Fabulous Jelly: Use Your Brain to Lose Weight E-Book

Susannah Healy

• Herausgeber: Mercier Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 187

Beschreibung

We all know what we should be eating and diet gurus abound, yet over 40% of the population is still overweight. Why? Because most of us find it so damn difficult to get 'in the zone' long enough to stick to a new eating plan that we really couldn't be bothered. In 'Fabulous Jelly' author and psychologist Susannah Healy describes the triumphs and failures of her own weight loss (including an absolute fortune spent on re-joining weight loss clubs), before she learned to use her own professional experience to design a plan that worked for her. Now two stone lighter, Susannah shares her secrets about how to get your brain to work with and not against you in weight loss, using research from neuroscience and cognitive and behavioural psychology. Susannah shares her eating plan that will get you motivated – and provide results. This book is not a life-long eating plan, but it will kick-start your weight loss, give you the motivation to keep going and stop all the rubbish clichés about 'completely new you' that are sabotaging your weight-loss goals. It's a fact: frozen veg are the new avocado!

Leseprobe

MERCIER PRESS

3B Oak House, Bessboro Rd

Blackrock, Cork, Ireland.

www.mercierpress.ie

http://twitter.com/IrishPublisher

http://www.facebook.com/mercier.press

© Susannah Healy, 2013

ISBN: 978 1 78117 180 6

Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

All characters and events in this book are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, which may occur inadvertently, is completely unintentional.

For my parents, my siblings, my husband and my children.

I love you endlessly.

Contents

Introduction

1 gNATs in Your Head

2 Mind How You Go (and Beware of the Cute Heuristic)

3 No Strangers to Failureville

4 The Enormous Big Humdinger of an Ask

5 Prostrate Yourself Before Your Unconscious Mind and Start Grovelling

6 The Fabulous Jelly Programme

7 More Morsels to Remember

8 Control Briefs

9 ‘You Will, You Will, You Will ...’

10 Cravings and Other Critters

11 From Pavlov to Pavlova

12 As Few Words as Possible on Stress

13 Instructions on How to Wake a Sleeping Pilot

14 So There You Have It and Here You Are

References

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I challenge you to find someone in Ireland who doesn’t know roughly what constitutes a healthy diet and what we should be eating more or less of: less saturated fats, more fruit and veg., etc. So why is it that about forty per cent of the Irish population are still overweight? Well, possibly because all the diet and eating programmes doing the rounds require willpower, self-control and a healthy dollop of self-denial. But psychological research tells us that willpower is like money: spend it and it runs out. So what use is the endless expert advice about good nutrition if most of us simply can’t manage to follow it? It seems that the gap between good nutrition and the reality of our daily lives is just too great. We all know what we’re supposed to do, but never quite manage it. Or we choose to go ‘all out’ … starting next week, because we need time to guzzle every delicious food that we love but are going to give up forever when the diet starts.

Diet gurus talk about the need for a ‘complete change of lifestyle’ a ‘lifestyle overhaul’ and a ‘new you’. This is an enormous ask of anyone and smacks of New Year’s resolution speak – and we all know how long they last. Many of these eating programmes are drawn up by people who have no personal experience of the heart-breaking battle that a dieter goes through each time they start and then flunk a new diet. These programmes fail to acknowledge, and work with, the weaknesses in human nature, particularly in relation to all-out change.

As you read this book you will see that I am a great fan of Unislim, Weight Watchers and similar weight-loss clubs – they have done wonders for many people’s lives. But most of their members will testify to how much easier it is to lose weight when we feel ‘in the zone’, i.e. that wonderful feeling of enthusiasm and motivation, when what you do and what you want seem to effortlessly line up together and your weight-loss goals are suddenly achievable. This book is about this piece of the puzzle: how to find the motivation to start losing weight. Based on my own personal experience and my professional insights as a psychologist, the Fabulous Jelly programme will help you to find the motivation to start losing weight NOW.

In case you have picked up this book simply wondering what on earth ‘Fabulous Jelly’ is, I shall put you out of your misery. Fabulous Jelly refers to your brain; that phenomenal gelatinous lump that weighs around three and a half pounds, contains 100 billion neurons, 100,000 miles of blood vessels, is home to 100,000 chemical reactions every SECOND and an estimated one quadrillion separate pieces of information over a lifetime.1 The brain is generally considered by scientists to be the most complex phenomenon in the universe – and you’ve got one. Unfortunately, most of us never even attempt to understand how it works; we treat it somewhat like the heating in a building, we know when it’s on but that’s about it. I hope that this book will help you to become aware of your amazing brain and how it affects your eating habits and weight-loss goals in particular.

