About this book
It is frequently the misfortune of people seeking solutions to their weight problems to find themselves under the influence of self-appointed experts. This is an unsatisfactory arrangement at best, which is why this book won’t tell you what to eat or when to exercise, or how to behave in any way for that matter – as any behavioural therapist will confirm, telling people what to do diminishes the prospect of change. Weight Wisdom is a journey to discover the truth about yourself, by yourself, and I believe that anyone searching for a lasting resolution to their weight dissatisfaction will find their holy grail somewhere in its chapters.
During the twenty-five years I’ve been immersed in weight management, I’ve encountered many subject experts, read countless books, articles and scientific journals and authored dozens of teaching and reference manuals. I have taught and lectured for training organisations and universities across, the UK, and presented at seminars both at home and overseas, supporting thousands of people to gain nutrition and weight-related qualifications and professional development. With an MSc in Weight Management, I’ve appeared on TV and radio and founded one of the UK’s leading weight loss organisations that has helped over 20,000 people to lose weight. I am a fellow of the UK Chartered Institute for Sport and Physical Activity
(CIMSPA), having been a member for forty years.
While these experiences have allowed me a glimpse at the problem, their true value was to provide me with the opportunity and great privilege of serving people as a weight-management practitioner. These ‘people moments’, spanning the whole of the weight spectrum, offered me true insight, and forged my understanding of this most common of modern human conditions.
Over the years, I have seen the same constraints and barriers preventing people from overcoming their weight difficulties time after time. For most people, permanent weight loss will be their greatest life challenge, even if they have scaled the north face of the Eiger. Of course, attempting the Eiger without adequate physical and mental preparation and a good guide would be foolhardy. This book provides both the guide and the waypoints to succeed, written with the understanding that we all have unique reference points from which to start. I have learned that, with guidance and support, no matter how serious the condition, people can and do find their path to long-term weight loss.
Broadly, I have encountered two types of ‘help seekers’ in the world of health and wellbeing: let’s call them Frank and Barbara. The doctor says: “I’m sorry to say that you appear to have contracted unusualitis; simply apply this cream three times a day”. Frank, oblivious of the disorder, blithely applies the cream and hopes for the best. Barbara, however, reads everything she can on unusualitis and, armed with this knowledge, tries to figure out the best course of action for a lasting resolution (which may, of course, involve applying the cream three times a day). If you identify with Frank, and just want to be told what to do, then this book is not for you; my advice (which I seldom give) is to put it back on the shelf now.
No two people I have ever met have the same reasons for being overweight. The complex backstories that lead people into their current weight dilemmas are as unique as our DNA, and so too are the solutions. Finding that critical path is a feat that can only be accomplished by the pilot of the avatar in question – you. The one-size-fits-all approach to weight loss is now thoroughly discredited, because, if it worked, the World Obesity Federation report released in 2023 would not be predicting that more than half the world’s population will become overweight or obese within the next twelve years1. There is only one solution, and that is to become a subject expert and a specialist in managing your own weight.
Typically, when weight becomes problematic, people are too reactive and give insufficient time or thought to developing and implementing appropriate strategies. They choose instead to lurch towards the most readily available solution, or the latest celebrity-endorsed fad, or the remedy that appears to offer the path of least resistance. But weight management is a journey of learning and development, relevant only to our individual circumstances, and each of us must carefully consider the facts in the context of our own experience and understanding of how our weight has evolved. Weight Wisdom will teach you how to overcome the ‘yearning enigma’ – that is, desperately wanting something, knowing what to do, but not being able to do it.
This book is suitable for the dieting beginner or the seasoned professional, for the social overeater or the entrenched food addict. This is because Weight Wisdom will teach you how to think and not how to eat. Weight Wisdom will particularly speak to people that are worn out with dieting and are seeking a life-changing weight transformation. If you are looking for easy answers, look elsewhere, but I truly believe that somewhere in these pages are the keys that will unlock the health and weight goals for many of you. What follows is a journey of learning, reflection, self-empowerment and, ultimately, self-determination, offering life-changing outcomes. This is a search for the truth.
If you are still reading, you have probably taken the first steps of your journey on the path to weight wisdom. Now, all that you need is a notebook, a pen, and a quiet place.
Preamble
The grand dilemma confronting weight-management practitioners is a tricky one. The obesity pandemic is ultimately a result of external obesogenic* forces bearing down on a susceptible population, and gaining weight year after year, or struggling to lose it, is a normal response, by normal people, to an abnormal environment. At the same time, the practitioner must enable their client to realise that, ultimately, it is they who are in control of their nutritional destiny. I hope that together we can strike that balance, and I apologise in advance for when I fall short through my assumptions and assertions.
While most people don’t want their food to become a religion, I don’t suppose they want it to be just a functional, tradable commodity either. Sadly, however, that is what much of it has now become: mass-produced, ultra-processed cargoes, barely resembling food and with little connection to the land from which it came. We have severed the ancient and spiritual connections between the earth, our food and our bodies, in favour of wrapping ourselves in multiple sterile layers of refined calories, each representing another barrier between us and the great giver of life.
Over thirty years ago, travelling India on the 3rd class rail network, holed up in a six-birth sleeper with an unknown family of meagre resources, I learned something important about food. Due to a logistics oversight, my companion and I found ourselves without food on a thirty-six-hour train journey. Early in the evening, our unacquainted family set about unfurling their food canteen. They didn’t speak English, and our Hindi was decidedly ropey, but without hesitation, once the food was set, they gestured for us to join them to eat. Embarrassed but hungry, we made token signals to indicate that we were fine, but they dismissed our feeble ruse and insisted that we join them. They shared all their food with us evenly as if we were part of their family. This meant that they all had less. We had nothing to contribute, and they absolutely would not accept payment. Those beautiful people shared more than just calories that day, they shared a lesson about the gift of food. It is a precious gift, it is life, and we must always cherish it. Take care of our food, and it will take care of us. Look after the people that look after our food, and they will reciprocate.
