See Mandy in her TV Appearance in STV's 'The Hour'
on Monday 10th August, talking about Mind Over Heavy Matter.
Click here for link to the video
Glasgow based Diet Evolu7ion offers a unique and simple approach to weight loss without dieting, where you will learn exciting new techniques that will control your hunger response, alter your appetite drive and reduce dieting stress.
Most of us know which foods make us fat and which make us healthy. It isn’t knowledge we are short of: the fact is that we tend to focus on the symptoms of the problem instead of the underlying cause. Think how it would feel to try sailing a boat with a hole in it. You might for a short time, be able to bail quickly enough to prevent the boat filling with water and sinking. However a longer term and much happier solution would be to fix the hole.
Similarly, diets are simply a quick fix that do not address the root of the problem.
Nine out of ten British women diet at some point in their life – 41% of them ‘constantly’ - and although many people manage to lose weight while they are ‘sticking to their diet’, a huge number of those people subsequently put weight back on.
In fact, a recent significant study into diets has been published, which not only shows that they work for fewer than 7% of the people who use them, but also that the vast majority of people who come off a diet end up putting on more weight than before they went on it!
Diets are not just a symptom of the problem – they are a significant part of its cause !
So why is it that diets don’t work for more than 90 people out of 100?
In this report you will discover the facts about how our bodies and minds work when we diet, and why in the long term diets are detrimental to our health and to weight loss.
You will learn exactly why diets are a waste of your time, money and effort, and how dieting contributes to low self esteem and weight cycling.
If what you read in the following pages makes sense and appeals to you, and you’d like to find out more about how the Diet Evolu7ion approach to healthy eating and weight loss can benefit you, then simply register for our ‘tip of the week’ where you will be sent invaluable tips and information on a weekly basis that will inspire you to change your relationship with food, and support you in your natural weight loss.
So here it is….
THE TRUTH ABOUT WHY PEOPLE WHO DIET, FAIL TO LOSE THEIR WEIGHT IN THE LONG TERM:
1. THE FOCUS IS CONSTANTLY ON FOOD.
You are trying to lose weight and probably all you can think about is food – what’s for breakfast, lunch, dinner? When can you next have a chocolate bar, or a slice of your favourite cheese? How many calories in a small slice of cream cake? Can you save up enough calories/treats/sins to have a nice meal out?
In short, the most effective way of making sure that we crave foods and overeat them, is by trying to cut them out or avoid them in our diet.
The very intention to suppress a desire has the completely opposite effect because we humans hate any kind of restrictions and so the moment a certain food is forbidden, we immediately find it more attractive and start to obsess over it
2. BEING ‘ON A DIET’ IS ALWAYS FOLLOWED BY ‘BEING OFF THE DIET’
In a study into human starvation during the second world war, biological researcher Ancel Keys discovered that reducing peoples diet to a state of semi- starvation produced symptoms of irritability, loss of endurance and obsessive behaviour around food, including but not limited to lying, hoarding and stealing.
Even more telling, in the three month period after the semi starvation was ended and people could once again eat whatever they wanted, their obsession with food continued.
Many people ate up to 8 times as much food as they had done before the study began. (does any of this sound familiar?)
That experiment, documented in the 1950’s treatise ‘The Biology of Human Starvation’, is considered unreplicable. After all to purposely starve people would be cruel and inhumane.
But here’s an interesting fact: the semi starvation rations from the original study amounted to about 1,500 calories a day – more than is allowed on any number of the thousands of diets currently in vogue.
What this goes to show is that depriving yourself of food is the worst possible way to lose weight.
Our bodies rebel against enforced restriction of food, and dieting is a major trigger for bingeing
3. DIETS SLOW THE METABOLISM.
Our bodies are designed to ensure survival both in times of feast and famine.
When you diet, your body thinks that food may be scarce – it cannot distinguish between famine and a weight loss diet – and a body deprived of food will defend itself by shutting down to conserve energy.
It does this by lowering its metabolism – the rate at which calories are burned.
