factor in weight loss success because what we think about ourselves can give significant momentum to our efforts and hence directly affect the result of those efforts. If your brain is not on the same wavelength as your body then your weight loss efforts will flounder. I have seen it time and time again with my clients – however, once they have mastered these seven simple steps they achieve greater success and it lasts longer too!

Not getting your mind sorted out before you embark on your weight loss plan is a bit like setting off on holiday without any preparation – you can’t wait to get there and you’re so excited about arriving quickly you don’t bother to check the oil, water and petrol gauge before you set off and end up breaking down. You might have been raring to go, but the car wasn’t and the upshot is you end up stuck on the hard shoulder for 2 hours waiting to be rescued. If you’d taken a little time to ensure the car was as ready for the journey as you were, you’d be well on your way. Instead, the journey that you were so excited about has become tediously long, disappointing and irritating. Of course, in reality, few of us would set out on a long and important journey without checking the basics, yet many of us embark on our weight loss journey without seeing to the fundamentals first!

The action points for step one are all about getting your brain to register what you are feeling within your body, thus forging a closer link between mind and body.

ACTION POINT 1: TIME YOURSELF
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

Time how long it takes you to eat your meals. Time each meal separately – your breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. You may find you wolf down your breakfast and lunch, but have a more leisurely dinner. Alternatively, dinner may be a hurried affair as you try to eat your main meal while simultaneously feeding the kids, or you simply race through it so you can collapse on the sofa and have a rest.

Once you have recorded your times, try to give yourself longer to complete each meal. Start off by aiming to increase the amount of time it takes to eat each meal by 50 per cent. Try to do this for each meal for one whole week. In the following week, try to add a further 50 per cent of time to complete each meal.

THE LOGIC

It takes 20 minutes for the stretch receptors in your stomach lining to send a message to the brain registering there is any food inside. As a result, when you are full there is a gap before the brain actually receives a message to that effect – by that time you may well have eaten more calories than you actually need.

Eating too quickly is itself unwise. It can cause digestive problems and has been acknowledged as a factor in irritable bowel syndrome. In reality, your life may not allow you to devote more time to all your meals, but even the process of doing it sometimes will make you more aware not just of what you are eating, but how much you are eating. Eating will become more of a conscious process rather than an unconscious motion that happens as life rushes on around you.

ACTION POINT 2: EAT UNTIL YOU ARE
80 PER CENT FULL
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

You know what 100 per cent full feels like, so back off before you reach that point. At first, eating until you’re about 80 per cent full may feel an alien thing to do – perhaps you were always told to finish everything on your plate as a child, or your body just really likes that feeling of being very full – but persevere with this, it has multiple benefits.

THE LOGIC

Your schedule may not allow you to always take as much time as you would like over each meal or snack, so learning to eat until you are 80 per cent full is a back-up plan that works hand-in-hand with taking more time over your food. This allows your brain to become aware of the food entering your body, which stops you from over-eating and actually energizes you more. Eating too much food decreases your immediate energy levels, as your body has to work harder through a process called the ‘thermic effect of feeding’ to digest your food. This can leave you devoid of energy and feeling as if you need to reach for that chocolate bar for an instant energy fix. In addition, you should start to feel empowered as you feel more in control of your food volume. Saying no can be very powerful.

ACTION POINT 3: EAT WITHOUT DISTRACTIONS
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

Try to eat your meals without any distractions. In your lunch break, stop trying to finish off a report as you munch at a sandwich; at breakfast, avoid grabbing mouthfuls of toast in between applying your mascara and ironing your blouse for work. Okay, okay, I hear you say – where am I going to find the time to do this? Well, I do understand that you may not be able to do it for all your meals for the whole week, but do try to do it at least once for each meal during the course of your first week. Try to focus entirely on the food on your plate – look at the colours before you start to eat, feel the texture of the food in your mouth and chew your food completely before you swallow.

THE LOGIC

Today’s fast-paced lifestyles mean that eating meals gets put on the ‘to do’ list as we multi-task with other aspects of our busy day. However, eating should not be a task – it should be an enjoyable experience that you share with friends or take time over. Sadly, it has become so rushed that we no longer seem to appreciate what we are eating or the actual sensual pleasure eating can give us. Eating can be sexy! Taking the time to really concentrate on and relish your food will heighten your awareness and sensuality of food. Focus on both the amount you are eating and the way it feels as it enters your body.

