I couldn't let another week go by without talking about the 'Fast' or 2-day diet. It's been receiving rave reviews and impressive press coverage, including case studies of amazing weight loss. I'm slightly sceptical because as a former journalist, I've cajoled a lot of people into being a case study when we really just wanted someone nice-looking to brighten up the page.
Anyway, this diet was devised for health reasons. Fasting is already acknowledged to assist longevity: the reasons are complex, but based on the fact that the faster your metabolism, the sooner you 'wear out' - and die. That's why mice have shorter lives than elephants. Fasting slows everything down because your body isn't processing food.
The 'fasting' diet gives your system two days off. Processing food raises metabolism, just as anything above a coma also raises it - by doing something. That's the real benefit of 2 days fasting. It lowers metabolism which helps lower glucose, heart rate and so on. It's good for your health.
As to weight loss though, I have my doubts. Weight loss is about calories. If you 'fast' for only 2 days (and on this regime you're still eating something) the most you're probably losing is 1,000 calories a day or 2,000 calories a week. Or let's say 1,500 calories a day? A pound of fat is 3,500 calories. You're still not losing the equivalent of 1lb of fat a week.
None of this is bad. If you want slow weight loss, this is perfect for you.
What I don't like though, is the idea that you eat 'normally' on the other 5 days. The reports I've read are of eating (and drinking) more at the weekend because Monday is your fasting day. Or fasting on Thursday so you can face the weekend's indulgence. This is not the way to face serious weight loss. Looking at a diet by working out what you can get away with isn't a lifestyle change.
The 5:2 diet is a good idea for those with high blood pressure, early-onset diabetes (insulin resistance) and a generally bad attitude to moderation. However, by reducing calories every day by just 500, you can lose more weight in the average week and not have to face 'fasting' days - which can tend to loom in your week and take on a significance that's not really beneficial for a healthy diet attitude.
I had an interesting day on Friday - unless you count driving for a total of 8.5 hours. I'm afraid leaving London on a Friday of the Bank Holiday heading west is never going to end happily.
I was invited with 3 other health journalists to the launch of a children's product called BARNY. It's a little sponge teddy bear filled with chocolate.
http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/article/1179349/Mondelez-launches-Barny-childrens-biscuit-brand
What's always impressive about a product launch is the amount of effort put into the whole occasion. I thought it was great. held at a place called The Hospital club, http://www.thehospitalclub.com/ we sat on a terrace first in glorious sunshine, before enjoying the 90 minute presentation from top PR and advertising agency Hill and Knowlton.
Cadbury's make BARNY. They also own Oreo. If you have small children, they really would love it. I gave some samples to my young neighbours today - and they accosted me by my car later
"Those Barny bear things are LUSH!" they squealed.
I'm really happy to say that some of my books are now available on Kindle.
I can't reproduce some of my titles, sadly. Copyright rests with the publishers of those books. I have the Copyright to four of my titles and they are gradually coming online via Kindle.
You can already purchase these to download from my site here. But I've had them put into Kindle format too.
http://http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jiffy-Diet-ebook/dp/B00CJJ2HK6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1367046556&sr=8-2&keywords=jiffy+diet
The business of preventing Internet fraud by people 'stealing' the content of my books and publishing it on their own websites for free, is a tiring and frustrating one.
Please let me know if you buy one!
I wonder if any of you saw the pictures of KATE BUSH receiving her MBE from the Queen the other day?
Kate Bush, if you don't know, is a songwriter and once-major singing star mostly known from the 1970s. Her performance in her hit 'Wuthering Heights' stung many girlfriends and wives as their men salivated over her. She was sexy, hot and had a hint of wild-child about her. She reached Number 1 and stayed there.
I'd heard that in recent years she'd hid from the world. She was a recluse. OK, lots of stars get like that after a lot of attention.
The other day, however, I began to see why she might feel like this. She was pretty huge. Her fantastic figure was gone. Huge in itself might not matter. But she'd been this sexy chick! And before you say "it's inevitable" - Audrey Hepburn kept her gorgeous svelte figure into her 70s. She never lost it.
But on the weight shame - I've heard the story many, many times from readers and clients over the years.
They don't want people to see what they look like these days.
Don't get me wrong: this might be far from the truth. Kate Bush is in her 60s and might just have got sick of it. She's still nice looking, she has the hair and - let's face it - she was receiving a gong from the Queen, which most of us won't ever.
It happens at school reunions, work reunions, you name it. Not many of us relish these occasions and the longer time goes by, the more difficult it gets. People tell me, often, that they couldn't face seeing old friends because they'd got so fat/let themselves go/ got 3 chins or simply weren't doing much with their lives.
Don't let this happen. We can't help getting old, but we can control ageing. Every time I see a hot/cool/stunning 20-something I think "don't get complacent" - especially if she's eating pizza and chips and boasting she never gains an ounce.
Oh, and this applies to the guys too. These days I get as many emails from men as women. It never used to be the case. But people are waking up to the fact that we spend more of our lives older than younger. Nowaday, once you hit 40 you could easily have another 40 years to live! It pays to spend those years feeling and looking good.
I have all sorts of programs for you. If you want to know where to start, book a session with me to talk it through. We can skype or phone. We can do this once, once a week, once a month. But we'll get you sorted.
You can get a personal diet. You can get a download diet, see how you get on and then call me. Or just email.
Whatever you decide, don't be like Kate Bush. Don't have sharp intakes of breath when people see you. Get back the Babe. Get back your Hot Guy. I just met an ex-policeman of 44 who blew me into the weeds with his physique. He's going to assist me with men's programmes.
Getting there is relatively easy. STAYING there is the challenge. Not hard at all, but needs facing. Who wants to send 40 years looking great and 40 years hiding away in shame?
Your hair doesn't matter...... that's what hair dye was invented for - but your waistline does.
Contact me today.
My post about limiting to 1,200 calories a day has had a huge reponse. I knew it would.
"This is starvation!" most have said.
I hate contradicting people, but sometimes I have to. Starvation means eating nothing. For weeks. 1,200 calories of good food, like fish and chicken with vegetables, is not starvation! It's more than enough if you're overweight. OK, go to 1,500 calories if you want to, but it's not necessary.
Here's an example of how people get their diet so wrong. A lovely lady came to me the other day. She's about 3 stone overweight. Her waist is a dangerous 36 inches. This is a health risk.
"What did you eat today?" I asked her.
"Well this is the thing" she said. " It's all super-healthy. For breakfast I had oats soaked in milk, topped with half a banana, sliced, a sprinkling of ground almonds, then raspberries, blueberries, a few broken walnuts and topped with plain yoghurt and a drizzle of honey "
"Mmmm.... sounds fantastic" I said. "Let's do the analysis."
Turned out, the drizzle of honey was more like it was hosed on from a tanker. The 'few' broken walnuts was a fistful.The fatfree yoghurt was 3 tbs which was half a large pot. The nuts were more than an ounce each. (170 cals/oz.) This delicious bowlful was massive. It worked out to over 600 calories.
Her other lovely meals of fillet steak or salmon or chicken with vegtables were 800 calories each. The main portions were enough for two. Then there were the healthy snacks of fruit (400 cals total) and her daily milk intake etc. It turned out her impeccable diet was around 800 too many EVERY DAY. 5,600 extra calories every week. 22,000 a month 291,000 a year.
This is how people get fat. Confusing healthy diet with a good , stay-slim diet. OK, I know it doesn't workout exactly as 291,000 calories a year. We have times of less and times of more. But you take my point.
To lose the fat your body has to 'eat' it. It's like having a larder. Eating 1,200 calories a day reduces your needs by 800 calories. Your body will look for them and - that's how you lose weight!
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you are overweight, losing weight fast is the best thing you can do for your body. Losing it slowly (which is the advice that came from nowhere and found its way into our folklore) siply prolongs the time you're unhealthy.
When people come into a metabolic clinic, severely overweight, they're put on 500 calories a day immediately because every day counts!
The main thing is, not to worry. 1,200 calories a day is not starvation. The very idea makes me laugh. You can starve of nutrients but really, nobody in this country needs to go hunting for food or walking miles for a fresh vegetable.
So I go back to my original message: if you curb calories consistently, without break,. you can't help but lose weight.
Try it?
I don’t know about you, but I have my winter body right now.
No, not a few extra pounds. Not bursting a bit at the waist or thighs rubbing. Heaven forbid!
A winter body is one that’s more used to the great outdoors – mowing, digging, cycling, hiking for whole days … but because it’s dark, it’s cold and it’s wet, the sofa has seen more action.
The result, it might surprise you to know, is not weight gain, but weight LOSS. And a teeny bit of softness where there was firmness.
By the
end of last summer, and every summer, I was super-fit. I would cycle the Avon Gorge for miles
until 10pm. I cycled difficult hills for several hours a week until my legs were screaming. Mowing the
garden with a heavy petrol mower took an hour each time and needed doing twice a week. All that lifting and heaving of heavy grass boxes! I went swimming
after work or early mornings, always cycling to the pool. By the time I moved house in October I’d gone from
my usual
8 st 4lbs to 9 stone. I'd gained 10lbs of lean tissue and lost bodyfat and inches in my midsection. My dresses were loose and my thighs would have cracked walnuts.
After
the winter we’ve had, I’m back to 8st 4lbs and feeling a little softer. I
still get out as often as I can, but the gym is nowhere near as much
activity. All I've been doing is walking and some Yoga and core work. The hours outdoors haven't happened. It doesn't worry me because I'm starting back to building my routine again for spring, but I can tell I've lost power. I cycled a very tough route of hills today and it was very, very hard. But I know my legs will be back to normal in a couple of weeks.
I’m
telling you this because most of us determine how we look or how slim we are by our weight. We look at
pound loss and cheer. "I don't understand it; I've been sitting in a conference for two weeks and come back 4lbs lighter!" people write to me all the time. Unfortunately, it's probably loss of lean tissue, or muscle fibres.
This post today is mainly aimed at the women who
are already slim but maybe sitting back and congratulating themselves on where
the scales are hovering.
It is also a lot easier to stay firm when you are really young. The line is age 26. Before 26, we age positively. After 26, we age negatively. Neglect beings to show.
If you stop exercising but maintain a normal diet, you'll probably lose weight. It's absolutely untrue to say exercise controls your weight, because it doesn't. A muscle loses tone within 48 hours if not used. As those fibres decrease in number, you will weigh less. Burning calories is a myth. I'd recommend cardio for the health of your heart and circulation and it's absolutely essential for blood pressure. But weight loss? Don't count on it. Waving away the demon drink is far more effective.
Unless you absolutely pig out and go mad, you won't gain when you stop exercising in the winter. It is called homeostasis - our body's desire and ability to stay the same and return to where it was as long as you maintain your routine. Most slim people have a routine. They never eat more and they never eat less. They eat meals at regular times. Stopping or increasing exercise doesn't affect their appetite.
Take a look at your body. A winter shape isn’t a crime but it’s important to get those muscles firm and strong again. You want a bottom that doesn’t droop and thighs that don’t wobble. So maybe, as spring shows a bit of promise, start to walk hilly roads again, get on the bike in a high gear or if none of these ring your bell, run up and down stairs two at a time. It isn’t much, but it’s something!
Nothing wrong
with a winter body. It’s important to rest and take stock. But really ladies, a
soft, flabby body won’t work when the shorts and tees go on.
It pays to be ahead of the game. I helps to be ready rather than panicking. Don't judge your look by what the scales say. I suggest you go somewhere private now and take a handful. Seriously. The muscles are there; they're there when you're born. But what sort of shape are they in?
Looking round Facebook and other social networking sites...... it's amazing and alarming how many people are dishing out nutrition advice. I mean, really preaching. Usually after just a few months training.
Training is not education. Don't get me wrong, these people are well-intentioned. But usually, they are enthusiastic and even fixated on their own training and fitness, and through their great motivation and enthusiasm they more or less pass on to client whatever worked for them.
BodyBuilders are the worst offenders. But their diet is totally wrong for the person just spending a few hours a week in the gym. Body Building fanatics are a special breed. Super-motivated. They will say a lot about believing in themselves and training harder and the more the better. There's nothing wrong wih this but they have very little else in their lives.