* Causing, or increasing the likelihood of, obesity in a person or animal – Dictionary.com
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2016 there were around two billion overweight adults in the world, representing 40% of the global population. Of these, 650 million were classified as living with obesity. These figures have tripled over forty years, and now most of the world’s population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than food shortages or malnutrition. A scientific study published in 2008 predicted that, by 2048, all Americans would be overweight or living with obesity2.
In the US, in 2017 almost three-quarters of adults were overweight, with 43% of these living with obesity3. In the UK today, collectively around two-thirds of adults are overweight or living with obesity, with more men than women crossing the BMI threshold of ≥25kg/m2 (about 69% vs 54% respectively). Interestingly, younger men are far less likely to be overweight than younger women, but older men are far more likely to be overweight than women of a similar age. Of the fifty-three countries in the WHO Europe region, the UK ranks fourth, behind only Turkey, Malta and Israel as the most overweight4.
Over the years, I have witnessed the ever-changing villain of nutrition. First, it was fats that were considered bad for us, and specifically saturated fats. Then it was carbohydrates, and specifically sugars, and now it appears it is proteins, specifically animal proteins. While I am being a little flippant here, my point is far from mocking the collective wisdom of the day, but more to point out that the science of human nutrition is still evolving, and the pursuit of a blueprint for optimum human nutrition is far from concluded.
When we look back in 100 years, I think we will find that each of these iterations in the search for the ultimate diet for human health was correct in the context of what was known at the time. Personally, I still believe that eating processed fats and sugars is a risky habit, and I’m currently considering the prospect of animal proteins as being deleterious to human health, too, but I have yet to reach a position on this as I don’t believe there is sufficient compelling evidence to support such a radical idea. But that isn’t to say that this won’t change in time.
At this point, I presume that you are reading this book because you are struggling with your weight. I hope you will take comfort in the fact that it is not your lack of willpower or asserted gluttony or sloth that has gotten you to where you are now. The vast numbers of people affected – encompassing all ethnicities, socio-economic groups, geographical parameters and cultural, religious, or political persuasions – rule out a delinquent lifestyle as the root cause of the obesity pandemic.
Millennia ago, governments realised that cheap and plentiful food was the bedrock for a stable political landscape, and this is as true today as it has ever been. To threaten the supply of inexpensive food is to threaten the establishment. Subsequently, obesity is a consequence of ubiquitous, affordable, calorie-dense and convenient food, woven into the geo-genetic and social lottery of life. It is these factors that will largely determine your risk of becoming overweight or obese.
I frequently hear discussions about where the responsibility for the obesity pandemic lies; is it personal responsibility or does it sit with our governments? Do we need to be telling people to eat less and move more, or should we be tackling the obesogenic environment (OE)? The answer is that we should be doing both. It is important to support people to eat less (or, more precisely, eat more healthily) and to move more, and yet at the same time, all of society – including politicians, educators, policy makers, food producers and suppliers, and environmental designers – should be tackling the OE. It is not one or the other, it is both. To make the travelling public safer, sensible governments legislate for and ensure the increasing safety standards of both highways and vehicles. Why should we not also expect them to do the same for the food we eat?
With respect to the individual or the establishment, it helps me to think about the obesity pandemic on two levels. Firstly, I consider matters at a population level – my high street, my town, my city, and so on, each with its environmental, political, economic and commercial landscapes that create and perpetuate weight gain. These are the embedded structural systems and processes that work gradually and pervasively to dominate their populations, despite the best efforts of those communities living amid the onslaught, such as food supply chains and multinational corporate power structures. The resulting obesogenic pressures exerted on these unsuspecting populations are entrenched and intractable; they will be very difficult to change in a hurry.
Testimony to this is the litany of well meaning attempts by governments of all persuasions over thirty years to try to curb and reverse the ever-expanding waistlines of their electorate. Not one of them has scratched the bloated surface, and we are collectively still getting heavier.
Then, of course, I consider the second and more apposite matter (for you and me), which is weight at an individual level. The person who is with me in practice, the foot soldier, battling against a tsunami of weight-promoting products and practices that shape our lives and bodies. Each overweight person has their own story to tell, their narratives are totally unique. Similarly, each person’s path to a healthier weight is as inimitable as their journey into overweight was in the first place.
When in practice, before I start a consultation, I take a moment to remind myself that this person has probably tried to lose weight 100 or 1,000 times before. In most cases, they will be experts in every diet known to mankind and will have tried all sorts of weird and wonderful eating and exercise regimes to control their weight. They will have had temporary success making them feel amazing; their aspirations and life plans could not have looked brighter. Ultimately, however, the diet ended, the weight returned (with interest) and all their efforts came to nought.
They suffered the humiliation and pain of having put their heart and soul into something only for it to fail. Why would they put themselves through that again and again? But wait! They’re still here; they are sat with me right now. Despite the hurt and disappointment of the past, they are still trying; they still believe that one day they will achieve their goal. I am full of admiration for them; they exude strength, determination and fortitude. I’m reminded that these people are not quitters, they have grit, and I know that, if together we can find their path, then they will surely walk it.
My hope and beliefs are that this book will help you to find your path, but the path you are seeking is hidden, for now. To find it, you must search in a different place, and you must look from a new vantage point. Central to change is being able to see things in a different way. Because, when you can see things differently, you can start to think about them differently. Crucially, only when you can think differently can you start to behave differently. In a nutshell, we must see things differently to think differently so that we can act differently.