I think you will find that the Fabulous Jelly programme is a breath of fresh air compared to what has gone before. It is based on my own experience of what worked for me and why, as well as really getting a leg up from the field of psychological research into why and when we eat. Please remember that I am not a dietician or nutritionist and to make the right food choices in the long term you may want to enlist the help of one of these professionals. Also, don’t be naive about it. Eating is a matter of life and death so if you have any medical condition at all check with your doctor first before changing your diet.

A Bit About Me

I can’t tell you how often I personally had a ‘last supper’ – the big ‘last treat’ before starting the diet the next day. I’m a chocoholic. There are plenty of things I like to eat, but chocolate is the clear winner. And I don’t like anyone messing with my chocolate – I don’t want it diluted with flour and eggs in a cake and I don’t want it filled with wafer, toffee or any other substance that might take up space that could otherwise be filled by chocolate. So my ‘last suppers’ usually entailed a cup of tea and an enormous slab of chocolate broken off a giant bar picked up while queuing at the counter of some supermarket. When I was a child these huge bars, like the packets of sweets which hang on racks from the display unit, were called ‘family packs’, but somehow they now seem to have morphed into single servings. If the cup of tea wasn’t available, the bar would sit in a cupboard or in the car so that I could nibble away at it continuously throughout the day. Of course, I often never quite managed to start the diet the next day – or I had started and stopped by lunchtime.

Many years ago I lost three stone with Weight Watchers. It was easy. I followed the system, got loads of exercise (which was also easy as I was a student at the time) and attended my meetings. From memory I don’t think there was ever a week that I didn’t lose weight and I could never quite understand how other people at the meetings found it so difficult. It seemed so simple to me: follow the plan and lose the weight. Fast forward ten years, I’m a busy working mother with neither the time nor the energy to stick to much of an eating or exercise plan. Somehow the motivation to eat healthily seemed to escape me. I was never a fan of set menu plans so instead I told myself that I would stop nibbling between meals or cut out carbs or never eat chocolate again or stop all sugary snacks completely. All good enough plans in moderation, but I never stuck to them. In fact, I never believed from the start that I would stick to them, so I often just told myself that this was being unkind to myself or unrealistic and jumped off the wagon and into a bar of chocolate. I joined and re-joined Weight Watchers countless times. I knew I had to devise a plan that ‘knew me’ – who I am, how I live my life and how I tick. I didn’t want a whole ‘new me’. In other matters not pertaining to eating I considered myself a fairly competent and together kind of person. I just wanted to lose weight.

If weight loss was a simple matter of ‘eat less, exercise more’ we would all need only one diet book. We all know it should be simple maths: calories in, calories out. But it isn’t. In order to start moving more and eating less we need to get in ‘the zone’, in the mood or simply disgusted enough with ourselves to finally shift ourselves into gear. This book is about that bit. Weight loss isn’t a ‘journey’. Travelling to France is a journey. So is watching countries go by while sitting in the dining car of the Trans-Siberian railway. Weight loss can feel more like an Iron Man Decathlon – this book is about getting up off the couch and into the runners. The distance you choose to go is up to you. I was inspired to write this book by all the times I thought about losing weight, yet did nothing, and by the technique I finally found of jumping into ‘the zone’ and keeping myself motivated enough to keep going – surprisingly with great ease. As I said, in the rest of my life I tick along just fine. So the fact that week after week, month after month, and particularly, Monday after Monday I would consider, contemplate and then ditch the idea of starting to lose weight really irritated me. Why was it so hard to lose weight? Of course, I knew (and you, the reader know) the risk of lots of nasty diseases associated with excess weight and I waited for the day when my own bottom would feature on one of those documentaries on obesity that film the backs of lots of faceless pedestrians walking down some street. (And everyone has that ‘friend’ who will be sure to tell you that your bottom was on the telly!)

I’m not a dietician or a nutritionist so you may well want to contact one of these. I didn’t write this book to repeat all the stuff you already know about what you should and shouldn’t eat. If you don’t know it by now there are plenty of books out there to help you with that bit. This book is written for the millions of people who already know all of that but just can’t quite get it together to get started. I was one of you.