I can tell you, their regime is so severe, most bodybuilders have whole crazy weeks off their diet when they eat everything and everything. They post photos online of their carb-fests, the pints of beer and the bottles of wine and shots. This isn't normal nor healthy. Their bodies are so toxic through extreme protein loading and carbohydrate restriction, they go the other way.
And these guys tell the rest of us how to eat!
The 'Paleo' diet is all the rage. However, take my word for it as a graduate Food Scientist, It isn't for everyone. Many perfectly healthy people still can't tolerate high protein diets. And they shouldn't. Many people need a low protein diet. A lot of protein is toxic. Fact. Cutting out starchy carbs is positively hazardous for many.
Saying the Paleo diet is giving us what we need as humans is also plain wrong. Ancient Man ate this way because there was nothing else to eat!
But my point is this: don't take someone's word for nutrition if they have only had a 6 month course. Or studied intermttently over a couple of years. Human nutrition is a 3-4 year degree study involving a year's anatomy and study of biochemistry, microbiology and diseases. I did three years full-time. And believe me, you can still hardly learn all there is in just three years. Six months of study involving healthy individuals is not going to qualify anyone to dish out useful nutrition advice.
You have been warned.
About hundred
years ago (feels like) I started writing about diet. And not just like this,
either, bleating into the web and getting whole forums ganging up saying I'm an
idiot. (I never said I wasn't an idiot by the way, but so much for the
sisterhood. Apart from one man ever, I've never been insulted in public by a
bloke.) No, my audience used to be over 10 million a week. Ten million! For
years! That's a scarily large number of readers. Yet nobody took any notice and here we are as a nation, fatter than ever.
Proving, I think, that if there's intolerable pressure to be thin, a massive
proportion of the population have an iron will of resistance because they
haven't taken a blind bit of notice. I'm absolutely not going to cry into my
low-sugar cornflakes at these poor teenagers, pressured beyond belief into
being thin. From where I was sitting this morning in my standard market town
centre, you'd be hard pressed to find a single teenage girl under 15 stone, so
I'm not buying that one.
Look, our mums and grandmothers didn't stay at home, gladly scraping carrots and boiling nappies and
mangling sheets and mincinge their own beef because they were full-time at home.
They were full-time at home because it was the only way they could scrape and
boil and mince and mangle! If they'd gone to work, nobody would have been
fed.
Now, we have more time than ever. Fact.But our diet habits are all about
'not having time'. Rubbish!
I wrote the other week about instant porridge. Porridge itself takes 3 minutes
to miscrowave and only 5 minutes if you make it in a pan. But people want
even more instant than that. You haven't got five minutes? Seriously? There's
something wrong with your schedule.
Now, people walk and eat, work and eat, drive and eat. There is NO reason to do
this. People walk all the way to Starbucks and wait in line for a coffee because
they have NO TIME?
There's never any excuse for walking down the street with a wrapper crammed into
your face. It's disgusting. It lacks self-respect. There's never a reason
to be pulling food out of a polystyrene box as you walk the pavement. The
ridiculous habit of taking food to your desk is simply rude to everyone around
you. I have a no-food policy in my car. It gets everywhere anyway and you walk along the street in your nice skirt, oblivious to the chocolate-button marks across your bottom. Eating in the car is up there with texting in the car. It should be 3 points. But you'll say you have no time. No time? However, long your journey, this is the land of plenty. Nobody is ever far from food. We should all be able to last four hours without nibbling. It's just lazy and careless and plain bad for you to keep stopping for snacks. It's not as if your snack is broccoli, after all.
"My periods are out of line, I
can't sleep, my skin's breaking out" people write. Of course they are!
Your body needs R-O-U-T-I-N-E!
As for "I can't lose weight however hard I try" I'm afraid this is
another one. I know I go on about laziness (and laziness isn't a crime) but when
you have a problem and want to fix it, you have to take the steps.
So I'll let you into a secret. It isn't earth shattering and it isn't even new.
But it IS a cast-iron, weapons-grade, ocean-going fact.
If you eat 1,200 good calories a day, every day, from now until whenever,
you'll lose weight. You can't fail to lose weight. If you want the fat to fall
off, it will. I guarantee it. All you have to do is eat 1,200 calories a day
and never go above that number. Not one day. If you are 16 stone and want to be 10 stone,
you'll be 10 stone before Christmas. Promise. This isn't a vague hope or unrealistic claim: I don't make any money telling you this. It's science.
Don't ask if this food or that food will make you slimmer, quicker. Don't ask if you should avoid carbs after 5pm or skip breakfast. None of these things is relevant. No food will make you bigger, smaller, slimmer. Protein won't make your muscles bigger. Too much protein will make you fat. Too much anything will make you fat. Too many apples will make you fat. If you ate nothing but fruit every day and went above your calories, you'd get fat. Your body has no idea what you ate. It just knows you didn't use those calories sitting in your muscles (energy) waiting to be used. They were leftovers. Like all leftovers they got chucked away but they didn't go nowhere. There are no council trucks coming to take them away. (Not unless you get liposuction. Then you see it being carted away into a jar for £3,000, Nice) Your excess food stays in your body and gets carted away to your hips, thighs, stomach.
So why do people give up and not lose the weight when they know they could do
it?
The power of the choc-chip muffin. The lure of Bargain Booze. The seduction of
a samosa.
i'm giving you the really good news here. It may sound like a rant but it's anything but. I'm telling you that being slim is not just possible, but a total rea;ity if you eat 1200 calories a day (if you are overweight already).
Are your looks not worth kicking your bad habits into the weeds for a while?
My fantastic "Get Back Into Your Jeans" video workout is now tranferred to DVD.
It took forever to get the Rights from News International, but here it is - restored and ready to help you burn those calories and tone just about everything, ready for spring.
http://www.monicagrenfell.co.uk/shop/product/5/fabulous-in-a-fortnight
Order it!!!!
I took part in another radio debate yesterday on solutions to obesity. The old theme of higher taxes on junk food, fizzy drinks etc. came up. Whether the obese should find it harder to afford to eat badly!
My stance is this: kebab vans, muffins, sweets, Coca Cola and burgers are there for all of us. Everyone can pop into McDonalds for a double cheeseburger and fries. This is nothing new. When I was a child, there was a sweet shop opposite the school gates. Chips shops lined the high streets.
The issue is not the cost of food. It's that some people do and others don't. The fact that many people get fatter and fatter and don't seem to say "I look dreadful" and other say "actually......this'll make me fat". This is what should be addressed.
The only thing standing between humans and death by obesity is vanity. We are the only species that cares how it looks. Or has mirrors! We're designed to eat and eat and eat, with huge appetites. So overeating is normal for humans. In the long past, scarcity saved us. Now there's no scarcity, we only have vanity.
I know that if I am ever tempted to a choc chip muffin I think of my pencil skirts and I think again. Why spoil things? People say it's boring to diet, but it's a lot more boring being fat every day with nothing to wear because all your nice things are in the charity shop. And someone's walking out with your lovely pencil skirt they just got for £5. Now that's more boring than saying no to a muffin.
I completely understand that it's hard to care what you look like when you have no prospects, nowhere to go and no hope. I understand that. But prospects might improve if people took a bit more trouble over their appearance. Things might not be good today, but the phone might go and everything change. Life can go off in a new direction in seconds. It helps to be ready.
I spoke about this on the radio yesterday. Sweets and high-fat, low-grade food are there for all of us to buy. The point is, those with self respect, concern for their teeth and a normal, healthy self-image don't eat them, or at least not often.
Once upon a time fat people stood out. Now it's a case of the lunatics taking over the asylum. Obese people look almost normal in our high streets. Nobody stares at a standard overweight person. Maybe this is right, and there's a lot of humanity that needs to be taken into the equation but overall, being in the majority takes away the pressure to conform.
Taxes of unhealthy food won't make a jot of difference. What WILL make a difference is when they feel out of step and out of place with everyone else. Then without any help from anyone, the right food choices will be made.
Yes, I can hardly believe it. After years of wrangling and basically not being able to break the News International copyright on my 1999 workout video, I now have the Rights!
People have been asking me for years if this is on DVD. Now, we are turning out fresh copies and you can get your order in.
Get Back Into Your Jeans' was a massive success. The news of the World promoted it on the front page of the newspaper on January 3rd 1999.... and we sold thousands on that day alone.
My workout suits everyone. Based on solid aerobics, my no-fuss routine is easy to follow; just 20 minutes of actual aerobics, then on to abs, bottoms and legs on the floor. With no time-wasting chat or explanations, you won't be listening to the same old stuff each time you put on your DVD. You get straight to work!
The Master tape, for so long held by News International, has taken a while and a lot of work to restore. At £8.99 (plus p&p) it is fabulous value for money.
Until we get a new page up for the DVD you can find it here at the moment.
http://www.monicagrenfell.co.uk/shop/product/5/fabulous-in-a-fortnight
Although it isn't on the correct page, we will know what you want!
And any questions, let me know......
Monica
I'll tell you what really 'grinds my gears' today - water bottles in exercise classes!
Gyms are now full of grown people wandering about with bottles stuck in their mouths, heads back, sucking away like babies.
Watching the queue of people waiting for my class yesterday, it was actually comical. Bearing in mind that most of your fluids come from the food you eat, I'd say those ladies were already well hydrated with plenty of available energy.
Once in the class, (Body Balance, not sweat-up-a-storm stuff) a water bottle was planted on the corner of every mat or stuck around the room. Every time the mats were turned, there was a clattering as 18 bottles fell over. OK I'm exaggerating, but it wasn't far off. Plus 'water breaks'. So we stand around waiting while the whole thing breaks up for another comfort-suck at the bottle.
There's no need to drink water constantly. I never take water in the gym. Anyway, that's what taps are for. And when did this hydration trend start anyway? Nobody used to take water bottles to the gym.
Be a rebel. Fuel up before and replenish afterwards. Enjoy the hands-free experience of entering the gym floor without armfuls of stuff. It's liberating!!
On Friday, the Jeremy Vine Radio 2 programme rang me up. They ring quite often, but I've rarely been able to appear. Would I, as a nutritionist, like to discuss the issue of people turning vegetarian since the Horse Meat scandal?
"Yes, fine" I said.
"Can you appear on the show at 1.30pm today? We'd value your comments as an expert".
"No problem."
"Great, So what do you think?" said the affable, pleasant guy at the other end. " Is this going to cause terrible health problems like headaches and stomach troubles as they start to experience withdrawal?"
"Are you having a laugh? It'll have no effect on them at all."
He persisted.
"Yes, but look at what happened on Atkins. (a high protein, no carb diet popular ten years ago) "People felt weak and fuzzy headed. Don't you think turning veggie will have the same effect?"
"Absolutely not!" I said. "People aren't 'turning' vegetarian. Vegetarianism is a personal moral stance. Avoiding meat for a while over a scare isn't a moral issue. It's a temporary decision based on shock. People will soon start eating meat again. This issue has only been out there for a fortnight!"
"But they felt weak and irritable on Atkins after suddenly wirthdrawing carbs."
"Of course they did. They were cutting out an entire food group. Meat isn't a food group. It's one item. Anyway, they were people trying to lose weight. It's an entirely different matter. They were irritable because they couldn't eat a doughnut or whatever. They would be fighting all sorts of cravings.
"So you think people will start eating meat again? seriously?"
"Of course they will. I give it another week. The shops will be onto it. They'll go overboard to print the name of each cow on the packet and photos of the UK farm it came from and the name of the farmer. They will. People will trust them and go back to beef. "
"And the health issues?"
"There aren't any health issues. "
"Yes but...."
"People in different parts of the world eat foods we have never heard of. They grow and thrive like us. Giving up meat for a while won't even be noticed by the body. The body doesn't know what you ate it only recognises the nutrients. meat is high in iron and protein so maybe you'd need to supplement, but even that is doubtful"
There was a silence. Then he piped up " well, perhaps we won't have you on the programme today, but thanks"
"I didn't say what you wanted me to say?"