You may be new to weight management, but the chances are you’re probably not. You may well be thinking how or why will it be different this time? I suggest that this time it will be different because, en route, you will change your outlook on key aspects of your life and the world around you. You will recognise both the internal and external disrupters of weight and the balance needed for health and happiness. You will learn how to overcome engrained unhelpful behaviours, habits and thoughts that have thwarted you in the past, and you will adopt these new ways of thinking to ensure a future that is free of weight turmoil. You will learn things about yourself that you never imagined. This is the journey of Weight Wisdom.
A typical weight-loss journey
As I’m sure you are aware, most people can lose weight. The problem is that weight lost normally returns, and this is very demoralising for the dieter. Most diets start with a wave of optimism and determination – this time it will be different! Primary and secondary goals drive the changes needed for weight loss and these commonly include a desire to improve appearance, self-confidence, be more active and improve overall health. Meal plans and exercise projects are scheduled, and a general air of excitement and positivity gets things off to a good start. With early weight loss comes optimism, enhanced confidence, and a brighter outlook; all is well with the world.
However, weight loss takes considerable time and effort, resolve, strength, abstinence, and several other virtues in generous helpings if it is to be guaranteed. Typically, diets run into one of two problems during or at the end of the diet. As events progress, life gets in the way of our best intentions and, sooner or later, weight loss diminishes, the target weight becomes a distant hope, and any faith of remaining in control evaporates. At this point, there is a realisation that neither the weight-loss goals nor the dreams of becoming a slimmer person will be realised. Lapses become more frequent and turn into relapse, which finally succumbs to total collapse†. Weight gain at this point is inevitable.
The other primary drawback with diets is that, if the dieter successfully reaches their target weight, motivation to maintain the ‘temporary’ changes required by the diet wanes and it isn’t long until a full-scale return to previous eating habits and sedentary living occurs, followed by a return of the weight.
This is a crushing time for anyone. For the dieter, there can be no other conclusion than that their frequent attempts to control their weight are not worth the considerable effort required (let alone the brutal effect it has on their mental health) and, as a result, they abandon any plans for future weight loss.
† A lapse (or ‘slip’) is a brief return to old habits after a person has made a commitment to change. A relapse is a longer but still temporary (medium term) return to old behaviours and a collapse is a full-scale return to previous lifestyle and the causal behaviours, with no apparent intention to change.
Many diets set out a weight-loss phase followed by a ‘mythical’ maintenance phase. To me, this is rather like asking someone to take a perilous walk across a treacherous, icy, high-altitude ravine. Once safely across to the other side, the instructor says, “Oh, you can’t stand here on terra firma, you need to get back out there in the middle and stay there!” There is no maintenance phase, there is either the lifestyle you are living now, or the lifestyle that you intend to live. Both are on firm ground.
It appears, though, that most people blame other individuals or themselves for weight gain. In an article published in the international journal Appetite in 2013 entitled ‘Who is to blame for the rise in obesity?’5, the authors asked 800 US citizens who they thought were most contributing to the rise in obesity (assuming it was a representative sample, 70% of them would have been overweight). Respondents were asked to pick from: food manufacturers, grocery stores, restaurants, government policies, farmers, individuals, and parents. Eighty percent said individuals themselves were primarily to blame, with parents the next-most culpable group, blamed by over half of respondents.
A further problem is that many people reading this will have had their weight ‘medicalised’ by a lifetime of traversing the healthcare system, consulting doctors, nurses, dieticians, pharmacists and endocrinologists. Following these interactions, it may be difficult to consider your weight in the context of the social, environmental and behavioural factors that may well provide the answers. Keeping an open mind is essential for getting the best out of this book.
This book is structured in a way that enables you to take the lead in finding the path that is right for you (as would happen in normal face-to-face behaviour change practice). You may be nineteen years old, or seventy-nine years young, either way you must work through the Five Insights in a way that is relevant to you, as they are the foundations upon which your rehabilitation will be constructed. And may I brazenly suggest that this involves much more than a few brief notes in your book. How carefully you think about the questions raised by the Five Insights, and the integrity and depth of your answers, will greatly influence your future voyage.
Weight-loss myths
At this point, it’s worth revisiting and examining any advice you may have previously been given, or perhaps any that you are still getting. Be sure it is evidenced, or, at the very least, that it makes good sense to you. By way of example, I recall lots of ‘experts’ telling people not to weigh themselves more than once each week (I think, over concerns that people might spiral into obsessive compulsive weight neurosis), but I always found this notion odd, and I avoid advocating any weighing regime, simply leaving it to the preference of the individual. Recently, research has shown that more frequent weight monitoring assists weight loss, leading to greater adoption of weight-control behaviours. Apparently, people don’t drive themselves crackers doing it either!6
A further myth is that losing weight gradually is better than losing it rapidly. For years, weight-loss professionals (including myself) have followed the prevailing recommendations and advised gradual over rapid reductions, because we wrongly, it appears, accepted the hypothesis that the longer the duration that people spend losing weight, the more likely it is that their new lifestyle will ‘stick’. To test this, Australian researchers randomised 204 overweight people to either a twelve-week rapid weight loss programme on a very low-calorie diet (450-800 kcal/day) or a thirty-six-week gradual weight-loss programme, reducing intake by about 500kcal/day (which was for years the standard advice). They found that, while the overall calorie deficit for both groups was the same (over twelve weeks or thirty-six), 80% of the quick losers achieved the target weight loss of 12.5% compared to only half of the slow losers. After three years, there was no noticeable difference between the group’s weight regain7. Therefore, contrary to Aesop’s fable, in a straight race, the quicker beast wins. Importantly, I must mention that I am not advocating very low calorie diets and don’t recommend them for weight loss.
Despite how many times you have heard it, “Don’t skip breakfast, it’s the most important meal of the day, particularly if you are watching your weight”, Wicherski et al looked at all the available evidence to date and promptly poured water on that particular firework when they showed that skipping breakfast does not correlate with being heavier8. While this will not be the best breakfast bulletin Kellogg’s have ever had, it will be music to the ears of people that practise time-restricted eating to support their weight loss (more on this later).