This book tells you how I finally started to work out what was and wasn’t going on in my head that was keeping me out of ‘the zone’: that gorgeous feeling when suddenly weight loss seemed easy and I wondered why I hadn’t started ages ago. To get to this point you will need to delve into your thoughts to find out what is preventing you from making the changes you need to make. Luckily you can do this in private, keeping the messy bits to yourself. I want to show you that all the corset-wearing, army-drilling, boot-camping (now there’s an interesting picture!) in the world won’t help you to achieve your desired healthy weight unless you have sought permission from the ‘control tower’ – your brain.

Using some basic concepts of psychological therapy, such as cognitive behavioural therapy and other areas of psychological research, I will help you to develop an eating plan that works with, not against, your unconscious instincts, needs, habits and motivations, so that your mind will allow you to gently change the habits of a lifetime.

Please be sensible about how you put the recommendations of this book into practice. Of course, if you are morbidly obese, a diabetic or suffer from any other medical condition, you should refer to your medical practitioner before changing your diet.

In fact, I am not prescriptive about what you can eat – you can largely choose according to your own personal preferences. What I do here is give some insight into why other eating plans haven’t worked for you and what things you need to include in any eating plan you choose in order to make it work. Albert Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The same applies to weight loss. There’s no point embarking on yet another diet if you’re going to use the same mental apparatus. This book will help you gain an insight into what you need to change. In addition, the eating plan outlined here is not a life-long eating plan: go to a properly qualified dietician for that. The Fabulous Jelly programme aims to help you to see fast results without denying yourself the things you really love. Once you have lost the initial weight you have something worth protecting and you’ll suddenly realise that that bag of crisps, mountain of pasta or Chinese take-away just isn’t worth losing your new figure for. That’s when your life-long eating habits will change – effortlessly.

The Fabulous Jelly programme does not aim to get you a perfectly toned beach-ready body, but it will get you back within a healthy weight range for your height and age (BMI).

However, you do not need to read all of Fabulous Jelly if you feel like starting to eat differently today. Just do it! Grab your motivation and let it take you where you want to go, starting right now. The rest of us will be plodding somewhere behind you until we feel our own motivation sweep us off our feet – but we will see you at the finish line.

1 gNATs in Your Head

We all have them. Invisible, sneaky, forever reproducing and hard to catch, these little bug***s cause a lot of problems. (gigantic) Negative Automatic Thoughts (gNATs) are habits in our thinking that we are not even aware of. Picked up from parents, people we are close to and life experiences, these negative ways of thinking can become so automatic (unconscious) to us that we rarely get a chance to challenge them. They colour how we view our lives, others, situations, ourselves – and food. Think about how many assessments you make about things every day that guide how you live. For example you might say to yourself:

It would be just my luck if the bus was on time today when I’m running late.

Or

What if that other guy going for interview has a better CV than me?

Or

I’m always coming out with the wrong thing or putting my foot in it.

Or

I’m bound to be the one that doesn’t meet anyone special.

Most people never learn that how they think is, in fact, just one way of seeing things and that if our thoughts aren’t working for us we can learn to choose an alternative way of thinking. This is great news! Imagine dumping all the huge, years-out-of-date generalisations that you make about yourself and the world, and replacing them with kinder and more accurate statements that relate to you on one particular day in one particular situation.

For example, ‘I’m rubbish at public speaking’ becomes ‘I had one, or a few, bad experiences at public speaking when I was really nervous because I had no training/wasn’t prepared, but I presume that if I got training I’d be just as good as others who have more experience than me.’

Of course, dumping out-dated or inaccurate statements about yourself can work in the opposite direction, e.g. just because your adoring mother said you should wear your hair in a high ponytail doesn’t mean that you still should twenty years later. Similarly you may have had to ‘put meat on your bones’ when you were a scrawny seven-year-old boy, but perhaps any more meat on your bones now and you could be a one-man threat to the environment.

Two of the most important ideas in cognitive behavioural therapy are:

THOUGHTS ARE

NOT FACTS

and

YOU FEEL THE WAY YOU THINK

so …

If you don't like how you're feeling

(e.g. beached whalesque)

... change how you are thinking!

The biggest gNATs when it comes to overeating are:

1. Over-Generalising: Do you catch yourself saying things like:‘I’m big. It’s just the way I’m made. We’re all like this in my family …’?