"Well... no. we want someone to argue the point that just cutting meat out suddenly is a bad idea."
"But that's not true!"
He laughed. "I like you Monica. I really do. I'll call you again. I want you on the show. Just not today. We want to talk about the downsides of changing your diet suddenly".
Someone asked what I had
for breakfast. I said porridge. “Real or instant?” he said.
These days we want not just fast food, but 'even faster’ food. Real porridge takes 5 minutes even if you make it in a pan from scratch. Real porridge can also be microwaved from scratch in two and a half minutes. Instant porridge takes 2 minutes.
I’d say if you need to shave off two minutes from your schedule, you need to loosen up a bit!
A snack used to be described as 200 calories or less. Now, I would say it’s hand-held food. When you need a knife and fork it usually counts as a meal. But then we come to the hot topic of ‘grazing’.
Grazing is a bad idea. You don't remember what you ate. Grazers are usually thinking about something else. On the phone, checking emails or watching TV.
Grazing animals eat constantly from food that is already there, like grass or leaves. Grass has very little energy value so they have to eat all the time.
Foraging animals, like chickens, have to find their food. Lots of energy is used in finding the odd, high calorie peck, such as seeds. A whole day of activity is expended in getting a full crop of high-energy foods.
We are neither of these. We’re hunters. Grazing is fine if you graze on veggies and not much else. I’d say leave it to three square meals a day. Eaten mindfully, on a plate and not at your desk!
This
week, I want to talk about the real reason people can’t lose weight Or more to the point, lose a little and pile it all back on - plus a bit more. It's what I call tidal weight gain. Over time, the real effect is that the 'tide comes in'. All their efforts are for no real reward and worse still, they spend years, decades even, thinking about and dreading and generally bargaining with food.
What saddens me is that many people say they've spent the best years of their lives hating the way they look. Family, friends, relationships and whole marriages have gone down the pan because of a load of roast potatoes or muffins. We can laugh, but it's true.I have been on the receiving end of endless letters from women who won't be touched, who 'can't bear sex in case he feels my stomach' who won't go to work events with their partners because they hate being the fat wife...... but STILL, they won't lose weight.
I'll say right here that there’s no law that says we should
be a certain size. If you are overweight and genuinely don’t care, stop
reading. I don't think everyone should be slim. But I do think that everyone should be happier than this.
Your size is your own business. Where I come in is when the vast majority live lives they hate because they are a size they hate. And what is it costing you, really? Endless embarrassment, covering up, slimming club subscriptions, envying your friends, thinking about food all the time……. These aren’t my ideas: they are what people have told me over the years.
There's a question hanging here about the 'tyranny' of size-ism and the pressures of modern life, the media, whatever, to make us feel bad if we're a size 14. This is nonsense. People make their own pressure. They want something badly and have trouble achieving it and this causes resentment inside themselves. I've heard it for years. The gap between hope and expectation (and reality) is the biggest cause of unhappiness, tension and internal pressure.
Let's face it, if there were real presure to be slim, a vast majority of the population are doing a great job resisting it: we've all got fatter!
So, the real reason people can't lose weight and keep it off. It's about priorities. it's about not wanting something badly enough. The only way to lose weight successfully is to budget your calories, by the way. People say it’s boring, dull and even ‘tyranny’. It’s nothing of the sort. Being fat is tyranny. People always want life to be easy but watching your calories is a lot easier than managing the endless slog of being fat. Remembering calories is no more difficult than remembering the telephone numbers or addresses of people you contact often. You don’t need to look them up: you just know them. It’s the same with calories. But I’ll get back to calories later.
A diet
can’t fail. You might not like it and you may feel deprived. But aren't you deprived already? Deprived of nice clothes and confidence? Deprivation is an interesting concept. Few of us can have everything we want. Being deprived of a croissant or chocolate or whatever, only lasts a few minutes. Being deprived of confidence affects you all day.
And here’s where 19 stone Jenni Murray comes in. Jenni popped up on saturday in the newspapers again, starting another diet. I love Jenni on the radio, but she's a poster-girl for the downsides of a roast potato. (For those who don’t know Jenni Murray, she’s the 62 year old presenter of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour; a respected journalist for decades and she's absolutely marvellous: clever and funny and wise.) Unfortunately, Jenni has also had breast cancer, a hip replacement and lots of health problems. I'd hazard a guess that many of them are down to being 19 stone. But try as she may, like many of you, Jenni can’t lose weight permanently.
Why not? It is simple biochemstry that if she eats less permanently she will be the 10 1/2 stone she longs for. She can't fail if she stays on a diet. So it isn't that success is far beyond her. It isn't as if she is being asked to eat nothing. Nobody has asked her to eat scorpions for a year. All Jenni needs to do is count calories and not bust her budget. Yet somehow, gluttony wins.
Nobody wants to be 19 stone. That’s seriously heavy: it could kill her. Jenni is morbidly obese. Yet
even though her life and her joints are in the balance, she can’t wear anything
nice, she struggles to find clothes, she finds shop assistants ‘snooty’ and a
whole host of other things that she has written about at great length, and which have cost her dear, Jenni still said yesterday in an article on her latest diet “….could I survive without croissants
and four bottles of wine a week?”
Yes Jenni, you could. Most of the world survive without even one glass of wine a year. Whole populations and continents can only dream of a croissant which would be a genuine treat. Jenni calls something a treat when she has it every day.
I mention Jenni Murray because she has made her story very public so it's not an invasion of her privacy. Her story is remarkably similar to the stories of thousands of women I have written about in my years in the tabloids. We used to follow Case Studies and diet diaries in my columns regularly. We chose from hundreds of volunteers and the selection process was rogorous. No use picking someone, and publishing their story if they fell off the wagon after two weeks.
So let's look at what Jenni's said about her diets over the past ten years.
2003
Jenni starts the Atkins diet and starts a weekly diet diary in a newspaper.
“The results? I haven't felt hungry or too deprived. I've eaten fat whenever I've felt like it, usually in the form of lashings of butter on vegetables and the crisp, crunchy bit on the edge of a nice piece of rump. And in a month, I've now lost a stone and have no plans to stop the Atkins diet: I feel well on it and it works. I shall continue on the weight-loss phase until I'm down to 10 1/2 stone.'
Jenni
gives up the diet soon after and gained the weight back.
2011 – The Dukan Diet
Jenni said.
“Dukan’s diet really seemed to work. There’s no doubt I would have lost more had there not been frequent lapses. I had such high hopes of a new, slimmer, healthier me facing my 60s with energy and aplomb. Only three months ago I weighed 14st (down from 19st), with the intention of getting down to 12st.
But all the hard work of the past year came undone in a matter of five indulgent weeks on holiday. Two stone has somehow crept back on. “
2013 – The 2-day Diet
Jenni says:
“After a week, I can say this: I have not once been hungry or felt deprived. My stomach feels less bloated, I have lost 2lbs and I’m enjoying a bit of fruit or a handful of nuts when the urge to eat hits home.
So tonight, I can sit back and enjoy that big glass of wine — my Saturday treat. What other diet can give you that?
So, ten long years have passed with Jenni barely
moving below her 19 stone, except for a brief moment to 14 stone. For her size,
14 stone is still very heavy.So what happened?
Jenni says two stone ‘crept on’. But it didn’t creep. Jenni had five weeks of overeating - clearly. Plus drinking. Not the odd day or week. Five weeks! What does this tell us about her determination to lose weight? Two stone means that above her normal calorie needs, about 2,000 calories, she consumed another 98,000 calories. 98,000! Can you imagine that much food? And then she admits her weight gets her down and causes her anguish.
Why does Jenni stay
like this? She's not alone. She talks about temptation, but which of us is not tempted in many ways in other areas of life? The temptation to not get up for work. The temptation to shirk at our job and do less. Yet we know what would happen. When our whole livelioods and ability to pay the bills rests on getting up and applying ourselves, even if our job is a lowly one, getting up is top of our priorities. It certainly seems to me that on HER list of priorities, wine and croissants and treacle sponge and roast potatoes and champagne meant more to Jenni than her health. For make no mistake: her weight is killing her.
Most people will do something if they want to, need
to or must do. Please don't say 'ah, but it's not that simple". It is that simple. Saying you are going to lose weight and then giving in to temptation means you're not serious enough.
I can help.
Willpower vs Habit
It’s not about willpower. Willpower has no chance
against habit. Your worst enemies are the habits you’ve got into. I’m reminded
of Jenni Murray saying she needed croissants and bottles of red wine. Actually, lots of people consume these items and don't get fat. It is her diet as a whole that causes her problems. Her insistence that life is miserable without them. Yet don't many, many people have to change their diets radically when they learn of an illness, like coeliac disease, which means certain foods can never be looked at again, ever?
Breaking habits is very hard. But finding new habits will work too. It just needs a little time. It also needs the absolute determination to have the figure you really want.
Calories – the only way
Our bodies work to calories. Calories means energy. However healthy your diet is, if you’re not losing the weight you want, you’re eating too many calories. (And recently the emphasis has been on healthy eating instead of ‘dieting – and guess what, people don’t lose weight!)
By watching calories, you can’t go wrong. I hate is when people say counting calories is dreary or tedious. That’s like saying checking your bank balance and making budgets is tedious: maybe it is, but people who refuse to watch their spending soon find they have less money than they thought and have overspent.
So it is with calories. It is the ONLY way. My private clients who count calories (and they don’t all do this: some prefer watching carbs or fat) are always successful. You know where you are with calories. You have a personal daily ‘budget’ and go from there. Obviously it’s best to eat good food and not 1400 calories of cakes, but you know that.
If you want to get started but need a little guidance to face the right way, why not book a session with me? By phone or by Skype. We can go through everything together and make a proper plan. You’ll find details on this website.
But if you’re happy to go it alone, start counting calories! And make losing weight top of your list of priorities.
You could already be 10lbs slimmer by Easter. Or a couple of stone by the summer.
Today’s talking-point
concerns the fixation some of you have on food and losing weight, so much that you try every diet going and endlessly seek more and more advice - which is often conflicting advice. And this leads to tension within yourself as you struggle to balance what one expert told you - against the advice of another. It can even just be advice in magazines and the internet.
What can happen is you become too fixated on the fight and not on the result.
So here's a KEY understanding you must have if you ever want a really great figure without too much anguish.
If you're still stuck feeling needy and out of control, you're
not going to see how important it is to bring value to your diet. You're still fixated on your own worries,
your fears of missing food and being hungry. You're still insecure about your size, lack of nice clothes and continual embarrassment that people are looking at you and judging you.
And with that fixation,
you won't be able to put energy into your diet and exercise regime. You'll have wasted all your energy
needlessly worrying about how hard, how boring and how tedious it is being on a diet.
I understand if you're been continually disappointed by your weight loss failures or yo-yo weight gain. I understand your hatred of how you look. I understand you're a mass of insecurities and frustration around food and slim women.
But in the end those emotions do you no favours - they repel other people who pretend they're suportive, they waste your energy and they make everyone miserable.
The only way to get out of that cycle and moving towards building a firm foundation for a healthy diet and good, healthy and gorgeous figure is to find your own self confidence independent of diets and worries about food..
Remember: Food or 'comfort eating' will never fill an emotional void, or "make" you happy...in fact, comfort food rarely gives anyone any comfort at all. Even if it does, it's only for the time you're eating it. Comfort foods are rarely good things like broccoli or eggs. They're unhealthy, fatty, sugary and make you look as bad as you feel. Some comfort!
You have to make yourself whole and happy away from food.
Two final thoughts to burn into your mind:
First: It doesn't matter how much energy you
spend worrying, obsessing or fantasising about your size.
Yes, it takes energy, but it is WASTED energy. It helps nobody - it makes you nuts and all your friends and family see is you being needy, distressed and unbearable.
And trust me; they do. They have told me for years about how boring and needy their dieting friends can be. OK, they act supportive. They say they support you. But they don't say this about you to others.
Next: WASTING ENERGY on your own fears, wants, disappointed / hurt feelings, fantasies, etc. does not equal putting energy into getting fitter and slimmer.