You’ve also got to keep an eye out for the flaky science. Having read thousands of scientific journal articles, I’m frequently surprised by published articles that have somehow escaped the scrutiny of peer review (sometimes, in journals that should know better). One example was a 2020 study published in the ‘Bulletin of the Association of Medicine of Puerto Rico’ looking into sociodemographic factors affecting weight loss in adolescents. The researchers determined that female adolescents were more likely to lose weight if they felt unhappy about their appearance whereas males were less likely to lose weight if they were unhappy with their appearance9. Could you take that to the bank? I don’t think so. You can’t always rely on what you read in a scientific journal. Make your own mind up, scrutinise all information from ‘the experts’, including anything you read in this book. If it makes sense and it seems to work, that’s not a bad starting point. If not, be very wary.
In writing this book, I have tried to balance the things I have learned in practice against the more nebulous machinations of the evidence base. My aim in melding these two uneasy bedfellows is not only to seek the truth, but to make sense of it all. Each section represents an important contribution towards the objective of solving for the reader the great enigma that is unwanted weight. The book strives to bring enlightenment and empowerment, with the aim that you become a self-weight-management expert. I believe that this is the only sure way to discover your path to success.
I have always believed that what accompanies learning and development is great power, in this case the power to change your life. You will learn about the biology of weight gain from before the moment of conception, and the forces that act upon our weight as we grow and develop. You will come to understand the intricate interplay of appetite control and energy management, and how hormones work to support or undermine our hopes.
Weight Wisdom offers every relevant fact, scenario, situation and opportunity that I have encountered in twenty-five years of weight-management practice and study. Each contribution is integral in building the cache of tools and knowledge that will lay the foundations for your successful journey. The early part of the book provides information to build your essential knowledge base and adopts a heuristic and enquiring approach. Therefore, don’t look for solutions at the end of each section and do not expect me to give you the answers as we go along. Remain patient, take notes, and carefully consider the relevance of each issue in the context of your own
situation. Take sufficient time to reflect on the aspects that have the most relevance and resonate with you and your life. Think about them over days or weeks, if necessary. Share your thoughts with family and friends, and discuss ideas or hurdles, listening to and considering the views of those that you trust the most. This is fundamental in transforming information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom.
The latter stages of the book will focus on changing the way you think. But this will only be successful if you are in receipt of and have processed all the relevant information to enable your brain to make valid judgements. If your hard drive is not in command of all the facts, how can you expect the CPU to make accurate decisions and calculations.
A sense of balance
I often read that, when setting out on a weight-reduction journey, people should avoid unrealistic goals. My question is this: what is an unrealistic weight-loss goal? For example, for someone weighing fifty stone and electing for gastric bypass surgery, losing half of their body weight – while challenging for certain – would seem like a sensible target. Losing 10% would appear largely pointless considering the risks involved. On the other hand, someone with a BMI of 28 might consider that they would be happier if they were half a stone lighter, and some would say that this is a more realistic target. This target, however, could in fact be as unrealistic as the first example, because even if achieved, people rarely make their weight loss permanent, so it should be assumed that the weight will return. In this case, then, either all weight-loss goals are unrealistic, or none are. I prefer to think that none are.
Saying I want to lose a stone in weight is all well and good; it states what you would like to achieve, which isn’t bad as a starting point. An accompanying question might well be: how do I lose a stone in weight? There are lots of different approaches and some are likely to work better for you than they do for me, and therefore perhaps some trial and error may be required. However, the most appropriate question would be: how do I become motivated to make the changes needed to lose a stone in weight? This is because, if we are sufficiently motivated, we will always find the right way to achieve what we set out to do, and the key to long-term weight loss is finding the right approach for you.
Another important consideration is to stay realistic. If you think that losing weight will not involve restrictions on your life, you have been reading too many fad diet books. Life is balance, which involves placing restrictions on the excesses that are damaging us. It is important to accept that there will be disadvantages and sacrifices associated with losing weight, with the most obvious being that you will not be able to eat some of the foods you are used to eating. Ironically, if your journey goes to plan, in the future you will consider these to be advantages.
Overweight people know all about populist weight-loss strategies and, with respect to dieting and slimming, many could probably write a book. But, of course, diets don’t work, and I’m guessing readers of Weight Wisdom have long figured that out. I know that people I have worked with are aware of the daily behaviours and choices they make that foil their weight-management efforts. Each could describe an effective lifestyle plan that would permanently resolve their weight, if only they had the power to adopt it and maintain it. And this is why knowing what to do only loosely correlates with behaviour change. Weight Wisdom has two primary purposes: the first is to convince you that change is the only path to long-term weight management, and the second is to show you how to convert your (currently concealed) lifestyle plan into reality and realise the weight loss that you desire and deserve.
While it is entirely a matter for individual preference, I don’t necessarily think that setting out with a weight-loss target in mind is the most effective way to go about things. I would suggest that the best targets to set yourself would be behavioural, nutritional and psychological. When you can make these targets stick, then your weight-loss ‘target’ will sort itself out, and you’ll find the balance point that is right for you in terms of weight and lifestyle. The first important rule is to focus on change goals, not weight-loss goals.
I believe that the great thinkers and philosophers of the world mostly reached the same conclusions when it came to the big question: what is the meaning of life? They broadly settled on happiness and contentment being at its core. I would suggest that balance is at the heart of this. Balance is paramount: without it, we are lost, all of us, and the Earth, and the universe. If you are overweight or in debt, or unhappy, or discontent or unwell, or don’t feel loved or valued, or whatever, I would suggest that, somewhere along the line, the balance in your life has been disrupted. The only possible remedy is the restoration of equilibrium. Throughout this book, I hope to convince you that it is not weight loss or thinness or ‘the body beautiful’ that will bring about health and happiness, but balance (which may include one or all of the above). I believe that the purpose of this book is to help you find balance, which in turn will move you closer to lasting happiness and contentment, and a beautiful and respectful relationship with your faithful avatar.
