You Can Be Thin: The Ultimate Programme to End Dieting... Forever (13 page)

As an adult you cannot find comfort, distraction, friendship or love in food. If you could, believe me, you would have done so by now.

When children go on long trips it is so easy to distract them with food and it is hard not to do this on a long train, car or plane journey. So many habitual eaters cannot do a long trip without stocking up with sweets and snacks just like when they were children. You can break all of these patterns. Reward yourself with a magazine and an hour to yourself to read it. Buy healthy fruit to snack on.

For many people Christmas and Easter mean lots of chocolate while summer means ice cream because we have programmed ourselves to link a particular food to a particular event. Human behaviour is not random, it is heavily patterned. We set up patterns in our brain, but it is
your
brain and you can change any pattern. By doing the exercises in this book you can break these patterns forever.

If you sabotage your diet at teatime or get those early evening cravings for stodgy, fatty or sugary foods the way to stop them and to stop looking for comfort in food is to say to yourself out loud several times:

Every time you do this you are moving away from a negative learned response and rewiring your brain for success, so do it frequently and enthusiastically.

If you want to have a slender adult body you need to eat like a healthy adult. If you were travelling in first or business class you would enjoy all the luxury grown-up food served in first class. You would not ask the stewardess to go into economy and get you the children’s chips, beans and chicken nuggets, because you would feel silly. Imagine being at a glamorous event with two buffet tables, one for the adults laden with lobster, seafood, chicken, Parma ham, exotic salads, fresh mango, papaya and berries. The other is laid out for the children with chips and ketchup, sticky doughnuts with vivid pink icing melting in the heat, bowls of crisps and sweets in psychedelic colours and those bright blue and pink crushed ice drinks. Which would you choose? Imagine how odd it would be to eat all the children’s food with all the children while the other adults looked on baffled by your behaviour and choices.

When my daughter was very small and had birthday parties the other children’s parents always came along to supervise their toddlers. I would provide grown-up food and wine for the adults and smiley face biscuits, crisps, sweets, egg mayonnaise sandwiches and sausages on sticks for the children. Every now and again an adult would hover over the children’s table and eat all their sweets as quickly as possible looking horribly uncomfortable. I have done this myself, before I sorted out my eating habits, and I always hated the feeling afterwards.

It is so much nicer to eat and feel like an adult than to be stuck in that vicious circle of eating to feel better and ultimately feeling worse.

So far we have been working on ending habits and cravings that originate in the mind. Tests show that physical addictions are much easier to cure than mental ones. By now you have done a great job of resolving psychological cravings and are ready to get rid of the physical cravings too.

One of the downfalls to any healthy eating plan is a craving for certain foods that are chemically addictive and change our moods. One of the biggest factors in food craving is a lack of serotonin. Serotonin is a very important and essential hormone which elevates mood, which is why it’s known as the happy hormone. Research has found that bulimics, compulsive eaters and alcoholics lack the required levels of serotonin. Indeed, alterations in the levels of serotonin can actually trigger eating disorders. Low levels of serotonin are also linked to depression.

Researchers have found that carbohydrates are essential to the production and regulation of serotonin and serotonin is essential to keep our moods regulated. Serotonin has been central to studies investigating the causes and treatment of depression. Several anti-depressant drugs work by artificially increasing levels of serotonin in the brain and are designed to make serotonin stay in the bloodstream for longer, thereby keeping our moods and energy levels higher. They are known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors or SSRIs. Prozac is a well-known SSRI.

Studies have shown that people eating a high carbohydrate diet produce more serotonin and are more relaxed as a result. This is why so many people with eating disorders absolutely crave stodgy carbohydrates in the form of bread, cakes and biscuits. They are not necessarily craving that particular food, they are actually craving the serotonin boost it gives them. Alcoholics who come off alcohol frequently crave carbohydrates and sugar to replace the sugar rush they got from alcohol. They also crave fatty snacks, as foods high in fat also appear to increase serotonin levels.

There are people I call ‘carbohydrate cravers’ who have to eat a certain amount of stodgy carbohydrates to keep their moods steady and balanced. Carbohydrate cravers experience a change in their mood in late afternoon or early evening and as their mood changes they begin to crave sweet and starchy foods. Protein does not elevate their mood even though serotonin uses ingested protein in its production.

People who eat quickly and cram food into their mouth without really tasting it are actually craving the high they get from serotonin. Just like a drug addict they are looking for the feeling but in food rather than drugs. They are not thinking about what they eat or savouring each bite and enjoying the process, there is no interaction with the food. They are eating to get the feeling of mood elevation, to get high on serotonin. Just like any other addiction you have to give up the source of the addiction, to see it as a poison for your body and keep away from it. Many people self medicate with food without even realising it. They use food to sedate themselves, to tranquillise themselves, to feel better and to elevate their mood. They always use stodgy carbs to do this as they are the only foods that can do this. Starchy carbohydrates including pasta, bread, biscuits, rice and potatoes stimulate sedative-like brain chemicals; they would not get that feeling from copious amounts of berries or fish. A warm milky drink before bed releases sedative brain chemicals as does eating a stodgy meal.

Does this pattern sound familiar? You may recognise yourself here, you certainly don’t need to be bulimic or a compulsive eater to have this problem. Many people find they can eat sensibly and retain control all day but come teatime or the evening they have a longing for cakes, bread and sweets and nothing else will do. They are comfort foods. When we feel low we want puddings, toast, sweets, biscuits or other starchy foods. Many people who are unwell also crave starchy foods for the serotonin boost it gives them. Men do this even more than women, when they have flu or a hangover they want to eat what I call nursery food. Women want to overeat on stodgy carbs when they are unhappy, anxious, stressed or feel unloved.