If you spend all your time wasting your energy on your own thoughts and fears, that's energy you COULD have been putting into your diet that you didn't...
Finally: The energy you put into being healthy and losing fat is the only thing that matters...
The energy you PUT INTO your diet... and that's very different than your obsessive worrying, fearing, anger, embittered rage, hatred, resentment, etc.
If you want to waste your energy making yourself crazy and then get upset when your diet fails (because you put nothing into the new regime, just your mental neurosis), then you have every right to do as you choose. It's your life. But you have no-one to blame but yourself if you take that path...
When you put your energy
into improving an unhealthy and fattening diet this isn't being selfish or self-absorbed.
I understand that you might not like this. I understand that you might think I'm unfair. To be honest, I don't mind because this will be better for you. Far too many diet experts take the easy path and suympathise and agree with everything you say. The fob you off with spending money on their books and videos.
It is a simple truth that you will value yourself when you put value on how you are living, feeding yourself and treating your body as something special and unique.
If you honestly think that you can be happy living on junk, drinking too much and basically neglecting yourself .. then you just haven’t thought through reality yet...
At this point we're either on the same page or we're
not... but I don't want to spend time arguing with people who think Big is Beautiful and huge dress sizes are attractive. I know lots of very overweight women, and none of them would choose to be that way if they could easily be a size 10 or 12.
Think again. take a different stance. Sticking with your diet will help you stand out from other women, whatever your age, and face the future feeling like the person you always wanted to be.
Hello Monica,
I've worked hard on my shape for years now and am proud that at 44, I still have the same weight and figure I had at 18. Thanks to your book and your videos (why aren't they on DVD by the way?) and the classes I go to, I think I still look pretty good.
My problem is , I'm moving to Australia soon. For a time I'll be lodging with my sister and there's no gym nearby. I'm beginning to panic about staying in shape. Can you help?
Susannah, soon-to-be in Perth.
Hello Susannah,
I won't lie to you: having a flat stomach takes work.
Actually, a friend of mine in Australia had the same problem. He devised what he called a 'prison cell workout'. I saw him do it. In a space of a few square feet he did a circuit of punishing, impressive incline press-ups, sit-ups and pull-ups. He went for runs. I don't think he enjoyed it, but it served the purpose. He looked amazing! You can wear an iPod for motivating music and nobody will hear.
Pack a flexband and use it for resistance training. Write out a programme. Don't just stand there and think of what to do.
My videos were made by companies such as News of the World and I didn't own the copyright. I was merely paid for the job! I don't have the Master tapes so I can't reproduce anything on DVD I'm afraid.
Monica x
Hi Monica,
I've been feeling particularly lethargic recently. I'm worried about having a slow thyroid as my Mum suffered from it. I've heard that iodine tablets will help? I coudn't find pure iodine but I found kelp. Is this the same?
Maisie, Brighton
Hello Maisie,
Kelp is a seaweed. All sea products, especially shellfish, are full of this mineral. So prawns, scallops etc should be part of the diet when possible.
I'm not a doctor, so a trip to your GP is your only option for testing thyroid function. This hormone regulates metabolism and it naturally gets tired as life goes on. A slow thyroid has other symptoms, such as feeling cold all the time, thinning hair and a hoarse, husky voice. You also feel listless. Young women are unlikely to naturally have thyroid problems, though it does happen.
Iodine supports the thyroid gland - it doesn't help if you already have a problem. You would be treated with thyroxine, at a dose suitable for you. Iodine simply helps keep the thyroid gland working a little better, but as we all know hormones tend to have a life of their own however well we try and look after ourselves.
Kelp is easily available. I saw it in Boots yesterday. The next posting should give you more to think about regarding energy, which usually comes from carbohydrate foods and drinks. To make sure you wake fresh every day, have a carb-rich dinner and forget any nonesense about 'carb curfew' or not eating carbs after 6pm. It's ridiculous.
These
extracts are taken randomly. They describe some of my career experiences
during 18 years working as weekly diet and health columnist in some of
the biggest publishing titles in the world: the News of the World,
Mirror Group newspapers, IPC Media and my book pubishers, Pan MacMillan
and Time Warner. (now Grand Central Publishing).
To be successful in life you need to do two things –
think big and never quit. I can think of three, four and even ten things you
need, but two’s good for now. If you don't like the sound of thinking big, try 'aim high'. I’m constantly amazed how women will settle for
less than they want with their figures; how they’ll put on weight and say “I’m
four stone heavier than when I got married ten years ago” – and not do anything
about it and stay miserable.
They intend doing something. They’ve tried diets. They say the diets never work. So the overweight figure is worth it? Worth giving up dieting for? Worth that bottle of wine and dessert?
I'll say right here that I'm not saying everyone should be slim. There's no law that says what size we should be. I have a lot of friends who are larger than they should be and I don't care. they're my friends and I love them. I don't choose my friends according to their dress size. If you're genuinely happy with your size and think I'm talking baloney, please shut off this page right now and go and do something more useful. Don't sit here burning a hole in your brain with fury at what I'm writing. Plenty of people do. They send hate mails and fill the internet with abuse about me, but there's no need. This post is for people who want advice. If this isn't you, thanks for stopping by, have a good day and I'm here if you change your mind.
I’ll deal with ‘thinking big’ later. For now, let's look at the concept of quitting.
People say ‘diets are boring. Dieting's unpleasant” but so are many things in life. Getting up to a crying baby four times a night isn’t pleasant. Going out in the rain or studying for exams isn’t nice either. But we don’t moan every time these things happen. There’s a purpose to them that makes the effort worthwhile. Diets may be boring, but being fat is worse. Being unable to run after your little toddler who is heading for the river - and I saw that recently - bcause you're too heavy to move, has to be bad. Being fat with nothing to wear and all your lovely clothes in the charity shop – that’s much more upsetting than giving up a few roast potatoes or crisps.
People quit because they have no real
determination. OK, they say they're determined to be slim and they tell me they'll do anything. Then they give up after a week. They won't take the route to get there. To be successful in life you must hold on to what you want and
never quit. Quitting is weak. That's another way of saying it's lazy. I'm not saying it's bad to be weak. We're all weak about something. I'm hopeless at getting the ironing pile less than about three feet up the wall. It hurts nobody. I know what weakness feels like, but I pretend I'm brilliant at other things and my bad ways with ironing are somehow the result of being a busy woman. What a cop out. I'm weak and bone idle ! I say 'something has to give' but it's not even true. Lots of things can give, like watching an extra hour of TV which is totally unnecessary. I could have done all the ironing in that time. If I did the ironing as it appeared, it would take me five minutes. Like losing three pounds, which takes a few days. Instead, we leave it until it's three stone and it'll take six months to shift. So I work on overcoming the weakness, not pretending it doesn't exist. Of course, sometimes you have to accept you are weak and stop beating yourself up about it and telling yourself what a horrible person you are. Self pity is a truly ugly thing.
Being lazy about your diet shows on your hips and your stomach. It shows in your bank balance because you have to buy new clothes. It shows in your confidence. Basically, there's not a single good thing about being lazy. But people still go on and do it. It isn't food that has the power, but the Habit. Willpower doesn't stand a chance against habit. A habit can be a comfort. It can feel familiar and it takes effort to break a habit, especially if it involves friends. But I believe you should keep to your aim and never quit. Ever.
Attend to the small details
Taking trouble over the small details of life is important. We use the kids, the busy life, the school run, the organising of sleep-overs, as reasons we've gained weight and not looked after ourselves. We look at glamorous celebrities who got their figure back 6 weeks after a baby and we pour scorn. why don't we learn lessons from them?
The fact is, most celebrity women get their bodies back because they have a compelling reason. I have written books on diet and flat tummies and great legs - so i have the same reason to be in shape. I can't look a total idiot by not practising what I preach. It's not a difficult thing to do. Decades ago, people had to get their figures back or carry on wearing maternity clothes and nobody wanted to do that! It was the ultimate letdown. If you don't gain the weight in pregnancy, you won't have the battle afterwards. But society leads us to believe it's normal to be overweight after birth. It's not. It has simply become acceptable.
You may wonder here why I have gone off-road taking the scenic route, but the problem with weight-loss is not taking time for the scenic route and paying attention to detail. People want to get to their destination fast. They want a diet and they want it now. Actually, they don't want a diet - they want to be slim now! Don't get me wrong, I'm glad people want diets because that's what I do. However, I want people to be successful. Success means exploring all the other things you need to do.
Losing weight isn't just diet. A fast car isn't a fast car - it's a lump of metal sitting on your driveway. It has the potential to be fast if a good driver gets behind the wheel but right now it's sitting there going nowhere. I could go on for a long time but you get the point: you need to discover your weaknesses, learn how to play the game at dieting and pay attention to the small details. Having discovered them, you need to work out what to do about them. Definitely don't sit there feeling useless and crying that you're a failure. Where does that get you?
I’m impressed when a seriously overweight person
loses not just half the weight but ALL of it. If they can be bothered to make
the effort, I admire them. Getting halfway to your goal feels great and you can
love your new slimmer figure. But is it what you want? There are lots of things
in life that are seriously difficult and we have to learn how to do them. I’m
not good at lots of things. But eating less and exercising more isn’t an impossible skill we have to master. You don't need a degree in food science to eat less.
Thinking big can sound scary but it costs nothing. I need only exist in your head and does you no harm. People say to me “I'll be happy with a size 14” I say “but what size do you want to be? Size 10? “
You haven’t always been big – you were about 7lbs when you were born and just kept gaining. You were once a size 8. You just got past it.
Think of what you want to look like, and go there. Ok there are lots of things we truly can’t achieve – I’d like to be 30 again, but it’s not going to happen. So there’s no point in even thinking about it and instead, concentrate on what you can achieve. I can't be 30, but I can be slim. I can have a young attitude. Lots of 30 year olds are miserable and look shattered and have the troubles of the world on their shoulders. They moan. They're overweight, bulging out of their clothes and look awful. You don’t have to be old to look bad.
You can have great, youthful hair and good skin. For
women, youthful means good posture, a good bra, (drooping boobs are so ageing) moving with purpose, smiling a
lot. Good teeth. People want to be with you when you’re fun to be with.Nobody wants to be with someone who moans all the time.
I don’t concentrate on not being young because we have only so much energy in our lives, and that really would be a fruitless exercise! We're all only heading one way - towards old age. I would rather devote my
energies to something worthwhile. Regretting not being young isn't a worthwhile way to spend your energies. Think of all the good things about being you.
Think big. Aim high.
I saw a great thing on a beach in
Australia once – a group of kids were being trained in some activity and the coach showed a move holding some sort of baton, and it was totally wrong. I think it was something to do with surfing. It was also potentially dangerous.
“Hands up those who think this is a good thing to
do?” the coach shouted. No hands.
"Hands up anyone who thinks this is a really bad thing to do?"
All the hands shot up.
“So why do you keep doing it? You think it’s a bad thing to do, but you keep on doing it!”
I liked this. I came away repeating it to myself because that’s what people do every day with their diets. Do you really think it’s a great idea to eat a bucket of chicken wings, chips, fizzy drink and Ben and Jerry’s? So why do you keep doing it?
Back to The Beginning.
How did I become an expert on this? By persisting. When I wanted to go into newspapers, I was working at something dull in public health in a training company. I was worse than unhappy – I was in
a dead end with no possibility of earning more or advancing my rsther dull working life. . No chance of a promotion unless I took a
business studies degree. I was so frustrated I would wake every morning and
cry. Had my life come to this? I was young! Other people had control over my life and I couldn’t stand it. One thing I knew a lot about was nutrition. I decided I
wanted to write for the public, even though I hadn’t a
clue how to write or where to start. But I was
definitely going to try. Did I start modestly and go to the local evening paper? I didn’t. I wrote
straight to the Sunday Mirror – a national newspaper!