The lifestyle continuum
I’d like you to consider your lifestyle on a one to ten Likert scale, where one is the dregs, characterised by Wayne and Waynetta, the fictional slobs from the hysterical ‘Harry Enfield and Chums’ show. With respect to health and balance, Wayne and Waynetta’s lives are an absolute train wreck. Ten on the scale represents the ‘Health Saints’, the most health-conscious souls of both mind and body that you could conjure up. These saints maintain a strict palaeolithic diet of organic fruit and vegetables, a few nuts and seeds, and drink only pure, fresh mountain water. They’ve eradicated stress from their lives and walk daily in the tranquillity of ancient woodlands culminating in the calmness and silence of an hour of solitary Zen Yoga.
Then there’s the rest of us, somewhere in between the slobs and the saints. As the months and years go by, we vacillate between these normal operating parameters on our own lifestyle continuum. Where we are at any one time depends upon how we have reacted to all the external forces that are pressing down upon our lives at that time. This is normal. Most of the time we are striving to escape Wayne and Waynetta, but, perhaps at the same time, not wanting to get too close to the saints either. When our lives are in control and events around us are stable, we naturally gravitate in an upwards direction on the continuum. All is well, we are happy, we are healthy, we are eating well, and we are moving freely.
Then a significant something comes along to disrupt our plans (life has a habit of interfering with our best-laid plans – Covid-19, for instance). Illness in yourself or your family, the rigours and demands of work, economic hardship or just the plain old stresses and strains of life. Disruption occurs, commotion ensues, and our positive behaviours and choices falter, convenience and comfort become the order of the day and we slide back down the continuum, closer to Wayne and Waynetta.
Fortunately, it is innate in humans to try to do the best that we can. Following adversity, when things settle down and normality returns, we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and start again. Typically, we re-engage with our healthful activities and gradually we escape the sphere of influence exerted by the slobs. As our lifestyles improve, we feel happier and more in control, our mind and body are contented; we sense the balance returning to our lives. That is, until the next inevitable disruption. This is the reality of the lifestyle continuum, upon which we are all long-haul passengers.
Once you recognise the lifestyle continuum as reality, it relieves the stress and guilt associated with ‘falling off the wagon’ and diminishes the imperative of always doing the right thing. This understanding enables you to think one day at a time, and you can relax in the knowledge that you can simply try to do better today than you did yesterday. If that doesn’t work, you can try again the next day. What’s more, if you buy into the concept of the continuum, then you have a plan that anticipates and expects lapses and provides a realistic framework to turn things around when things go awry. In time, if you embrace the continuum, I believe that you will observe an ascending ratcheting effect, where the backward slides aren’t so precipitous, and the recoveries are swifter and more sustained. The key is not necessarily to question where you currently are on the continuum, but what is your direction of travel, and what are your intentions?
Don’t lose the path. As on any journey, you will from time to time stray, but don’t dwell upon these transgressions, the key is that you search until you find the path once again. It may be that you join the path further back than where you were previously, but that is OK – the point is that you are back on the path once again. This is the imperative.
In a moment, you are going to close your eyes and think of a period in your life when you were in a good place and feeling great about yourself and all that was around you. Don’t make the mistake of confusing the intoxicating vibrancy and resilience of youth with the harmony and contentedness of a balanced, mature life that is available to us at any age. Don’t open your eyes until this vision is clear and you can recollect when and where it was.
During this time, you are most likely happy with your behaviours and choices, you appreciate moving freely and are energetic and active. Time pressures seem manageable and stress, for now, is kept at arm’s length. You recognise your good fortune and enjoy your rewarding life. It might be that you are eating foods that you enjoy, and you don’t feel like you are denying yourself the things that are important to you. You feel fulfilled and might think of these times as carefree. You are probably at your happiest and most likely your healthiest as the two are inextricably linked. The result is high self-esteem, mental wellbeing, and a positive body image. Consider where this point would be on the lifestyle continuum, what number would you place on it? I suggest that this is most likely to be a good indicator of your preferred balance point. In fact, it is your actual balance point! Write down in your notebook: MY BALANCE POINT IN LIFE IS …
Now it’s time to determine where you currently are on the lifestyle continuum; what is the reality of your situation right now? To do this, you will need some reference points regarding all the measures of ‘lifestyle’, such as diet, sleep, stress, physical activity, social interactions and other interests, use of stimulants (caffeine, nicotine, alcohol or drugs) and anything else that is relevant that you can think of. Determining a perceived lifestyle value will probably also involve considering behaviours and choices that you think you ought to be making, but aren’t. In your notebook, write down a number from one to ten and then make some notes on why you have reached this figure. Write down in your notebook:
MY CURRENT LIFESTYLE POINT IS ….
It’s not fair!
I’ve heard it many times from my clients: “It feels so unfair that some people can eat what they want, but I can’t have a biscuit when everyone else can”.
Well, here’s news for you: life’s not fair! I have a friend whose fourteen year-old son has a very severe nut allergy, and he can never have biscuits or chocolates, or sweets or ice cream, or pastries or cakes or puddings or breakfast cereals or grain breads or takeaways or eat at regular restaurants, and he must always check every food label as if his life depended upon it – because it does. Sometimes, life isn’t fair, so you need to decide how fair your situation is. Thinking that it is unfair that you can’t have ‘junk food’ because instead you choose health and happiness over diabetes and emotional turmoil is dysfunctional thinking.