This metabolic slow down is the equivalent of going into hibernation. Your metabolism falls by 40% after 12 hours of not eating.(This is why it’s important to eat breakfast after a night’s sleep).
By denying your body nutrition when it needs it, you are telling it that there is none available – that you are starving – and it responds with a series of measures aimed at dealing with the emergency.
The body will continue to set about solving the crisis by sending out increasingly strong requests for fat and sugar: the best sources of instant energy.
And if you continue to starve your body with dieting, your body will respond by continuing to activate emergency strategies and will start breaking down muscle tissue to convert it into glucose (energy) leaving the fat stores intact just in case you might need them in the future.
Muscle is in fact an active tissue – it can burn calories when you are sitting doing nothing, even while you are sleeping. As muscle mass diminishes so does its need for fuel, and when you do finally succumb to your hunger, this extra fuel then gets stored as fat.
In addition, as our bodies are genetically programmed to hold on to fat after each period of scarcity, not only will you process food more slowly, but you will also build up fat reserves.
Dieting causes over-stimulation of the production of ‘fat storage enzymes, so that even when you start eating ‘normally’ again, your metabolism may stay stuck at this reduced level of function while it’s capacity to store fat becomes doubly efficient.
4. YOU ARE NOT MEETING YOUR EMOTIONAL NEEDS
If you are comfort eating, what are you comforting? Diets only treat the symptoms, not the cause. So why do you eat when your body does not need food?
Whether you call it comfort eating, compulsive eating, overindulging, constant nibbling, pigging out, binge eating, cravings, night eating or eating all the time, it all boils down to the same thing – overeating.
The triggers and behaviours that lead us to overeat are commonly habitual, but they are connected to our emotional needs too.
Are you under stress? Do you feel angry, lonely, bored, miserable or tired? Maybe you first put on weight following a trauma or difficult time in your life and you began to comfort eat to help you through that time. Now, even though that stressful time is past, you have kept the dysfunctional habit of eating when you feel upset, lonely or just bored.
Excitement can also be a trigger for overeating, and people commonly use food as a treat or reward for themselves, or even as an avoidance strategy.
Many of us use food to create a feeling of immediate satisfaction and personal comfort, using food to soothe inner struggles, often unconsciously. The way we use food can become a habitual pattern in which we feel stuck.
By contrast, going on a diet won’t meet those needs – diets cannot possibly work for people who use food in this way as they do not address the underlying issue of the overeating.
5.YOU MAY HAVE UNIQUE BLOCKS OR BARRIERS
Deep in the recess of your unconscious mind that prevent you from losing weight.
(ie some people unconsciously believe that their surplus body weight acts like a kind of protection like body armour, keeping them safe). Perhaps being overweight has become part of your identity, and if you are successful in losing weight you don’t know who you are any more. Do you find that you no longer recognize the person in the mirror, or become uncomfortable about the attention you now receive?
Losing weight can threaten major, long-held beliefs about ourselves (eg I can’t lose weight, I’m always going to be big, I like my food, I’m big and strong). Without alternative beliefs to take their place, it can be tempting to return to familiar ground, where we feel more comfortable and safe.
Some overweight people can even use their body shape as an excuse for everything they don’t have in life (a partner, a good job, the ability to exercise). Despite the fact they may feel unhappy and powerless, their weight means that they can avoid taking responsibility for their lives. Weight becomes something that you can conveniently blame for just about everything and that kind of excuse can be hard to give up!
6. DIETS UNDERMINE YOUR CONFIDENCE
If you are one of the many millions of people who have attended a weight loss class in the past, I’m sure you’ll be very familiar with that niggling unease you experience as you line up to get weighed with countless others.
You are about to discover if, this week, you are to be a success or a failure; there is no middle ground. Will you be able to hold your head high, or will it be the walk of shame?
Not to mention all those glossy magazines that contain pictures and stories of others who have lost weight using various approved methods, challenging you at an unconscious level to achieve the same success.
This has even extended to a growing number of TV programmes, where we are yet again exposed to groups of dieters who have successfully banished those extra pounds simply by following a prescribed eating plan.