The Editor saw me (which
in itself was astonishing) and told me I was a nobody. She actually used that word - nobody. She was known for being ruthless and taking no prisoners. I just stood there in her huge office on her thick carpet and took a pounding. I was wasting her time. Readers wouldn't be drawn to this young woman from the sticks, she said. I had no idea why this Editor agreed to see me. She must have been hungry for some fresh meat to humiliate and kill that day. I travelled three hours there and three hours back for this. She pointed to a gigantic picture on her office wall behind her, a well-known soap star. This celebrity was writing the diet column I wanted. And she knew nothing about diet! Basically, I came away
with nothing. But she’d seen me, and I reckoned she could now have a face and a
voice to the name. It was better than nothing. I kept picturing that huge soap star picture on her wall. It ran from the floor to the ceiling. I imagined my face there. Years later, I was all over the cover of the News of the World promoting my New Year Diet and my new Get Back Into Your Jeaans exercise video that they paid for me to make. They were distributing it with my book of the same title as a box-set. How lucky am I, I thought. I made three TV adverts for them. Part of this was luck, sure, but I helped the luck along by making sure that the Editor had me in mind when a problem came along. A problem had come along and the soap star didn't want to renew her contract. I was so glad I shoehorned my way into her office that time.
You can't have luck if people don't know you exist.
Know what you are doing
The thing is, I knew what I was doing. Part of my formula for success is to make sure you know what you're doing because if you don't, someone will come along and do it for you. I just didn't know how to convince this Editor that I knew what I was doing! I decided to apply my mind to working this problem out while I was working in my boring job.
In diet, don't just go and pick the latest diet just because some celebrity is doing it. In Woman's Own we have a new diet every week; 50 new diets a year. Sometimes someone picks up the magazine for the first time, likes a diet I've written and writes to me to ask if I can adapt it for them. They might not like dairy food or want a vegetarian alternative. I can't help them. "That diet is my best advice for the problem we've highlighted" I explain. "It has to stand complete as it is. But don't worry, I've written a diet just for what you need and it'll be out in three weeks. Try and hang on until then".
Picking on any diet just because you're desperate is flailing around in the dark for a solution. A diet isn't a solution. It's a tool. As I said before, if a diet did the trick, I would be a bilionnaire by now and all the world would be slim. There's nothing I don't know about weight loss. I know the business inside and out, and weight loss is all about your mind. I'm not overweight because I don't want to be. Nothing more exciting than that.
Wait, try to get to know your weaknesses, discover where you usually go wrong and go from there. Know what you are doing.
Be patient
This can be the hardest. If someone had told me it would take years to get started I probably would never have started. Ignorance can often be the best thing. If I'd known how hard it would be and how belittled I'd feel month after month, i'm not sure I'd have had the stomach for it. Eventually, when I was halfway there, it was a case of "do I turn round now or plough on?"
We all want something now. It's not unreasonable but some things just take time and you can't hurry them. If I had gone straight into the Sunday Mirror I'd have made an idiot of myself and they'd have kicked me out. So in the meantime, while I was busy being a nobody, I did write for the local paper. For over a year I think. They told me they had no budget and couldn’t pay me, so I said, “OK don’t pay me. Give me a Saturday night column and I’ll do it for nothing”. The Editor was tired and stressed and he saw a way of getting rid of one page. I said 'OK then, give me four weeks. Give me a trial. if you don't like me, get rid of me."
To be fair, I kept my day job because I had to work or go without eating! But I felt I was doing something towards the kind of life I wanted. Oh and I may be self-assured and confident these days but back then, I was anything but. Pushing my luck was hard and embarrassing and stressful. I spent most of my time getting up the nerve to pick up the phone. I was a nobody. I just reckoned that I was totally miserable at home doing nothing about my life so I might as well be totally miserable getting rejected, trying to do something about my Life. Whichever way I looked, I was totally miserable ! But at least this was a way of possibly not being miserable. There was a chink of light in the gloom and I was heading for it.
Most people didn't write back to even tell me to get lost. That was the worst. I had good writing paper printed and wrote carefully thought-out letters. The only person who did write back was Piers Morgan. I got a 'No' but he still wrote back to tell me himself! Another was a man called David Montgomery. Now David has gone very quiet these days, he must be in retirement, but he'd been editor of the News of the World, among others, and was currently Chief Executive of Mirror Group Newspapers, so he was massive. He wrote a long letter saying it was a bit chicken-andegg as they needed a name to draw readers in, but why didn't I write a book which would at least raise my profile, and go from there?
At first I was in despair, because writing a book could take another year and then I'd have to get it published so I was looking at another two years. None of this put me in a good place, but it was something.
This is what I say to dieters. They complain ( not unreasonably) about spending the next year shifting their weight. It's not a nice prospect, but it's necessary. I say "that year is going to pass anyway. The time will go, however you spend it."
A year later I had a handful of nice newspaper cuttings
and of course, nobody knew I hadn’t been paid. That was between the editor and
me. People thought I was getting thousands and although I never lied, I didn’t correct them either. It raised
my reputation and everyone thought I was the most important person in town with a whole broadsheet page every Saturday night on any diet and fitness topic I wanted. I sent them to a lot of newspaper people who probably put them straight in the bin, but one day I guess someone took a look through them and that person was the editor of the Sunday Mirror. .
People say these days that they won't work for nothing and I agree that you should get the best price you can if you're worth it. The thing was, I wasn't worth it. I had no newspaper experience. It took me all week of practising to write that column and I was pretty useless but it was worthwhile and I got very good at it and the main achievement was that readers got proper advice, and it helped them.
One day I got a call from someone at the Daily Star. Would I write a quick diet, overnight, based on popcorn? I'd been hassling this person for two years with regular letters and phone calls. There was no internet back then - I think it was 1994 or 95 - so I couldn't send emails. I think she offered £250. Blimey, I had to work for more than a week to earn that in my current job! I was terrified, but this was what I wanted: to earn a week's wage in one evening.
It had to be on her desk by first thing next morning, faxed across. I hadn't even got a fax machine! I wrote the diet, but hadn't a clue how to write an introduction in a tabloid style. I'd be writing in a sleepy broadsheet in a small Wiltshire town for people with enough time for me to expand my theme, write long sentences, explain in ten different ways. Now I was being asked to write a popcorn diet in 500 words. How did I start it? And finish it? I rushed out to buy the Daily Star. OK, you write it and then discard the first half of it and start from the middle. That's what it looked like to me, anyway. In a panic, I rang one of my colleagues at the local paper "I'll give you 50 quid if you can write the first two lines for me" I said .
"Have you got a pen handy?" she laughed.
That was the easiest 50 quid she ever made. She dictated two lines in less than a minute. I was in awe of her ability to know what to write with no notice. I wanted to be like that! It also proved the rule about a good reputation because I knew she was reliable and she's the first person I went to. She's still at that Wiltshire paper, very happy, and we laugh about it still.
The ending of that story is quite sweet so I'll tell you, even though I'm going totally off-road now. Years later, the magazine I was working at, closed. It was totally unexpected and pretty shattering. I hadn't spoken to that person at the Daily Star in about 11 years but I rang her. We'd never even met. "Popcorn diet!" she laughed. "Come and see me. Don't speak to anyone else!". So networking, and a good reputation, worked.
Make your dull times work for you
If all this sounds rosy, it was anything but. I was still slaving away in public health. In between working at a dull job, struggling with the bills and sitting on my stairs, crying, I wrote a book. Of course nobody wanted to
publish it, but eventually a tiny publisher did bring it out and then that publisher
was bought out in a takeover by a really big publisher who put money into it, re-printed the book in a big, glossy style, sold it to the USA and other countries. That’s how 5 Days to A Flatter Stomach became global. It took years. I wrote it in 1995 and it came out in the USA nine years later, in 2004. They also asked me to write several more books. I couldn’t have imagined my little book would be so big after 16 years, but I thought big and never quit. Whatever problems had come my way, I’d have found a way round them in
time.
Make your dull times work for you. A girl said to me last week: "My relationships's finished. I'm in the depths of despair and don't know how to go on. I've gained ten pounds, I've been drinking a bottle of wine every night and smoking 20 cigarettes: I'm so stressed. I was supposed to go on holiday with him next week, and now I have two weeks of nothing"
"Don't be silly" I told her. "You can't do anything about losing your boyfriend. But you have two weeks off work and nowhere to go. Can you imagine how many women who love to be in your shoes, with two weeks on your own? It's tough, but you can make something of that. Chuck everything out of your fridge and fill it with salads, lean meats and fish. Get up early and go for a run or bike ride. Have long baths, plaster your face with cream and your body with oil and make your skin glow. Diet like a demon for two weeks. Lie on the floor and do sit ups. Put on a Pilates DVD, I don't know. Just do something with your time that'll make a difference. It won't bring him back, but next time you step outside the door, you'll look 100% better and that'll make you feel better I guarantee." Being bored is a great opportunity.
I eventually got the Sunday Mirror column and spent a very happy time there.
Obviously there are problems, but I love problems.
Solving a problem, beating the odds and getting people to work with you are
brilliant solutions. All the top people in life spend their time solving
problems and they love it. There’s nothing wrong with having terrible, terrible
times in your life but don’t let them grind you down. Instead of focusing on
all the things that are wrong, focus on what you’re going to do about it.Then, when things go right, it's such a brilliant feeling.
The brilliant feeling I get is helping others reach their goals. All of this is worthwhile for me because my prime concern is to be useful to people. I don't know anything about plumbing, so I call a plumber. I don't know how to make curtains, so I go to someone who does. My reward for all the studying I've done at university is using my knowledge to be useful to others. It may sound pious, but it's true. I've done enough crying on my way here to know what it feels like to believe there's no way out.
Finally, this is my top tip that has
always worked for me. DON’T FLOG DEAD
HORSES. There’s a huge difference between hanging on in
there and persistence, and flogging something that's never going to work. If you have to lose weight for your health, get on and do it. But if it's not working, stop and think of another way. Don't follow a diet just because some superstar does it.
(I'll tell you something about superstars: they're surrounded by food. When it's reported that Victoria Beckham only ate one prawn for lunch it wasn't because she was dieting: she's been to one event mid-morning where cakes were baked in her honour, she had another event in the afternoon and a huge charity ball in the evening. Celebrities are sick of food. The food served at celebrity events is food for people who are never hungry and don't need to eat)
So, don't flog dead horses. Spending years at slimming clubs, paying a fortune and still going back to your old weight, is flogging a dead horse. Now, i agree with slimming clubs and think they're great for the right sort of person. But they're not for everyone. If you're spending money and getting nothing back, walk away. Try something else. Don't give up on the final outcome, but try something more worthy of your time.
Find a way and never quit.
Toxic friends
Don’t fall in with friends who have bad habits and lead you astray.
They’re not friends if they don’t care about what you want to achieve. They’re
not friends if they tell you you’re boring for not drinking or eating extra
pizza. Some people go back to drunken nights out every week because their friends tell them they're boring since they stopped drinking. What kind of friends says that? They don’t care about you. Trust me, they don’t. They care about the great time they're going to have laughing at your antics when you're drunk.
Don't accept these insults. Don't accept people making you feel bad or small. If someone upsets me, I go for them. You don't have to fight. You must never raise your voice. Something worth saying isn't said any better in a loud voice. Never lose it. You can even leave them not realising they have just been hauled over the coals, but do it.
Someone upset me recently over something relatively trivial, but it showed she didn't care about me. It was a gold-plated insult. Given the friendship, I was entitled to expect more from her. I gave her the benefit of the doubt for a while, but then I simply rang her. "Just curious" I said. "But have I offended you? I hope you haven't been ill?" If I'd gone straight into asking her why she'd ignored me I'd have felt pretty stupid if she told me she was just in her third round of chemotherapy and had been kind-of busy!