You may also be surprised to learn that most healthy-weight people don’t just eat what they want when they want, despite what they may tell you or what you might think. Healthy-weight people realise that they must adhere to certain eating parameters if they are to stay lean and healthy, and while they don’t necessarily have the same struggles as someone that is overweight, they still need to be vigilant because life makes you fat. Furthermore, you might not have considered that, for people that don’t have weight problems, exercise is also hard and tiring and time-consuming, and often needs a good dollop of motivation to get it done.
I often wonder if the difference between people with or without weight problems is simply that healthy-weight people have learned (most probably from their parents) to train their brains to be more harmonious in terms of their cognitions and their wants. If your thoughts and beliefs (which control your behaviour) are at odds with your wants, you will never have what you desire. Achieving our goals is simply a matter of learning how to think in a way that connects our wants with our actions. Weight Wisdom will teach you how to do this, but, for now, just try to think about how your thoughts and beliefs influence your actions.
Another thing to think about for now, is whether you have allowed yourself to fall into the trap of developmental procrastination. When it comes to the things that we want to do, people say: “I’m looking forward to doing all these things when I have lost some weight. I can’t join the dance group now, I’m too heavy, I’ll do it when I’ve lost a bit of weight. I’ll get my bicycle out of the shed when I’m two stones lighter. I’ll join the chess club when I feel a bit better about myself.” But it doesn’t work like that. Doing these things now will help with your weight because they make us feel stronger and more positive about ourselves. These things give us tangible reasons to keep working at the changes in our lives that make things more meaningful and rewarding. They bring friendship and camaraderie and the social support that is required if we are to make positive changes in our lives. Taking the steps that enable you to do the things that you want to do in life brings self-credibility.
Self-credibility
You know that you are not happy with how things are, and you desperately want to change – you have ideas about change, and you are just waiting for the right moment to make your move. You need some space and time in your life to overcome a few obstacles before you can start – now is not the right time and there are lots of good reasons for this. Also, the status quo of the moment is serving its purpose – it’s familiar, comforting and reassuring, and nothing seems that immediately threatening. What’s more, you are worried that if you try to change, and you are not ready or prepared, then you may fail, and you’re afraid of what this would mean, which makes it difficult to take the first step. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. I feel like this regularly.
But by seeking help, or pursuing self-help, or buying this book, you have taken the first step. You have accepted that there is irregularity or disturbance in your life, and you must believe that there is a realistic prospect of a satisfactory outcome or you would not have taken the first step, which you have. Jointly, your actions, supported by your beliefs, confirm your readiness to embark upon this journey. Remind yourself daily that, simply by the power of your thought, you have reached the conclusions that have enabled you to act and engage in self-help, this is the first logical act of therapy. By taking this step, you are already moving away from the irrational beliefs that have held you back in the past, and you are now travelling in the direction of a more positive, productive and rational life. You are now gravitating along the ‘lifestyle continuum’, and this gives you self-credibility.
Credo is the root of the word credibility, and means ‘I believe’ in Latin. For years, I worked in general management and the theme of professional credibility was a constant bubbling undercurrent. When competing ideas or strategies clash and corporate tension escalates, so too does the notion of professional credibility. What usually follows is a palpable ‘credibility display’ by each party, determined to press home their own professional credentials in a bid to win support for their proposals. As petty as it seems, credibility displays are central to commerce, because being able to believe in someone is ultimately what drives business. Having left that surreal world, I’ve thought a lot more about the concept of credibility and how it applies to the self.
The issues of credibility and relatability are also important considerations for people attending support groups. A crucial element that creates the all important group chemistry lies in the bond between the facilitator and the group members. This is why ex-users make the best drug rehab leads, and why weight-management practitioners with higher BMIs tend to get better results from their clients10. I learned early on that most overweight people were not going to take dietary advice from a lanky stick insect like me, which is one of the reasons I stopped giving it! (I think this is also one of the main reasons that I still suffer terribly from imposter syndrome). My friend who is a dietitian of many years also told me that patients don’t like dietitians if they are too fat or too thin – as she says, “You just can’t win!”
Developing self-credibility is probably the most important foundation for your growth and development. It is the framework upon which you will build all the skills and techniques required to achieve your weight-loss goals. The more that you think about it, the more likely it is that you will reach the unavoidable conclusion that, without self-credibility, you can’t believe in or trust yourself, in which case, you really are in a spot of bother. Take a couple of moments to think about this.
We all regularly deceive others to benefit our own cause (“Sorry I can’t make Friday; I’m taking my gran to the cinema”). But why would we deceive ourselves? The general theory is that self-deception evolved to make it easier and more convincing to deceive others – if you first deceive yourself, you don’t have to lie to anyone else. Self-deceit is a common feature of human nature but we don’t do it only to aid deception of others, but also to distort self-truths or suppress painful realities and memories, thus avoiding uncomfortable feelings associated with things we don’t want to face up to. A thief that doesn’t get the opportunity to steal considers himself to be an honest man.
Central to this theme is the question: how can you achieve self-credibility and learn to trust yourself if there is no core honesty? If, every time we get something wrong or make a mistake, we rationalise it away or lay the blame elsewhere and allow it to settle as a distorted memory, where is the growth? If we make excuses for ourselves and put the blame elsewhere and justify our actions with untruths, where is the learning? Each time we turn our faces from the truth, we loosen our grip on reality a little further and fall further into the abyss that is an irrational world of make-believe.
Research has shown that we all lie to ourselves, and this is known as cognitive dissonance. First proposed by Leon Festinger in his 1957 book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Festinger proposed that we desire our attitudes and beliefs to always be in harmony, but that they can become conflicted or dissonant because of our behaviours. When this happens, we lie to ourselves to avoid the mental torment that such conflict brings. An example of this might be someone that steals from their employer and then convinces themselves that this is to justify the low wages that they are paid. Maintaining a firm handle on self-reality provides a basis upon which to make decisions and control the direction of our lives. By making ourselves aware of our self-deceptions, we can regain self-credibility, followed by control, and finally find the true direction in our lives.