And surely if all those other people are able to stick to an eating plan and lose weight then you should be able to do it too?
It’s true that many people do lose weight this way – that’s why diet clubs and groups are so popular and well subscribed.
What most people fail to realize though, is that ultimately the majority of those people who have lost weight by dieting, then put all of the weight they’ve lost back on again once the diet is ‘over’ – and then some.
7.THE DIETING INDUSTRY CARES MORE ABOUT YOUR £ THAN YOUR POUNDS
In the UK, the weight loss industry generates £4.6 Billion a year, whilst in America it has an estimated value of $100 billion a year.
Four million Britons are on a weight loss diet at any one time, and thanks to the fact that the majority of dieters will fail to lose weight long term, these huge profits continue to soar year by year, as people are perpetually hopeful that the next ‘wonder diet’ will be the one that is successful for them.
For the giants of the weight loss industry, your failure is far more profitable for them than your success.
8. YOU ARE NOT DEVELOPING SUSTAINABLE HABITS THAT WILL KEEP WEIGHT OFF AFTER YOU’VE LOST IT.
The habits that keep us overeating can be deeply ingrained. We either choose diets that fit around our habits so that they never actually change, or we try to create new habits, but fail to meet our emotional needs.
You may be able to give up your favourite foods for long periods of time. You may go on a liquid fast and eat virtually nothing for weeks. You may even be able to rigidly follow an eating plan that requires you to accurately weigh and measure very specific foods.
But at some point we can no longer sustain the effort and we ‘give in’.
And what has changed? Nothing
And what have we learned? Nothing
And so we simply return to the deeply embedded habits and behaviours that have shaped our lives in the past.
9. A BODY SHAPE IS GENETIC.
It is virtually impossible for the vast majority of us to look like the models portrayed in the media (only 3% of women have the same proportions as the top models featured in most women’s magazines)
Despite what the media would have you believe, we cannot totally control the shape and size of our bodies. Between 40 and 70% of our body mass index (BMI) is genetically determined.
And even the models and actresses, who we often aspire to emulate, frequently have to resort to drastic measures to maintain their ‘perfect’ size and shape, whether it be drastic dieting, denial or surgery (not to mention the benefits of ‘airbrushing!’)
Diet-mongers would have us believe that it’s quite simple : ‘follow this prescription for eating, and you too can have a perfect body’
This is not only untrue, but in most cases undesirable!
10.APPETITE AND EATING PATTERNS ARE UNCONSCIOUS BEHAVIOURS.
If only eating patterns and appetite were controlled consciously, life would be so much easier!
We could simply decide to be hungry for a meal or snack whenever it was most convenient, and then switch off when we wanted.
And, if only we could decide to follow any diet, stick to it, lose weight, stay slim forever simply because we wanted to. If only …..
However, the fact is that we cannot control these things 100% consciously, or merely by using ‘willpower’, because it is our unconscious (subconscious) mind that is in charge when it comes to running the body.
Your unconscious mind is the part of you that beats your heart, breathes your lungs, puts you to sleep at night and wakes you up in the morning. It controls all learning, behaviour and change.
In fact it is responsible for controlling 90% of what happens to you on a daily basis –including sending you hunger signals when your body needs food, whether it is for physical or emotional nurturing .
The amazing thing about your unconscious mind is that you don’t even have to ask it to do these things for you - it just does it automatically!
Therefore, in our world where food is freely available, maintaining weight loss by dieting requires a continuous conscious effort to eat less. Like our inability to resist sleep when we are exhausted, our unconscious mind will over-ride the conscious thinking part of the brain and make us eat.
No wonder so few of us achieve the coveted status of losing weight, and remaining slim and healthy, because we have ‘really strong willpower’.
If you would like to find out more about this groundbreaking new approach to offloading your excess weight, changing your relationship with food and developing a healthy relationship with your body, then simply register with ‘Diet Evolu7ion’ and receive a wealth of tips and information sent directly to you on a weekly basis , giving you all the basic tools you need to start the process now.