But this person did say that. She actually said she'd been busy and forgotten! She'd been having a fine old time. I'd been a good and very loyal friend to her. I'd recommended her and defended her when everyone hated her. I was the only person who cared about her. The thing is, it would have been easy to stay quiet and either let it pass over or remain with the insult grinding away in my stomach, building up a head of resentment that was bigger than the problem! But that would have been to allow this friend to walk all over me. By going straight for her and asking why, it may well have made her feel bad, but at least she knew she mattered to me and the unkindness mattered too. It made me feel better and if it made her feel bad, well, I can't do anything about that.
if your friends constantly put you down (even though they may not mean it) tell them. Never whine. Put yourself in control and tell people firmly and nicely that they're not helping. Then say nothing else. Turn the problem over to them to deal with. Your body is yours and if you want to diet, nobody has the right to stop you. Women can be mean like this. It's all about jealousy and that's a whole new topic, but whatever the situation, if you want to eat a salad, make sure nobody makes fun of you. You can say "do you mind if we don't talk about this?" or something that suits the occasion, but never sound defensive, cross or apologetic. Don't say your piece and turn around and storm off. That is being afraid of the response. People say their piece and get the hell out of it because they don't want to hear what the other person has to say in case it wrong-foots them. They don't feel clever enough against the opposition. They feel the other person is smarter and will win. I understand that it can be terrifying facing your bully, but storming off makes it easy for them! They can turn to everyone else and have a good laugh about you. Make them uncomfortable. Stand your ground and make them think up something. They'll never forget how uncomfortable they felt, being called to account, especially if their friends are there. They'll probably never make fun of anyone's food choices again. They definitely won't have a go at you ever again! They deserve it. Wait and see if they have anything to say for themselves. Don't be aggressive. I know this sounds like a bunch of teenagers but actually, right now two of my friends are having a stand-off about this very thing and both of them are pensioners!
Make sure that nobody is in any doubt about how you feel. Don't apologise. That would make you the victim. You're not a victim.
I am saying a lot about this because believe it or not, bullying behaviour by family and friends is the number one reason people come to me for advice.
When people see a slim woman who looks well groomed, all they can see is the end result. They don't see the effort it took. Thinking big is saying you’re not going to settle for clothes you hate, the worst restaurant tables to hide yourself behind. All the other girls getting the dates. It makes you feel bad and who on this earth thinks it’s a good idea to feel bad?
I can’t forget that coach on the beach and the faces of those kids as the penny dropped.
______________________________________________________________
“You’ll be surprised when you look in the Mirror!”
I said this line for a television commercial in 1994. I had been slogging away unhappily at the coalface of the NHS, when somebody called me from the Daily Mirror one Friday night. The 20-second advert was filmed on the Saturday and it ran over all the ITV channels on the Sunday night. Like a lot of things in newspapers, it was a split-second decision for them. “Let’s do a Body Tone week. We’ll get that short dark girl – what’s her name? Monica Grenfell? The diet woman. Get her in”
When wheels spin into action in newspapers, they burn. Nobody moves faster. Some celebrity, with a kiss 'n tell story against him, had got an injunction. His story was due to be splashed over pages 2,3 and 4 on the Monday but it was pulled. They had to fill the space! Body Tone Week went in instead and I got my break.
I was still in
my £12,000 a year job in Cheltenham. I was working Saturdays at a chemist’s shop
for petrol money. I did an old lady's ironing every Friday for a fiver. By the Monday my picture ran down the entire side of
the Daily Mirror front page, displaying my lace-clad bottom. 'This Woman Will Change Your Life Forever!" it screamed. Blimey. Well, at least I had a quote. I used that line on my books for years.
It was like MGM rolling into town. I was in make-up for over two hours. I was on all the ITV channels (there weren't many back then, mind you) the next evening wearing workout gear, spinning around saying ”you’ll be surprised when you look in the mirror” to millions of viewers. I only had about three lines but I was so wooden and frozen with terror, it took all day. My physique may have been fit and ready but my brain certainly wasn't. To be brutal, I looked like an idiot. Behind me on the set an overweight, lovely professional comedy actress who was famous from the TV Hit 'Allo 'Allo was bulging out of a teeny fluorescent leotard, sweating away on an exercise bike. She then had to fall off and peer over the back of the sofa, panting and envious, while I draped myself around looking superior and cool. My first line was "Hi, I'm Monica Grenfell" and I even messed that one up. 'I’ll show you how my simple exercise routine will give you the firm bum and flat tum you’ve always wanted' I purred. I have the tape still, and it makes me cringe. I sound even worse. That poor actress had to pedal like crazy and fall off the bike about 100 times while they did take after take to get me to sound normal. She didn't care: she was getting paid a fortune. She also made a very good living by being fat, so there were no worries about upsetting her. She'd arrived by chauffeured limousine wearing furs and jewels. Everyone fell over her plying her with champagne and canapes while I got a cup of tea in a paper cup. I'm not joking! I might have been the star of the commercial but she was the star of the show. We got on very well and she was a fantastic person. I just kept thinking how glad I was I'd kept in shape as the camera panned down to my tight abdomen. It was tight through nerves and flat from not eating. What with the job, the Saturday job, the ironing and standing by the road every day crying when my £750 car broke down again, I was a stone thinner in those days too.
You don’t get many truly lucky breaks in life. I had to write an entire week's worth of exercises and diet tips overnight. I didn't even get paid! Newspapers are like that. They reckoned I got something out of it while they spent £300,000 buying TV time, so it was deemed an honour. Which it was. It is easy to let great opportunities pass you by especially if you are terrified. I wasn't feisty or particularly confident, but I knew my stuff. It's no good thinking big if you can't come up with the goods. But you have to be patient as well as enthusiastic.
You must also not get too big for your boots. If you are
overpraised and overflattered you have an inflated sense of your worth. Lots of
kids these days believe they can be a success without trying because they are
brought up on a steady diet of compliments. They are told they are winners when
in fact their school grades are poor and they look a mess. They don’t get jobs
and they get bitter. When they grow up, they find that the rest of the world
does not cherish and love them like their family does and they complain of low
self-esteem. So they quit. Giving up is easier than trying. I have found this
when dealing with clients and readers who cannot understand why diets don’t
work for them. They get bitter.
They become vicious about other women. Unfortunately, people who fail often respond with a barrage of excuses. I always say there are two types of female responses when a gorgeous girl rides into town. Those who hit the gym with a bit extra detemination and those who hit the biscuit tin, crying.
If an otherwise intelligent adult consistently apologies and makes excuses for having messed up and let everyone down, I walk away. They are not worth anyone’s time and attention until they get the message. I’m sorry, but I am brutal about people who lack respect for people's time and give lame excuses.
When I got my lucky break writing a column for the most-read newspaper in the country, lots of people all over the country also got their lucky break. It should have all gone to plan but unfortunately I was about to come up against my biggest challenge. But let’s rewind:
"We're calling your column 'Looking Good With Monica'. “
My job at the Sunday Mirror was a complete surprise. This was
now 1996 and I hadn't heard from them since being dismissed from
the office two years previously. The week at the Daily Mirror was a
one-off. I did the advert, wrote the feature and then went back to my old life. People always think a bit of TV exposure is the start of a new life but more often it is just an oasis in a desert. You have to capitalise on it yourself.
However, I’d been patient and practised writing. I had waited out the contract of the soap star who'd written the column I wanted. But no terrifying Editor this time. I met the Picture Editor, a vast, humourless man who reminded me of the late, great comedian Larry Grayson. Without the jokes.
"We're calling your column "Looking Good with Monica" he said.
My column! What column? Looking good with Monica? When? How? How much? How long? I wasn’t told any of this. They assumed I would say yes and they were right. My heart was singing!
I ran the column by the seat of my pants, but it worked. I didn’t dare ask what I should be doing. I was supposed to know. Magazines really are desperately busy. You are hired to get on with it and deliver the goods, not spend hours agonising and dithering. Luckily, I had ideas. Ideas are everything in magazines. I did it all from my home in Oxfordshire, gazing out at cows and sheep. What did the women in the tower blocks of Birmingham or fish-gutting wastes of Lincolnshire want to read? I couldn't really suggest recipes with rocket and parmesan. Could I? I had better get down to these places like Halifax and Southport and the Isle of Wight and the Norfolk Broads and see how they lived. It could be exciting. I also realized that I had a chance in a million, to write my own health column. I had to raise my game.
I soon learned that the editor was too busy and
stressed to be bothered. A year or so later she walked out on some crazy
principle. Nobody cared, which was sad. She had been a nasty piece of work, but she gave me my break and that was good enough for me.
These days magazines are run very differently. Back then, without internet or email, I simply organized my own PO Box Number, ran a competition, asked readers to write to me and it got printed on my page without question. Nowadays, data protection rules all this fun out, which is a shame. Back then, millions were reading my column and sacks of 50,000 postcards arrived at my house on a weekly basis with names and addresses on them. Within a few weeks, I was arranging photoshoots and travel to London to get reader stories into the magazine. Surely I could get a nervous stranger onto a train with the promise of a glamorous makeover? My boldness increased.
"I wish you'd warned us" gasped the village postman as he heaved a bulging mailbag up the path. I'm not exaggerating. Pre- email, it really was a case of 'answers on a postcard please’.
Helping people to lose weight became my career. I have now written eight diet books for different problems like cellulite, hormone problems and that perennial problems, the big tummy. But as you already know, losing weight is about a whole lot more than just following a diet.
Diets are everywhere. Diet advice is in every magazine. You are told to watch calories, eat fat-burning foods, control sugar, control insulin and glycaemic index. Advice goes from the uselessly vague “just eat less and exercise more” to the crazily specific, “ eat food that has been grown no more than five miles away.” I know this business inside and out, but back then I was just a food scientist. I knew the theory; I was about to put it into practice with real people who had real lives.
So there I was, mail pouring in. At first, it was just
questions about their diet and why they couldn’t lose weight. Soon I decided on
real-life stories and people sent ‘before and after’ photos of their weight loss.
I hit on the idea of forty being the new thirty (I swear I was the first
person to think of that!) and I was inundated with gorgeous, fit forty-year-old
readers. Fitness being the rage, I ran a fun piece where readers rated their
local gym or aerobics class. I did quirky things like giving six readers a
pedometer. They each had to guess how many miles they walked a day and then
wear the pedometer and discover the truth. The school cleaner walked 16miles,
the Catholic priest walked two miles up and down his church and the A&E
nurse did a paltry one mile despite feeling she hadn’t stopped. Perception is
everything. The feature was a massive hit and I decided to run a competition
for readers to win a pedometer. I asked companies for free merchandise and soon
found how easy it was. I then appealed for new, young grannies to get in touch,
begged for our readers’ best diet tips, asked for favourite low-calorie
recipes. I appealed for couples to come forward with heart-warming stories of
dieting together. I planned one week just for men and a postman was picked to
be our guinea pig. When he lost weight he promised to propose to his
girlfriend. We called the column ‘First-class Male’ (March 15th 1998) which I thought was fun.
Each appeal had a massive response and the sub-editors did their magic with clever headlines. I remember one column I wrote on wheat intolerance which they called ‘Dreaded Wheat’. Funny.
With each appeal, I was astonished and thrilled with the
response. I didn't really have a clue what i was doing and lived in dread of the phone going and the editor telling me it wasn't working. But nobody stopped me. Indeed, they seemed very pleased with me and my madcap ideas. Now don't get me wrong: the Sunday Mirror was well-run, excellent paper. It was important to them that anyone working on the magazine was a self-starter and motivator. Luckily for everyone, I liked being my own boss.
Readers wrote long, detailed letters. They spoke about what they ate, but most lived in denial and blamed their stressful job or a bereavement on their food obsession. If it wasn’t these, it was the HRT, contraceptive Pill or slow thyroid that was the trouble. Thyroid I could accept, but not much else. Death isn’t fattening. Looking back now, it was one of the most crass and insensitive things I have ever said and dealng with difficult, angry people made me less sensitive than I should have been. I was skating on thin ice at times but amazingly, most were relieved that they would not be piling on the pounds with each tragedy in their lives.
I wrote about this in my mailbag and was astonished to
receive 8,000 letters of support, which was wonderful. There was a fair
proportion of abuse and hate mail too but funnily enough, it never worried me.
Anyone who could be bothered to sit down and cut out pictures of animals with
my head superimposed and a gun thrust up my nether regions - and those were the
nice ones - got some sort of credit from me - I don't know why.