A good starting point to build or restore self-credibility is to acknowledge that you do lie to yourself, and accept that it has probably become habitual. In this case, you are going to need a plan to develop the healthier habit of self-honesty, with the goal of making this a core life principle. Self-honesty will often involve facing up to your fears and accepting your limitations, which can be challenging. Only when we truly know that our words, decisions and actions are tethered to reality can we start to trust ourselves and reclaim self-credibility.
Take a moment to think of some examples of how you might have deceived yourself in the past, or perhaps instances of ongoing deception that you use, possibly as a coping strategy. Write them down in your notebook. Here are a couple of self-lies that I sometimes fall into the trap of using, that erode my self-credibility and core self-trust:
“I can’t go to the gym today; my knee is sore from the long dog walk yesterday.”
“I don’t have time to make a healthy lunch today because I have to keep writing this book and get it finished, so I’ll just have something quick and convenient.”
“I didn’t get time to help my son with his homework tonight as I was too busy with research.”
Here, in contrast, are the truthful words that will rebuild and sustain my self-credibility:
“I didn’t go to the gym today; I couldn’t find the motivation and I was comfortable at my desk.”
“I just ate junk for lunch today because I couldn’t be bothered putting in the effort to make anything better.”
“I didn’t help my son out with his homework today because I prioritised my work over his.”
Such reality checks might not always lead us to the gym or to eat more healthily or whatever, but they will make us feel better because we are being honest with ourselves. This in turn will help us to make the right decisions, so there is more chance of us doing the right thing simply by being honest with ourselves. This is important to keep us on track – we all want to be better people.
We all know that the short-term consequences of making poor lifestyle decisions are marginal, but over the long term, if we maintain the self-deceit that is perpetrating these bad decisions, then we are aware that things won’t turn out well. The penalties for successive bad life choices are going to include physical and psychological distress, the consequences of which, in time, could become calamitous. Everyone makes mistakes, but lying to ourselves to justify them only makes matters worse.
Furthermore, frequent, conscious poor choices will ultimately diminish our faith in our own judgement. We all need to be cognisant of our decisions and be vigilant against taking too many easy or selfish options and passing them off with lies and excuses. Being honest with ourselves and truthfully rationalising our decisions (and owning them) helps to stop the self-duplicity and grounds us back in reality. Being true to ourselves enables us to take responsibility for our decisions and to trust in our judgement. This gives us self-credibility, the characteristics of which are:
Respect – Respect, love and care for the person that you are, and for your avatar.
Expertise – Be competent in your field. Be a self-expert in weight management.
Self-truth – Self-deceit and disloyalty will undermine all self-credibility. If you make a mistake, immediately acknowledge it and correct it if possible.
Practice Authenticity – Don’t try to be someone else, realise who you are, and grow and develop that person.
Emotional intelligence – Feelings and emotions guide us. Be aware of emotional strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities to help avoid impulsive actions.
Credibility – Take ownership of your actions and be responsible for them. Don’t make excuses for bad decisions or choices.
True Integrity – Alignment between thoughts and actions. Do the right thing for the right reasons – especially when no one else knows.
Things to practice when developing self-credibility:
■ Practice listening to yourself – what am I saying to myself?
■ Practice fact-checking yourself – is that what I really believe?
■ Practice reasoning with yourself – is that really what I want?
It is also important to remember that past performance is no guarantee of future results, and a successful life relies upon us trying hard each day to achieve the things in life that we feel are important. At the same time, an essential aspect of achieving and maintaining self-credibility is building a bridge from the past to the present, which we can then project into the future. This is because time links all things together, and you can’t just cut off the past or ignore the future. Our past does not define us, but it helps to remind us, and acts to guide us for the future. Take some time to consider the journey that you are on and use your experiences of the past to give you strength and direction for the future.
Purpose
We all need purpose in life. Without purpose, life has no apparent meaning or direction. A life without purpose is surely just a confusing cycle of pain and pleasure, leaving us bobbing around in the yin and yang of existence. Without purpose, you can try to make sense of the chaos all around, but the meaning is lost. In the absence of purpose, we are simply coping and surviving, lurching between triumph and disaster. But life is meaning, and purpose validates our existence and helps to answer the age-old question of why we have been gifted this the most precious commodity of all – being.
Now, while it has been said of me that, if I were a swimming pool, I would have two shallow ends, I don’t agree. For instance, I regularly muse over the meaning of life, which normally involves me thinking about who or what I am, and trying to fathom what my purpose is in life. When I delve into what I am, it helps me to consider myself as a symbiotic organism, with two parts – the mind and the body. My body (including my brain) is the physical form that allows me to exist. My mind is the product of this physical form, and it is the master, where my body is the servant. Throughout my life, I’m ashamed to say that my mind has meted out some dire treatment to my body, abused it, and taken it for granted. My mind has relied on my body to always come through, to be there irrespective of how it treats it. My body has taken the knocks every time and has always been there when I’ve needed it. I’ve punished it, truly, but it never complains, it does its best and always obeys the command of its master.
I know what the body needs, and I know what nourishes it and protects it, but the master doesn’t always care about that, sometimes the master wants gratification and pleasure, and the avatar must suffer the consequences. When it gives up, I am gone, ‘we’ are gone, but I don’t see my body as an equal partner. I don’t value it as I should, or I wouldn’t abuse it in the way I do. If I am to achieve all that I want in life, I need to develop an equitable relationship between my mind and the beast of burden that is my body. My body has always looked after me, cared for me and protected me. My body has always been my guardian. My body truly loves my mind, and this is evident in everything that it has ever done for me, and everything it continues to do, in spite of my ungrateful disregard for its welfare and often abhorrent treatment of it. My body provides me with unmitigated devotion, but I, the mind, do not always reciprocate.