When one of my friends died I was so sad I could hardly eat, but when I did resume eating I only wanted to eat chips. My other friends who were also mourning our loss and who eat a diet similar to mine (yes, I have converted almost all my friends) reported cravings for white bread and cakes. If you react like this you can naturally increase your serotonin levels with healthier foods that encourage your body to make more serotonin. The five best healthy foods that help the body increase its production of serotonin are coriander, bananas, eggs, avocados and turkey. I make sure I have scrambled eggs with coriander for breakfast three or four times a week and I eat a banana every day to keep my serotonin levels up.

Bananas are full of B vitamins and tryptophan which increase dopamine levels. A lack of dopamine is also linked to depression. Serotonin is made from the amino acid tryptophan; certain foods are tryptophan rich, especially turkey and bananas but also eggs, avocados and coriander. You can easily find a way of incorporating those five foods into your diet and if you don’t like one of them just have more of the others. Coriander is a delicious herb that you can grow yourself and the other four foods are very inexpensive.

Sunlight also helps the brain make serotonin so make sure you get outside more, especially in winter. Many people crave starchy carbs in the winter and link it to the poor weather. They are correct to a degree as the lack of light in the winter can cause the brain to make less serotonin and the starchy carbs are giving them a serotonin boost. Eating more starchy carbs is never the answer because when you eat junk food and white flour it can cause your levels of serotonin to rise and drop so fast that this can actually trigger eating disorders and food cravings. Chewing food slowly can help maintain serotonin levels and also reduces appetite. Another factor that diminishes serotonin is aspartame, an artificial sweetener that is used particularly in diet drinks and low-fat snack foods as a sugar substitute to keep the calorie content of the product down. Reducing the fat reduces the calories but also makes the flavour bland so sweetners or sugar substitutes are added to increase the flavour. However, when aspartame is combined with carbs it slows down the brain’s production of serotonin.

If you stop eating refined and processed carbohydrates you will eventually stop craving them. It’s the same with all addictions: stop feeding the monster and it will die. Your serotonin levels will balance out and become more stable when you stop the cycle of eating or bingeing on rubbish, and the rush of insulin and glucose it brings, followed by the dramatic drop that sets the vicious craving cycle off again.

Certain carbs can have such a powerful and detrimental effect on our bodies. Several new studies have shown that bulimics who are taken off all wheat products completely can recover from bulimia, but resuming the consumption of wheat can cause a relapse at any time. Bulimics mostly crave sugar and refined carbohydrates. I have worked with hundreds of bulimics but have yet to meet a bulimic who craved grilled fish and broccoli or hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes. They always report the same thing, ‘Once I have one bowl of cereal I have five more, the minute I start on bread I eat the whole loaf, as soon as I open the biscuits or crisps I eat them until they are gone.’ No one has ever said to me, ‘Once I start on a whole chicken I eat it all and then another one and once I start on a punnet of blueberries I eat ten more punnets.’ This is because real food satisfies us quickly whereas refined food is so full of chemicals and so altered in the refining process it drives us to crave more and need more which is why it needs to be avoided most of the time.

Another reason to steer away from refined carbs is that research has found that children who eat high carbohydrate breakfast cereals get hungry again before lunch and want to snack on junk food. These children consume more calories overall than children who have a protein breakfast. The children on the protein-based breakfast ate more moderately all day and had much better concentration and attention.

Bread may be delicious, whether it’s French, Italian or Arabic, but it is still glue. Glue? Yes, it is flour and water and anyone who’s spent time playing with children knows how to make glue from flour and water. I still have books from my childhood with pictures I stuck in with glue my mother made from flour. Forty years later they are still stuck down.

To see what I mean by glue, if you take a piece of bread (about 3 inches) and roll it in your palms you will find that as the moisture comes out of it, it will become solid like Play-Doh. Play-Doh is just what it says it is – dough with lots of toy-coloured dyes, and it lasts in those little pots for ages. This is what it is like in your stomach – hard and useless as a source of nutrition and hard for the body to digest. My grandmother once made Christmas decorations out of dough. Every year she got them out and hung them on the tree, eventually they fell apart but they didn’t decompose the way live food like fruit and vegetables would, because modern dough made from processed refined flour is dead, inert, lifeless food. It’s dead before you eat it and dead and inert in your body whereas fruit and vegetables are live healthy food.

Another reason women in particular should avoid highly processed carbohydrates and sugary foods is that they can quadruple the risk of birth defects. Pregnant women who eat a lot of breakfast cereals, white bread, white rice or chocolate biscuits put their babies at risk of abnormalities. Tests compared diets of 454 mothers with babies with birth defects against 462 women with healthy babies. The risk of birth defects increased four – fold in women who ate high levels of sugar and highly refined carbohydrates like chocolate biscuits and breakfast cereals, and potatoes. Researchers believe the high level of glucose these foods release, quickly giving a massive sugar rush followed by a low, may overwhelm the baby in the womb interfering with key development stages.

An expert from an important birth defects monitoring programme states, ‘There is an association between neural tube defect risk and the glycaemic index of the mothers. The risk doubles in women eating a high carbohydrate diet in pregnancy. In obese pregnant women eating a high carbohydrate diet the risk quadruples.’