Nowadays, over sixteen years later, we have Internet Obesity forums and anti-diet gangs of vicious females all over the world just waiting to be offended. If something is published at 8am, 500 people have writtten spiteful, obnoxious comments by 8.30am. They egg each other on in their outrage, from as far away as the USA, British Indian Ocean territories, Sweden and other places where they could not possibly have read my article. Some of the language is shocking and deeply personal against me, my family and my friends.
(Warning: this extract has bad language)
http://kateharding.net/2008/04/03/dear-monica-grenfell-stfu/
Back in 1996 it was no more than the odd sad bloke in his bedsit, cutting out newspaper words spelling HATE and sticking them over my picture with Pritt Stick.
I spent most of my week sitting on the floor, surrounded by
letters and photographs like some mad card game. I had quite a few letters from prisoners and got into a sweet correspondence with Jeff. Jeff had been a bodybuilder on the outside, careful about his diet, and he moaned pitifully about the lack of decent protein and fresh vegetables. As far as I was concerned a reader was a reader, and captive readers were the most loyal. I answered his question, gave him diet tips, the lot. This went back and forth for several months before I thought I ought to know how long he was inside for. The nature of his crime was tricky but I handled the whole thing incedibly badly. He was in for twenty years. He told me the story, but his main complaint was the terrible food. I playfully suggested that he might have thought of that before he battered a poor pensioner to death. For some reason, he never wrote back to me.
One day I came up with an even better idea; an idea that might also help me keep the column and turn it into something permanent. Without a contract, I was still working at the hospital, the chemist and the ironing, and it was nearly killing me. My work schedule was brutal. I spent hours dictating hundreds of replies and talking on a landline phone was also time-consuming. I took on a woman in the village to type my replies. I felt like the mythological king Sisyphus, condemned to spending eternity rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again.
My idea was to take on people to lose weight with the
magazine in real time, and we would do a weekly diet diary. Nobody had really
done this yet. It needed a dedicated nutritionist who would make this her
full-time job, and nutritionists who could also write for the tabloids were
rare. Readers got the next week of their diet, which kept them buying the
paper. If it took a year, we would have to stay with them for a year and
I would keep my job. It worked, but as things turned out, I wasn’t going to see
the time out anyway. Another paper asked me to join them. The Sunday Mirror
finished me on good terms in June 1998, giving me six pages and a ‘Spring Clean
Special’, which happened to coincide with the world cup. Their souvenir
magazine carried the coverline SPRING CLEAN YOUR SYSTEM WITH MONICA GRENFELL.
THE NEWS OF THE WORLD
The News of the World, the greatest global Sunday newspaper, had asked me to join them. It was the ultimate prize. My new column was called MONICA'S HEALTH CLUB. It was a totally different set-up from before, run brilliantly with a team who all loved the magazine. We did amazing things. One year, 1999 I think it was, we filled Pontins in Pwhelli with 2,000 News of the World readers for a ‘Feel Fab’ weekend. It was a mixture of fitnness, advice, clothes and make-up and a fashion show. I gave talks on diet and Dr Hilary Jones, our resident GP columnist, did his party piece of 100 press-ups before a gang of screaming women. It was mental. It was like some gigantic hen party and twice as wild. I don't know about the readers, but the entire magazine staff went there and I don't think any of us actually went to bed as we were raking the streets of Pwhelli. We still talk about it.
The thing was, we threw ourselves into our jobs. Over four million copies of the magazine were being printed every week, which meant a readership of over ten million. One in six of the population was reading us! Masses of money was pumped into everything we did. Advertisers loved us. I ploughed on with my column for a further five years and by about 2004 Holland and Barratt, a fantastic company, sponsored my column. They paid a vast amount of money to be on the bottom of my page every week with a product of the week and their website. I once mentioned one of their products on the Sunday, and every Holland and Barratt store had sold out by Tuesday. It was a huge responsibility. In 2006 we won Newspaper Supplement of the year and I enjoyed the fabulous event at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane London. Piers Morgan was the main speaker, and I recall he was slow hand-clapped by bored, drunk journalists because he spoke for too long.
"Oh, have I gone on too long?" he asked.
"YEEESSSSS!" screamed the entire room.
Such fun!
Real life stories were the backbone of Sunday magazine. Real life plus celebrity. I had access to the most amazing celebrities who were all too pleased to talk to me in exchange for great publicity. Such was the power of the newspaper, their agents approached me not the other way round. My brief was to provide one real story per week, one celebrity story, a mailbag and a product of the week. My idea of real-life slimmers doing a weekly diet diary went down well.
They could have a personal nutritionist, me, free of charge, to be their mentor and guide. They would have a personal diet drawn up. They could contact me every day, any time, and at the end of it they would have lost weight. The good news? It was all free. The better news, they didn’t even have to leave their homes. Think of it. A nutritionist, just for you. Every day. You’d get the figure of your dreams. You had been selected from thousands. Yet people still blew this opportunity.
AIM HIGH - IN STAGES.
These days, when someone says they will do absolutely anything to lose weight, and I am their last hope, I sense trouble. I soon learned my lesson.
I never actually met Kathleen, but I will never forget her. She
was picked from thousands of applicants for a personal diet plan. We whittled this down to dozens. I looked at thousands of photographs of women, in various stages of undress that would make 'Embarrassing Bodies' look tame. Kathleen stood out. vastly overweight, she was also bubbly and sweet, keen, enthusiastic, said she would 'do anything' - words that these days would make me run down the road screaming. But I was still naive then. I was inexperienced in this type of reader.
We had several long chats on the phone; she filled in a comprehensive medical questionnaire and had to write a full story of her life and why she was overweight. I wasn't going to make it easy for her. But I did want her to be successful and motivate our millions of readers to put down their crisps and pick up an apple. The idea behind every trial dieter was not actually to help that person lose weight but to motivate and be an example to millions of others. It was one thing for me to lecture people on eating less: It was quite another thing when it came from a vastly overweight young woman with a life just like theirs. It needed to be a success.
Kathleen lived in Glasgow. She managed a portion of a vast call centre, she was 28 and what you might call a popular girl. She worked hard and played even harder. Her food and alcohol intake was historic. She was genuine, warm, funny and sincere. She wanted to lose weight and frankly, if she didn't lose weight she would die. She weighed 21 stone.
I warned her that her progress would be reported every few weeks. We would want regular update photos that should show the weight loss and take everyone's breath away. I didn't expect anything unrealistic. Just normal, regular weight loss. She had to be brutally honest with me. I would write her a personal diet plan but the work was down to her. She would speak to me several times a week and write a detailed diary of her day. Every day. She would have to post these to me. If she failed to do any of these things, I would drop her. I was friendly, but not her friend and the deal was simple: she would do as we asked, provide a fantastic story to motivate our readers and in return she had my undivided attention. At the end of it, she would have lost at least ten stone and hopefully, more. She would then come to London, all expenses paid, have a fabulous makeover with lots of lovely free clothes and basically, become a star for the day. What could be simpler?
Kathleen's problem was her drinking. She binge-drank at weekends. She had dozens of friends who all adored her. I spoke to them, with her approval, and they were keen to support her. The first few weeks were great. I didn't need to ask Kathleen what she was eating as she had that down to a fine art, but she would chat about her day, her mother, her lapses, her miserable boss and how she got through the weekends drinking only Diet Coke. Not a problem, she assured me.
She lost one stone, then two, three and four. We published her photos. She was thrilled at everything and talked of shopping for new clothes. The weeks and months rolled by and I got on with my work. I couldn't wait to publish Kathleen's success story, which was probably going into the paper as well as the magazine.
Kathleen's real problem had been her social life. We could manage her weekday snacking. But the weekends had been about seeing her boyfriend and socialising with her girlfriends where she drank about 5,000 calories of booze. She always finished the evening at the kebab van. Once home, she topped up with biscuits and crisps. She had given all this up and assured me it was no problem.
Kathleen recorded her weight every week and posted me new photos. This being before the digital camera, she took photos got them developed and posted them. They were a little blurry, but she was looking OK.
The week of the photoshoot arrived. A top London studio, photographer, assistant and getting Kathleen to London would cost thousands. We agreed to fly her there. Two days before, she rang me. There was a problem. At first it was a sick mother. Then it was her work. Then she had flu. Then she said she was OK. We went ahead. It was just two days away.
The campaign was to be our Beach Body Special. Four pages. I had already been primed to shoot the TV advert. It was five years since the disastrous Daily Mirror effort. This time we did it in a huge film studio in London, decked out to represent a beach. It was astonishing. Huge JCBs shifted in hundreds of tons of sand into the building. The Crew were all over it like flies, quickly building huge sand dunes. Shells and seaweed were being arranged decoratively. Rock pools were built. The money they spent was out of this world. All for 30 seconds on the TV screen. In the middle was me. I was given a swimsuit and killer high pink stilettos which seemed crazy but this was a Sunday tabloid after all, not 'Women's Fitness' magazine. We had to sell the finished result, not the means of getting there. I was given a tan, and a posse of make-up artists slathered any bare flesh with golden gloss that looked like 'Goldfinger'. I held a gigantic striped beach ball. The idea was that I hold this beach ball, hands either side, and by computer wizardry later it would shrink gradually in the middle as I spoke, to look like an hourglass. I said "Want to lose a few pounds for the summer?" This time I did it in about 42 takes instead of 100. The day was long because nobody had thought that the ball would actually be so big it hid my face. I am only 5ft 2ins with a short body. I couldn't actually see round or over the ball to deliver my line. And basically I was still wooden and self conscious. I got the message and have never done television shows since, and never will. However, the advert went out and looked quite good. We were all ready for Kathleen to fly in, the star of the whole thing, and do her big photoshoot.
Kathleen never came. I didn't manage to contact her for a week. When I did, she said she had lost four stone, many months ago, but she had gained it all back again. She wept and screamed in genuine distress on the phone. She believed, even to the last week, that she could somehow lose several stone. My blood turned to ice.
Her friends had been supportive for a time, but then complained she was no fun any more. Without a drink in her hand, without falling down drunk every Saturday, their nights out were tame. Kathleen had been the life and soul. Now there was no life and no soul, all because Kathleen had lost weight and wasn't drinking. Her boyfriend had got tired of all the calorie counting and said he liked her as she was. What he meant was he liked his life as it was. Yes, he told me, he wold like Kathleen to lose weight. But not if it meant all this fuss. Worse than that, Kathleen had given up all she had achieved, and put her health at enormous risk, all for the sake of peer pressure. The power of disapproval and the lure of a drink were greater than her desire to be slim. Willpower does not stand a chance against habit.
That was a massive disaster for me, but not the end. We did something else. I decided to write the truth for our readers. I felt that Kathleen owed the readers an ending of sorts. I told readers how Kathleen had given up under pressure from her so-called friends. We weren't criticising her: it was an honest explanation and could help other readers. This was my hope. It had an enormous, positive response. Since then, I have believed in telling readers the complete truth. It was important that they didn't see only the diet successes but also the failures. I took a punt on admitting I could not help someone to lose weight successfully, and it worked. More and more readers wanted to diet with me, and to present a success story in the News of the World to prove we could do it.
The lessons:
1. Don't talk about the problem, endlessly.
Friends tend to say these things:
"He's an idiot! How dare he mention your weight!"
or
"You're nice and curvy! Who wants to be like a stick-thin, anorexic model anyway?"
or
"That weight suits you".
Now, if you are overweight, this is an insult to your intelligence. It is an insult to your plans for yourself and your big thinking. You want to aim high. You don't want to quit. You're in the doldrums and feel your life is never going to progress while you are so unhappy about your weight. You have been on a roll, losing weight successfully, and these people come and thwart everything you want for yourself.
Don't overdo the therapy.
You can spend hours talking about how your break-up or your mother's death made you overeat. You can spend months in therapy discussing your low self-esteem. But in the end..
* your friends walk away.
*They will talk about you as boring and they'll avoid you.
*Some even think your misery is attention-seeking.