As a younger person, my behaviour was delinquent. By the age of sixteen, mostly as a result of my reckless actions, I had spent three weeks in hospital with serious burns, managed to spear myself through my calf muscle, and almost died from pneumonia brought on by self-neglect. Shortly after leaving school, I spent another long shift in hospital with septicaemia and endocarditis (a potentially fatal infection of the inner lining of the heart) because of treading on a broken bottle and ignoring the wound. In my mid-twenties, I ruptured a ligament in my knee playing football (absolute disaster) and almost fractured my skull cliff diving while on holiday in Yugoslavia (got away with twenty stitches). Aged thirty, I travelled the world for a year, during which I contracted a bad dose of malaria, spent another three weeks in hospital in New Delhi suffering from typhoid (very, very nasty!) and brought home a few parasitic worms in my intestines and liver (bilharzia), which needed several visits to the unit for tropical diseases at Kings Cross to exterminate the blighters.
I remember watching TV one evening sometime later and seeing one of the BUPA ads you may recall – ‘You’re amazing’ (you can still see them on YouTube). These ads catalogued a series of astonishing facts and images about the body and portrayed this magnificent organism in all its glory. At that moment, I had an epiphany: “I’m no longer going to be the abuser in this relationship. I commit that, from this day, the servile relationship ends, and this becomes a true symbiotic partnership with common respect and reciprocated caring and love for this most precious thing, this wonder of creation, this body that loves me and cares for me and protects me. I would never treat anyone else in this way, why am I treating this faithful and loving friend in the way that I do?”
Shortly after, I changed career and moved from general management back into the wellness sector where I had previously worked in phase four cardiac rehabilitation and exercise referral programmes. I considered the growing obesity pandemic and re-retrained, specialising in weight management. I started to take my health more seriously and learned everything I could about human nutrition and non-communicable lifestyle disease. I applied what I learned to myself, and tried wherever possible to make better choices. I was starting to earn credibility with myself, which I still strive each day to maintain as best I can.
I am glad to say that, since this awakening, I haven’t had any major medical skirmishes and I have been more responsible in taking care of my avatar in the same way that it takes care of me. I truly believe this way of thinking has helped me to make wiser lifestyle choices in the face of all the temptations that are thrust upon me, and all of us, daily. It was the start in giving me self-credibility and purpose. If I can’t have respect for my own body, how on Earth can I have credibility when it comes to helping others to think about their bodies in a similar way? Maintaining self-credibility continues to keep me grounded and validates my work with others, which is, I think, what gives me purpose.
I believe that the most important (or sole) purpose of humankind is to make life better for others. But this must include taking care of ourselves (perhaps the most purposeful thing that we can do). For how can we help others if we are gone?
Feeding nurture
There is no doubt, your weight today is the result, to a large degree, of what and how much you ate as a child. From the moment of conception, your nutritional environment will have played a significant role in plotting your lifetime weight trajectory. The earlier the influence, the more profound the effect. I will ask you to consider this in detail when you undertake the five Insights of Weight Wisdom, because without a clear understanding of your journey into your weight, you will be unable to find the path to your new life. More about this in Insight 2.
All infants (humans and other animals) rely on their parents to teach them what to eat. This is fundamental to survival and is, in my opinion, one of the most crucial responsibilities a parent assumes when they bring a child into the world. Every mammal undergoes a nutritional apprenticeship, and the head teacher is typically the mother. In highly socialised animals such as elephants, siblings and other family members are also important teachers. In the case of our closest relatives (primates), this education can last for twelve years. During this time, children and other young animals spend much of their days observing and learning from their parents which foods are nutritious and which are to be avoided.
One aspect of this that you may not have considered is the permanence of such lessons. Something learned about food or feeding in childhood is held sacred, and unless challenged, will most likely become a lifelong ‘belief’ about how to behave around that food or that feeding behaviour. Nature has a way of ‘imprinting’ valuable knowledge to safeguard it for future generations. I experienced the power of this when I was about six or seven, but I did not realise its significance until some thirty years later when it occurred to me why it had such prominence back then.
My friend Gerald, or Jez, as he was known to us, was a real character, as tough as old boots. He had five older brothers with eight people living in a tiny two-up two-down next to Bank Hall colliery in Burnley where his father and some of his older brothers were working, ‘down pit’. When I first heard the poem Timothy Winters by the poet Charles Causley, I instantly thought of Jez (and still do). The first verse goes like this:
Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.
I recall asking my mum if Jez could come round to our house one day for tea (dinner) after school. Knowing of his family, Mum was resistant at first, but eventually caved in under my persistence. And so, sure enough, after a school footy match Jez came along. On walking into the house, Jez spotted the table was set for five people. He stopped in his tracks and gave me a look of real surprise:
Jez: “Are we having a party?”
Me: “What?”
Jez: “Why then the table and chairs and tablecloth etc?”
Me: “Because we are going to have our tea!”
Jez: “Oh…”
We didn’t speak about it after that, but that conversation stayed with me. Why on Earth did he say that? I would muse over it for weeks after. I knew that Jez had a big family and I supposed they didn’t have the room in their house for a table big enough for eight. Perhaps they all sat in a circle on the floor to eat their meals? What on Earth did they do when it came to tea time? I just couldn’t fathom it out.
Of course, what I realised many years later was that we had both been socialised differently regarding eating as a family; to do anything different would be utterly absurd. I imagined their family to be huddled in a circle on the floor, and Jez thought we had a tea party every evening. The message, I hope, is clear. If you think that what you believe about food and feeding is correct, if you learned it in childhood, you need to check that it is valid. What is more, even if it was appropriate back then, you need to determine whether it is still the case.
Throughout the book, lookout for sections of text that are greyed out. These provide more detailed technical information that will be at the preference of the reader.