ACTION POINT 4: BELT UP!
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

Stop wearing elasticated waistbands. Replace them with fitted waistbands or belts. Do this straightaway, not tomorrow, not next week, but straightaway. You need a reference point that tells you how much space your body takes up and this will help your brain to become aware of this.

THE LOGIC

Elasticated waistbands lull you into a false sense of security. They encourage your abdominal muscles to become lazy, as there is no reference point for your tummy muscles to press against. Although it sounds rather insignificant, changing to inflexible waistbands is a very effective act. Firstly, by changing to a rigid belt you are able to mark your progress on your belt notches. Secondly, the act of changing to a rigid belt is a positive step towards getting to know your body better.

If your clothes only have elasticated waistbands, tie a thick piece of ribbon around your midriff under your clothes. Fix it firmly so you can feel it around your waist without it digging into you – this will give you a reference point of where your body ends and the belt begins. If you are a man, your task is to stop lowering your waistband so it lies under your beer belly. This only further lulls you into a false sense of security that your belly really isn’t that big. You don’t have to wear your trousers under your ribcage but you do need to start accepting the ‘real waist’ situation. And, as a bonus, doing this will improve your posture.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Like any relationship worth sustaining, the brain-body link needs attention and care in order to remain strong. Don’t become lazy in maintaining mind-body awareness. Once you have fostered a closer relationship between your brain and body, you are ready for step two.

Case Study: Rebecca’s Story

‘Although I was desperate to lose weight, all the diets I had read about involved cutting out all the foods that I enjoyed the most: chocolate, biscuits, pies, chips, lasagne, cheese, mayonnaise, quiche etc. To have to consider giving them all up was just too daunting. Then I read the Drop a Size plan. First of all I increased my water intake – that alone gave me energy. I didn’t feel so groggy all the time and was able to think more clearly. Within a couple of weeks my body began to ask for water – it had become automatic. I made up my mind that, while I would make healthier choices, if I needed a chocolate fix I would have one, but a small one. By Christmas I was close to being ready to start dieting. January 2nd was ‘D’ Day – Diet Day. But I didn’t go all out. I wanted to be kind to myself and ease myself into the process in a way considerate to my needs. I knew myself, and my limitations, and I wanted to succeed, so I made it challenging but not scary.

For the first couple of weeks of following the Carb Curfew I went to bed in the evening with a light feeling in my stomach that was alien to me. Before, my usual evening meal was meat, sometimes vegetables (not always) and potatoes or rice or pasta. I was so accustomed to feeling heavy, lethargic and sometimes bloated that I thought it was normal. The extra energy I had in the evenings gave me the motivation to exercise. It was all beginning to snowball and I was feeling really good. Only when I began to feel some of my clothes a little looser did I venture on to the scales. I had lost 4lbs. It was the incentive I needed to carry on.’

STEP TWO:

BEFRIEND THE MIRROR

As we cast a critical eye over our bodies in the mirror, many of us focus on one particular body part. When you stripped off and assessed yourself, did you find yourself honing straight in on your much-hated hips or tummy? If so, you probably felt pretty negative about yourself by the time you turned away from the mirror. That’s why it’s important to look beyond the mirror and acknowledge that your reflection is not all you are. Think about all the things your body can do, the pleasure it can provide, the miracles it has performed, the strength, endurance and power it has. Think how great it feels when you get massaged, or when you stretch after waking up or after a workout; how good it feels to slip into a hot bath, eat something delicious or dance. All these things are about your body and the way it feels, the way it performs, the way it can be challenged. Your body is so much more than that reflection you are so critical of.

Imagine seeing yourself through the eyes of one of your friends. How would you describe your body if you were to look at it as an outsider? Write that description down now, being as honest and accurate as you can be. The chances are if you’re looking at yourself through someone else’s eyes you’ll be a lot kinder, so use these more realistic judgements when you’re casting a critical eye over yourself and determining your goals and objectives. The reality is that everyone has good and bad points. Having a big bum, a beer belly or flabby upper arms doesn’t make you a bad person, a failure, or in any way a lesser being than the supermodels that pout at us from the pages of countless glossy magazines.