Amazing diet to add 5 pounds solid flesh in 1 week!
Prof David Haslam, chair of the National Obesity Forum, is quoted as saying: ‘If someone close to you has a large waistline then, as long as you do it sensitively, discussing it with them now could help them avoid critical health risks later down the line and could even save their life.’
Dr Jean Pierre Despres, scientific director of the International Chair on Cardiometabolic Risk, agreed: ‘Start by encouraging someone close to you to make simple lifestyle changes such as becoming more active, making small alterations to their eating habits and replacing sugary drinks with water.’
The plate that nags you to diet.
Does exhortation to lose weight ever work? Whether it’s coming from another person or from inside our own head, are we really likely to comply, on a permanent basis? Now there’s even a Talking Plate that nags you to eat slowly! The outcome of most diets is to gain yet more weight, once the diet has ended. And the truth is, they always do end!
However, the good Prof Haslam did put in the proviso about discussing this issue ‘sensitively’ so on that ground alone it feels OK to me to give him a grain of publicity.
My own approach when working with people who consider their weight or fat to be a concern, is to emphasise learning trust in the self, using intuition about what is ‘good’ behaviour around food, listening to the body’s internal signals, discarding shame and replacing it with self-love – all of which, I’m sorry to say, takes time.
SIX TOP TIPS Take small pauses to listen to your body’s own signals. Eat when you’re actually hungry! Then stop when you’re not! Eat sitting down, calmly, in company. There are no forbidden foods (that ‘naughty but nice’ nonsense!) End the diet rollercoaster (drama but no fun!) Eat with pleasure and gusto!
Of course, in actual fact it saves time: it’s the diets that waste time! If you drop quick fixes and focus on finding a sustainable relationship with food and your body, you are likely to lose weight over a period of time and keep it off without worrying. This entails deep re-training of ourselves to differentiate between ‘comfort’ eating and ‘hunger’ eating. It also means tackling the guilt and shame head on, by ending the habits of eating in secret, or when distracted such as when driving in the car. It’s a process, I say again, that demands time and effort.
The 12-step programme of Overeaters Anonymous is worth a mention here as it suits many people. Again, it has a slow, steady approach – not shouting at people but supporting them! I’m not sure if the medical profession in its institutional form, say in the shape of the National Obesity Forum, is capable yet of finding the right tone in which to address all the people who feel distressed about their eating, and for whom food is not the unalloyed pleasure it should be. But then, do organisations composed of doctors know how to talk about pleasure?
Therapists increasingly recognize that talking about past abuse or neglect in therapy may not of itself help people to move beyond such experiences. I am always interested and excited by innovative techniques and approaches that come along, which aim at changing the self-destructive behaviour patterns that are often the mark of someone who has been abused or neglected.
One such method which I am now exploring is called Lifespan Integration. It is a gentle method which works on a deep neural level to change our self-attacking scripts, and people report that it has enabled them quite quickly to feel…
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Laura Schlessinger is a radio personality who has said that homosexuality is an ‘abomination’ according to Leviticus 18:22 and cannot be ‘condoned’ in any circumstances. The following is an open letter to ‘Dr Laura’ from a US resident.
Dear Dr Laura,
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.
CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) is all the rage these days. Here is a pretty useful CBT exercise for those of us over-identified with our ‘thinking part’.
The Daily Mood Log (© David Burns, ‘Feeling Good Handbook’, 1989) comprises a four-step approach to tackling distorted thoughts - which we often don’t even realize are distorted until we get some external feedback or do something like this exercise. Get some paper out and try it next time you’re feeling a bit low or stressed. I’ve adapted David Burns’ original format slightly. Step One: Record the Upsetting Event in between about 10 and 25 words. Step Two: Record your Current Emotions and rate them from 0 (the least) to 100 (the most). Examples of Emotions are: sad, guilty, lonely, gloomy, miserable, cheerless, unhappy, hopeless, dismal, sullen, despondent, melancholic, angry, annoyed, irritated, livid, furious, enraged, resentful, outraged, cross, irate, frustrated, afraid, fearful, anxious, scared, terrified, helpless, nervous, worried, alarmed, frightened, embarrassed, mortified. Step Three: Record your Upsetting Thoughts and then next to each of them write the Distortion contained in the Thought together with a more positive and realistic Counter-Thought. The Upsetting Thoughts and the Distortions will probably be habitual and even feel ‘automatic’, whereas the Counter-Thoughts may be less familiar: be creative and give yourself some lovingkindness through this process! Examples of Distortions are: ‘All or Nothing’ (thinking in absolute black and white categories). Overgeneralisation (one setback makes you think in terms of never-ending defeat). Negative mental filter (dwell on the downside instead of exploring the upside). Dismissing yourself (insisting your qualities and achievements don’t count). Assumptions (taking it for granted that other people are reacting badly to you, even though you can’t possibly know for sure). Fortune telling (pessimism, even though none of us knows the future). Magnification (blowing things out of proportion). Minimisation (inappropriately dismissing the importance of people, things and events). Inappropriate reliance on your feelings (I feel like an idiot so I must be one; I don’t feel like doing this so I’ll put it off). Inappropriate reliance on the word ‘should’ (taking your internal Critic too seriously). Labelling the person instead of their action (calling yourself a ‘loser’ instead of acknowledging you ‘made a mistake’). Blaming (usually simplistic and leads nowhere!) Step Four: Reflect on your Counter-Thoughts. Try and make them believable to you, such that you can take them on board, literally breathe a sigh of relief, and think to yourself ‘Actually I’m not a bad person’ or ‘The world isn’t a wholly bad place’ or some such, more realistic view. The breath of relief is important. Take your time over this. Then consider your relationship to your original Upsetting Thoughts, and make a note how you experience yourself: · No better. · Slightly better. · Somewhat better. · Quite a lot better. · Much better.
Repeat dose as often as required!
