Reaching A Better Place

I’m a little sceptical of diet books written by people who’ve been thin their whole lives. Their diets may well be healthy but what do they know about losing weight? So given I’m one of those infuriating always-been-thin people I never saw myself writing about how to reach and stay at a healthy BMI.

And, in fact, I’m still not writing about losing weight, but I can write about going through a radical change in diet and sticking with it. I went through the sort of dietary change a weight watcher might go through. Except mine was probably more difficult.
September 5th marked exactly one month since I stopped consuming cow’s milk, refined carbohydrates and sugar. Unsurprisingly almost every food contains these three ingredients and here’s a quick run-down of the major foods and drink I had to quit.

Foods I had to give up

Chocolate
Ice cream
Almost every cereal in the supermarket (including healthy ones such as Alpen and bran flakes)
Biscuits/cookies (which were my staple snack)
Cheese (no, there isn’t a non-dairy version I like)
White bread
White pasta
Cola
Buns
Store-bought cakes
Fruit squash
Several fruit juices
And more…

Somewhere there are probably expensive sugar-free non-dairy chocolates and sugar-free non-dairy biscuits but being a student I don’t see myself being able to afford these, besides which without a car I don’t feel like trekking around Oxford on foot to health food shops every week I need to stock up on carob.
So, foods which most take for granted were (and still are) out of the picture for me. Can you imagine never eating ice cream again? Or pizza? Or cheese on toast? Never having another cool refreshing Coke? I haven’t had any of those things for a month and now I feel I could go the rest of my life without them.

You really went 30 days without sugar? Is that even possible?

Nearly every food contains ‘sugar’ – plenty of fruit contains fructose and glucose is very prolific. I didn’t cut these two forms out: I’m not sure if it’s even possible to have a healthy diet without them. I cut out sucrose, the white glittering stuff that we actually call sugar. Sucrose, too, is in a lot of food but it tends to be added as a sweetner and/or preservative. The easy way to cut ‘sugar’ from your diet is to check the ingredients list on food packaging. If sugar was listed as an ingredient I didn’t eat that food or drink that liquid. Fructose and glucose aside, this is what it means to give up sugar.
I had three accidental lapses. Two days into the month I ate a digestive biscuit without realising what I was doing. I had a pasta meal which used a sauce that contained sugar. I had a sip of someone’s mango juice because I thought it was my no added sugar pineapple juice. In the last month I’ve had probably a gram of sugar through absent-mindedness. So, there’s the grissly truth of the matter, now no-one can accuse me of covering up the Whole Truth :P.

And how was giving all that up?

On the whole, pretty easy. In the beginning I felt really hungry for prolonged periods (and even today I tend to be hungry more often than I used to be). Surprisingly I don’t think I’ve lost any weight (which is good as that certainly wasn’t the goal) and I didn’t notice any change in my energy or sleepiness levels.

And…why did you do this?

I bought an ebook that said that acne can be cured (or as close to cured as acne can be) through several dietary changes – which for most people are quite an upheaval. For me that meant cutting out the things I did.
My acne is pretty mild these days anyway, but there has still been an improvement in my skin in the last month. However I can’t say for sure yet if this is down to the diet or my return to lymecycline antibiotics. Time will tell.

The diet models

Eating healthily isn’t rocket science even though all the new fad diets can make it seem that way. Thin people, realising that most fat people don’t have the will power to eat a common sense healthy diet, have come up with lots and lots of diet models that promise minimal effort required, a fast result and few foods which are off-limits.
Yet obesity rates continue to increase. Nutritionists are bending over backwards to make it unthinkably easy for fat people to lose weight. Some of these diets are unhealthy and some are mostly hype, but I’m sure these health experts are really doing the best they can. I don’t think it’s a scam, it’s just that people are getting fatter so there’s more money in making them thin and well-meaning doctors, coaches, nutritionists and even general self-improvement writers are searching for that ultimate diet model. Yes, they’re in it for the money but that doesn’t make them crooks.
Diet book writers aren’t the problem and their odd diets aren’t great but they’re not exactly a scourge on humanity either.

Here are two big causes for why I was able to easily give up refined carbohydrates, diary and sugar (despite having quite a sweet tooth). And there were no whacky ‘eat everything green or the size of your fist’ antics going on.