Oh really? So your eating habits have nothing to do with your size? Do you actually eat very healthily? Do you get plenty of exercise? Do you eat similarly to the rest of your family? Do you eat ‘treat’ foods given to you as a child? Do your siblings? Do you run around as much as you did when you were a kid? Do you have the same metabolism as you did when you were young? Of course you don’t. And having a round-shaped face is NOT the same as being chubby-faced or a spare chin collector. The chances are if you and your siblings are all overweight you probably all learned the same poor eating habits and attitudes to food and exercise. You’re not made that way, you just learned it that way. Your ideas about eating aren’t fact, they are opinions – and they’re not working for you so it’s time for a change. (If you sincerely believe that you might have a medical problem that contributes to your weight gain, then obviously you need to discuss this with your doctor.)

OR

‘I hate exercise …’?

All exercise? Do you hate walking on the seafront on a sunny afternoon? Do you hate walking around your local park while catching up on the gossip with a pal? What games did you play outside with friends as a child? Do you support any sports teams? Chances are you don’t hate all exercise, you just either haven’t tried enough different types of exercise to find the one for you or you simply hate the feeling of being out of breath that you get now when exerting yourself. That bit is understandable. But don’t expand it out to hating exercise in general. Saying you dislike the shortness of breath you feel while running too fast now that you are unfit/overweight is a more accurate statement. It also instantly sounds like something more temporary and gets you thinking about ways you could get over the problem, like starting with walking, or jogging so slowly to begin with that you’re barely moving forward with each step, or walking with a friend so you are distracted by the chat, or getting coaching in a sport you have an interest in so that there’s loads of stopping and starting and plenty of time to catch your breath. All of these options offer you a way out of the habit of thinking in generalisations.

2. Fortune Telling – Predicting the Future: Do you tell yourself things like: ‘I’m just bound to put the weight back on. I always do …’?

Think about the times this happened before. Exactly how many times have you lost weight then put it back on again? What did the diet(s) involve? What were the main changes you had to make to your previous eating habits? Did the programme involve ‘all-or-nothing’ thinking? Did it involve extremes, i.e. ‘completely cut out x’? Did it fit in with your average day or did it require a lot of changes and self-discipline? Did it wreck your weekends? So many eating plans seem to think that a person can make a full-time job of their weight-loss plans, so don’t blame yourself if it didn’t work for you. We all know what we should and shouldn’t be eating so if those previous diets you tried just regurgitated all the same information you could have got from the Internet then don’t just presume that no eating plan will ever work for you. What did you learn from your previous attempts at weight loss? Which type of diet did you prefer – a set menu programme or something that allowed you more choice? What bits did you struggle with most? Did you feel hungry on some? How did you feel about that? Many people never leave long enough between meals to feel hungry and find the experience of eating when hungry really refreshing. Others just find they eat too much when hungry. Did any or all of your previous diets demand that you tried out new recipes? Did you enjoy trying new foods or do you now have a cupboard full of spices you can’t pronounce and a mortgage-worth of rotten but rather exotic-sounding vegetables in your kitchen? Think about what you have learned from these experiences regarding what works for your lifestyle.

REMEMBER: YOU WILL START TO LOSE WEIGHT FOR GOOD WHEN YOU FIND A PROGRAMME THAT WORKS WITH YOUR LIFE INSTEAD OF ASKING YOU TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

3. Mental Filtering: Do you protect your current beliefs as if you were Flash Gordon defending the universe?

Mental filtering relates to our mind’s dislike for change, which causes us to unconsciously think in a biased way. This means that we tend to take in only information that holds with our current beliefs and to dismiss information contrary to our current views, which results in us never updating our views of the world and ourselves.

Think about what mental filters you might be carrying with you through life without being aware of it. What are your beliefs relating to eating? (This is actually a really interesting exercise to do regarding all aspects of your life, but let’s stick to eating for the moment.) Maybe you believe you have no self-discipline. If you hold this belief then you probably feel that you haven’t a hope of succeeding on any weight-loss plan. You need to begin looking for information that contradicts this belief. For example, do you get out of bed each day? Do you produce a dinner for yourself and/or others each evening when you would rather spend the time in front of the TV? Do you get yourself to work/college every day?

‘Ah, but I mean I have no self-discipline when it comes to denying myself my favourite foods,’ I hear you say. So let’s look at this more specific belief. Have you ever