Design your Diet
Hello and Welcome to a favourite page.
Many people are directed to this page by the Internet,
probably because they put Eat Less into the search engine.
If you are looking for a quick (and painless) way to
Eat Less.
I fear that you may be disappointed.
There is no magic bullet.
But there is hope for you.
Slow down a bit and invest some time
to learn.
I urge you to get the full story.
Go to the beginning - Home (above)
and then Introduction
(top of the page) and relax.
Read it all.
This is NOT a normal Diet blog.
It is unusual.
Please read it.
ALSO
If you do read this to the end
there is further Eat-less information.
The stuff below is for those who have read it all so far.
We have been concentrating on Move-more.
Now we can Move-on from Move-more
to two more words - Eat-Less
5. Watch TV
To Eat-less, - watch TV.
Don’t eat anything whilst watching.
Look at any programmes on: How to Diet.
And learn the words.
The key words are Protein and Carbohydrate.
They will become more important later.
Why they can’t call them by some simple names I don’t know. There is another word - Fat. These are the main words about things that make you fat. They say so on the programmes … I think? Which programmes? Lots of them. There are two main types. Programmes about food and then, others about different Diets to eat. I’ve watched tons of them and you might have too?
The ones about various foods often line up lots of different brands from different supermarkets and then ask a ‘typical family’ (How do they choose them?), which of these yoghurts or milkshakes has the most sugar? Or which of these loaves, or which of these bars of chocolate, or buns? You get the idea. The family then gets it wrong, or sometimes right, but they are always shocked at the number of sugar cubes in the yogurt, which is usually more than the cubes in a can of Cola.
Drink more Cola?
Is the lesson to drink more Cola if you want to slim?
Well, No! Now you’ve got it wrong yourself. They are just trying to tell you in as entertaining a way as possible, not to eat too much sugar. It’s the energy in the sugar that is too much for you to use. Why is it too much? Because you don’t move enough – you have to Move-more or you will store the extra energy in your fat and you certainly have enough fat to store it in, don't you?
One chocolate digestive biscuit is worth about 85calories.
I didn’t know that. I’ve just looked it up.
‘Calories’ is the name for the energy … I think?
How many choccy biscuits have you eaten?
The other kind of food programme is about trying different diets on people. The people often have a reason for wanting to diet. They are usually going to a wedding in two month's time. They sometimes use what they call 'shock tactics' by putting all the food that the potential wedding guest eats in a month on a table for them to see. It is a sickening sight. What might it look like for you?
The experts give them a Diet to follow.
Sometimes the diets are awful,
like just eating one kind of food
– could be cabbage!
- but not usually.
Sometimes they have lots of meat, eggs and cheese and they are called protein diets (there’s that word)
Sometimes there will be lots of pasta, bread, rice and spaghetti, which are the carbohydrate diets (the other word ).
Now the interesting thing about the results, is that they ALL seem to lose some weight over the 4 to 6 weeks, whichever of these two diets they are on. Most say it was hard, it was monotonous, but it worked. Some say they will continue.
I’d like to see a surprise-visit to them later, to see if they did.
If a diet is hard, will they keep to it?
Would you?
But diets are supposed to be hard, aren’t they? No Pain - No Gain, they say. A Diet has to be different from your normal life to signify to you that you are paying a price, making an effort, holding on as long as possible, but relief will come soon if you can endure it until the final date. I have seen successful 'TV dieters’, being celebrated by their extended families, applauding the participants, holding parties with plenty of cake and celebratory cans of booze and bottles of champagne, when the conclusion has been reached at the end of the month’s dieting and the participant has lost almost a stone. How long will these people stay ‘slim’ surrounded by people with similar shapes and attitudes to themselves?
Commercial Diets and TV programmes that promise
or produce a significant, rapid weight loss
such as one stone in a month
generate an expectation
that losing weight should be quick.
It has to be quick for TV programmes,
so that the viewer can be amazed,
entertained and
wish that they could do the same.
Quick success has to be on your wish-list.
It also has to be quick for Commercial Diet plans,
in order to dangle a dream in front of the customer.
It sometimes has to sound as though it is easy and needs no special extra effort other than a possibly brief and very limited adjustment by eating the slimming product that they are selling to you. With Commercial Diets the dream has to be financially tempting and hopefully for the seller – ongoing – the longer the better.
If it doesn't work, could it be that you have been cheating?
OR
Could it be that you need more of their product?
If you have tried Diets
You might have dreamed of quick, or easy.
You might now believe that Diets don’t work.
Maybe you have not had the right idea in mind?
It isn’t rocket-science to realise from your experience that,
It is easy and quick to
put on weight,
BUT
it takes a long time to take weight OFF
and it is neither quick nor easy, to do that permanently.
I know that.
You know that now.
Read on below if you can understand this.
It is Time for a rethink
Time for some careful thought.
(This is serious)
If you have been overweight for a period of time your body will have adjusted to that weight. Your muscles have developed to carry that weight. Your internal systems expect to extract the nutrients and energy from food to support that weight. Your brain has an understanding of eating certain things at the usual times each day to keep that weight going.
All this has happened over years.
Your body runs to this clock.
Yes, of course all these body systems can be shocked by a complete break from what has happened daily for such a long time. The shock of not eating, or of a radical omission such as no carbohydrates or no protein from a diet is guaranteed to produce an effect such as those seen on the tele, BUT, as has probably already been proven (by you?), it is unreasonable to expect a short, sharp shock to be a permanent change.
Expecting ‘effortless’ diet miracles is not a sensible expectation.
We need to think again.
You need to think again.
Almost the only way to begin to introduce change in your body behaviour - to try to gain control of it, is to do it gradually.
You will have to re-educate the body and
give it time to adjust to changes slowly.
You CAN be permanently less heavy,
but the changes have to be in attitude
and in expectation to do it.
You can only do this if you really want to.
You have to say to yourself -
'The Time Has Come!'
You are not in a TV show.
You are NOT required to produce rapid weight loss to entertain an audience.
Losing weight is for you.
This adjustment is between you and yourself.
Surprisingly, you CAN expect it to be easy,
if you take it one-small-step-at-a-time -
over a realistic timescale.
I guess that, like me, you live on the too-much-of-everything diet, no matter what it is. I thought that I’d never keep up on a diet like just living on Cabbage Soup. It's unrealistic. I like my biscuits (carbohydrates) and my bacon and egg (protein), so I decided that the only diet that I could follow was one that I had designed for myself - so I did.
I would design a diet that I could sustain
That was the most important thing in the diet – to keep going,
so I could continue to follow it.
If I designed my own diet I could avoid it being too hard – and
You can too.
Interval whilst you think about it.
Go for a walk.
And to take a positive, practical step to Eat-less
read Diet 6. Know your habits.
To Read more go to top of page.
Hover on 'Eat Less'
Read Diet 6 - 7 etc