My relationship with food

Yesterday the universe seemed to try to break me. It seemed to say, ‘right, now you’ve gone a month without that stuff it’s time for you to give in at last.’
You see yesterday my family went to see my grandparents in Somerset and we went to a pub for lunch. We all sat down at a table for six. I ended up in the seat beside the dessert cabinet. Within a few inches from me was treacle tart, fudge cake, a mint and cream pie, apple pie, various toffee treats and more I can’t remember. My blood vessels must have been drawn like magnets to the dairy and sugar fortress behind me. When we finished the meal and the waitress asked about desserts there was so much pondering from everyone. ‘Ooh, should I? Shouldn’t I?’ – we’re talking a window a mile wide for me to order something. Finally three of us order desserts: servings of vanilla ice cream, Bailey’s and Amaretto cheese cake and chocolate fudge cheese cake. I don’t order a thing. I sit across from my dad and brother watching them eat their cheese cakes and I still don’t order a thing.

So, do I just have tonnes of discipline? No. In fact throughout my entire time at the pub I never felt all that tempted for my favourite desserts. Short of being locked in Willy Wonka’s factory it was one of the biggest threats to my new diet ever, but it really wasn’t that taxing. And I love treacle tart.

There’s a really successful weight-loss book called I Can Make You Thin which works on the principal that dieting doesn’t work and that for a person to be thin they should just think like a thin person: not create a difficult food regimen and hope that self-discipline will keep them following it.
I’ve never needed to lose weight (in fact it would be bad for my health if I did) but I learnt about the book’s methods and techniques out of an interest in neuro-linguistic programming and, of course, personal development in general. This was back in January. It was only when I started on my lactose-free, sugar-free and refined carbohydrate-free diet that I appreciated first-hand what the author, Paul McKenna, was teaching in print and on TV.
For the first time in my life I was going through a big dietary change yet it was actually really easy to make the shift and to this day it’s really easy to continue with the diet. Thanks to that book (and the TV series based on it) I have some very solid explanations for why I can give up sugary foods first time and why fat people can spend their lives trying to do it and never succeed.

So…yeah, I cannot say with conviction that ‘I Can Make You Thin’ will work for those wanting to make radical dietary shifts like the one I did. But it really sounds like it would. I believe at the heart of changing your diet is the mental relationship you have with food.

The decision

“Someone is either a smoker or a nonsmoker. There’s no in-between. The trick is to find out which one you are, and be that. If you’re a nonsmoker, you’ll know.”
- Cozy Carlisle in Dead Again

A friend I’ve known for years has a large frame (big boned, if you will) but for much of his life he was a healthy weight. As the years went on we saw each other less and less as can sometimes happen with friends who go to different schools. On the hottest day recorded so far in Britain I was invited to his house. He had a 10 foot diameter inflatable pool. I could sit at the bottom and the water came up to my neck. It was awesome.
We were perhaps 14 at the time and he and I and our siblings spent the day in the garden in our swim wear getting in the pool whenever needed. And he’d gotten fat. Very visibly fat. I was able to notice despite not seeing him very much those days – the change was very visible.

I saw him again six months later and I didn’t recognise him at first. I’m 6’ 4” and I weigh 11 stone. Standing there on my door step on that sunny day he was about the same height and weight. And I wondered: ‘Is he…no, it is him, isn’t it? Oh my God, that’s really him!’
I had never seen him that slender before and I’d seen the guy at least a few times a year for about 15 years. He looked good. Difficult to recognise, but good. I’m just really lanky but given he’s slightly shorter and has a wider build he just looked physically fit.
I found out that he’d decided at some point during that summer to lose the weight. So he did. He had some exercise equipment in his room and he used that for two hours every day after school. I never learnt what dietary changes he’d made, but that wasn’t really of interest to me. His exact methods are not the points of this story.

My friend was really over-weight and he decided the lose the weight. So he did.
One of my grandfathers had a heart attack from smoking decades ago. So he quit smoking. He went cold turkey and that was it.
A month ago I read that I could have improved skin if I stopped taking in lactose, refined carbohydrates and sugar. So I stopped consuming them. That’s all there was to it.

With big changes that involve quitting (what you might call ‘big quits’) there is perhaps a trend of just making a decision – of becoming something rather than making an effort towards it. The smoker who tries to cut back fails, but the smoker who becomes a non-smoker succeeds. The thin person who got fat goes back to being thin because it’s who they are.

If you want to go through a similar radical diet change for whatever reason and you fail, I say go right back to the start and see if you have these two in check. What is your relationship with food like? And have you decided to be the result of the change, and not someone who’s going to give the change a go? Work on the mind first, and the actions second.

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