______________________________________________________ It was 1997. The Picture Editor of the Sunday Mirror called me one Saturday. It was my job
as diet columnist to also comment on anything in the news that might concern
some celebrity's size, shape, whatever. They were less sensitive about these things
back then and we could be very cruel. Believe it or not the press is far less
cruel these days. It is seen as politially incorrect to call someone fat and we simply say 'curvy'. Back then we just went for it and said 'fat'. Anyway,
this Picture Editor called me and asked if he could send over some pictures of Princess
Diana taken a week or two earlier. She was on the yacht with Dodi Fayed dressed in her swimsuit, about to dive into the water. Her tummy was sticking out quite a bit, which was unusual for her. What did
I think? Could she be pregnant? The possibilities on the back of this sort of story would be massive. We could
run healthy pregnancy features, get sponsorship from baby companies, you name
it. I'm afraid newspapers have to dig around for angles. Would I, as their diet expert, comment on their picture and speculate on
whether Princess Diana was pregnant? True,
she looked a little ‘tummyish’ but I really didn't think she was actually pregnant. It was probably just her time of the
month. I didn’t feel it right to speculate on a possible pregnancy but I’m
afraid it sometimes happens that the editor wants a certain outcome and they
quite naturally want their health expert and her credentials next to it. It's not a great idea to start taking issue and arguing the toss on a busy Saturday with the paper in full production. I said to go ahead and write their own comment and they could put my name next to it. Not long afterwards, Diana was dead. My comments were used as an example of how the press hounded her. You can't dwell on things in the past though. You live
these things down. Fifteen years later nobody remembers this story. I had a lot of hate mail after her death but fortunately, as this was before universal use of the Internet, it was confined to letters. I also
learned not to get things out of proportion. Move on to the next thing and don't dwell. “I wish I’d stuck to a diet” If you want something badly, you must be persistent. It might be
anything from baking the perfect Victoria sponge to passing your driving test. Very
few people bake a perfect cake the first time. Not everyone passes
their driving test first go. They have to practice. If you need to go on a diet,
if you’ve been overweight for a long time and have never done it before, you
need to practice that too. Cut out a few things. Cut down on others. Try it a
day at a time. You wouldn’t expect a healthy eater to suddenly fill their home
with junk food, eat double their usual amount and feel great about it. Yet some
people go mad when they go on a diet. They chuck out the entire fridge of food,
fill the kitchen with fruit and veg. so it looks like a harvest festival and
immediately eat less than half their usual intake. It’s a bad idea. Willpower is
not the problem. If you have decided to go on a diet, you already have willpower in spades. It is the habit of where, when, what you eat and whom you eat it with. Habits are very hard to break. These were all challenges I faced in my first few years at the News of
the World Sunday magazine. Dealing with people was a new one on me but it became the most important aspect of my job. Kathleen Callaghan let everyone
down and wasn’t persistent. Kathleen was the lucky volunteer we picked to
represent a programme we devised for her. But she let us all down and didn’t
turn up. I wasn’t going to be soft about this. Thousands of women applied for
this one chance and we went through rigorous processes of choosing ‘the one’. Thousands
had been disappointed. Kathleen had a personal nutritionist, a diet tailored to
her needs, plus contact and support any time she needed it. At any stage of those months she could have
told me she was struggling. Right up to the end, if she had called me and told
me the truth, I would have been sympathetic. She could have saved the
newspapers half a million pounds of lost publicity. If she had called me I
would have had some respect for her. In the end, she didn’t own up and she
didn’t even apologise for having wasted our time and stealing an opportunity
from other, great volunteers. Am I being harsh? Not at all. All Kathleen had to do was eat less. I told her again and again that she was getting a lot out of it. Better health, lower blood pressure, saving money on all those nights out. A waist! Everything about her situation was going to be good. People can get upset about their struggles but those struggles are nothing really. It's not as if eating is a new and alien experience. All you have to do is carry on eating, but eat different things. A couple
of years later, Kathleen came back and was very apologetic. I accepted it and
wished her well. But I was also slightly to blame because what I should have
done, and what I do now, is accept a volunteer on the understanding that they
lose a stone first by themselves. They
have to go away and without any support, lose a stone in a set time. If they
can do that, I will take them on. Persistence
is everything. Having a go. Or decide you don’t want to flog dead horses: whatever
you do, don’t spend your life in a haze of tears and misery because of your
weight. Save your regrets for your old age There is plenty of time when you are old to sit and think about how you would have done things differently. In my first few years with the News of the World I had more readers every week than any other columnist in the world. I
had the tag most-read diet columnist. This
newspaper was massive and one in six of the population was reading us. We had
to choose our diet stories very carefully and we had to motivate readers to buy
the paper next week for more great diets and stories. My job was to help the nation get healthier. Quite a responsibility. “I wish
I’d stuck to a diet” said Mrs. Hart. I’ll never forget this lovely lady; she
was the lady I used to go ironing for. In a way, she personified one of the
problems with losing weight – putting it
off. Now she was 83 and in the last weeks of her life. She’d been a vivacious,
attractive pub landlady for twenty-five years. She was popular and fun. But she
had never been slim. In fact, like a stereotype, Mrs hart was fat and jolly.
Jolly, that is, until she had a stroke. Every
time she lost weight, people would say she was losing her face, looked haggard or was ‘going too
far’. Her three husbands had left her for someone slimmer. She had spent thirty
years trying to lose weight and given up because of other people. You may think
this is an excuse, but I spent every Friday lunchtime chatting to Mrs. Hart and
she was a phenomenal lady. A people pleaser. Years
later, when she could no longer do anything much for herself, she said the one
thing she really, really wished was that she’d stuck to a diet and not tried to
please everyone else. She seriously wished above anything else, that she had
been slim for just a few years. I put Mrs Hart in the magazine, quoting her regrets. I had a massive mailbag. She kick-started a lot of diets for the over50s. She had her stroke at 47. She wished so badly that she hadn't put it off until tomorrow. "Don't say you'll go on a diet tomorrow" she'd say. "I have lived 83 years and not had a nice figure for even one of those years" In ten
years at the News of the World I
encountered all sorts of diet volunteers. Real-life was our backbone. It wasn’t
just massive weight loss: we had to appeal to all sorts of readers, of all
ages. A popular story was called ‘Are you on the short list?” for which I
interviewed Kylie Minogue. Guess what, it tackled the problem of managing your
figure when you are very short! We did Leg specials, Bum specials, back fat,
bra bulge. Losing weight for a wedding, being the bridesmaid, How to stay on
your diet at a Barbecue, how not to blow your diet at Christmas. We would do
six pages on cellulite. Cellulite was always popular. I remember appealing for
reader volunteers for my special diet, and they had to send photos which clearly
showed the problem. It was no good sending a photo taken in a winter coat when you wanted to be part of our bikini diet. We needed to show readers what they looked like before and then afterwards and have our readers gasping in amazement at the difference. One woman - lots of women actually - sent pictures of herself with no knickers on, leaning
out of an upstairs sash window. I hope your imagination is running on all cylinders. Her huge bottom and thighs were covered with cellulite. Now, I understand that this is what we asked for and I wasn't shocked. I admited her for trying. However, we couldn't publish this sort of photo in the magazine, sadly! I had sackfuls of unbelievable pictures “showing the
problem”. I particularly remember the totally naked man
who sat on a chair, legs akimbo, to show us his flabby inner thighs. He wrote
“I can’t get my head round the problem”. Honestly. Get to
know every aspect of your job. True to my word, I decided to do my homework and spend a few weekends
travelling round the country seeing how people lived. Don't get me wrong: I come from Manchester and I know what a chip is! I just wanted to see more of the country and get a feel for whaty interested and inspired people in places I had never been to before. Oh, I thought
I was so clever! One Sunday, my special cellulite diet was in the magazine and I
decided to stay in Lincoln and explore the coast. On the Sunday morning I
opened the News of the World and was pleased with my diet of potassium-rich
foods; celery, spinach and asparagus salads. I threw in a daily ‘must-have’
of rocket and Parmesan starter salad. It all looked good. An hour
later, I glided into one coastal town twenty miles from Lincoln. It had sounded smart and vaguely prosperous. When I arrived, it was anything but. It looked like the land that time
forgot. Driving a smart silver sports car made matters worse. I had long-since graduated
from my Fiat 600 to something sleeker. I was gliding about the villages of Lincolnshire with the top down. Cringe. The town was peeling, shabby,
broken and forgotten. I had driven across wastelands of nothing but Bird’s Eye
fish processing factories – miles of them. A lot were closed-down. Men stood
outside the newsagent’s, chalky white with hollow eyes like Children of the
Damned. They all stopped what they were doing and stared. It was as if a
spaceship had just landed in the square, I’m not kidding you. Women still
had hairnets and vast white coveralls. Their eyes followed me. I noticed they
were all reading the magazine, probably for Mystic Meg’s horoscopes, but also
catching my asparagus and rocket salad. I might even have put Puy lentils in there somewhere. Don't! There was only one Spar shop in town
selling faggots in gravy, and tinned peas. I was suddenly, deeply ashamed of my
diet. I
felt so guilty I couldn’t get out of town fast enough. Fancy salads in the News
of the World? Pull the other one! I went
back to the office next day and changed everything to cheese or ham salad! "I wish I'd stuck to a diet....." (31/03/2012 @ 01:31:56)
Part 4
At the end of 2009,
I hit deep trouble. I have taken many knocks in my life, but this time I didn't get back up from the canvas. I didn’t see it
coming. I was dealing with
something I couldn’t negotiate.
If you refuse to imagine the worst, you won’t be prepared when it happens. Think big, but be cautious. I am a glass half empty person with a massive streak of optimism. The world can be a cruel place and people are out to get you in business one way or another. I have become successful by expecting nothing and never quitting. But back in 2009 I was as near to quitting as I will ever be.
Thirteen years had passed since the moment with the terrifying editor. I didn't think she was terrifying now; nobody had heard of her for years. Time has a way of diminishing situations, cutting things down to size. Other bad things had happened like the day Sunday magazine folded in 2007. In the June, we'd all been told the magazine was going from strength to strength. In August, the Friday before Bank Holiday I seem to remember, I was walking by the river in London and I got the call. I was out. We were all out. Enjoy your bank holiday. She actually said that.
That was nothing to do with failure. In 2009, things were going very badly for me. I was dealing with a very
unpredictable situation. The reasons aren't important now (it was a personal matter) but I had not been prepared. One word of advice: you can't deal with paranoid people. They drive you crazy and you'll never win. Don't deal with people who bullshit. Don't accept disrespect. Know your value. I knew one man who told his girlfriend she was fat. She was fat, but she was also his girlfriend, and it's not like she didn't know she'd gained weight. They had been intimate. There are much better ways to say it. Don’t get me wrong: failure and upset and challenges
are a normal part of life, but you must be prepared to walk away. It's not defeat: it's self-preservation!
In the end I could see this stretching into the future with more stress and I don’t believe in flogging dead horses. I decided to take the line of least resistance and cave in. I was paid off. I wanted to devote my energies to more worthwhile matters even though it cost me a lot, and left me seriously battered.
People often accuse me of not understanding how it feels to be overweight and desperate as I have never been overweight myself. The way I see it, having a weight problem is about a lot more than what you weigh. It is about feeling defeated and out of control and worthless. You don’t have to be overweight to understand how that feels.
The Higher you rise, the further you fall.
Before I got into the media I was stuck in a nowhere job with no prospect of advancement. In the next few years I did very well indeed. I wrote six books and was published all over the world. My face and name had been at the top of a national publication every single week without a break for fourteen years, which isn’t a record but it was an achievement. It was an achievement I could never have believed. I had worked very, very hard, played the game and exceeded everybody’s expectations. If you talk too big you had better come up with the goods or fall below what they expected. If I had failed when I was young, nobody would have noticed. Starting from scratch when you have nothing to lose is easy. Starting from scratch when you have a reputation is much more difficult.
ENJOY THE ROLL
I ran into a friend, Jane, who I hadn't seen for a year. She had been one of my diet success stories and we became close. She had been in a very bad place with bad health and a failed marriage all because of her weight. This had turned into self-loathing, she argued with everybody and retreated in to her shell. Her husband left her. I mentored her for a long time, she lost seven stone and her story was a huge success. Readers bought the paper just for her diet. Our mailbag was jammed with letters about Jane. She became slimmer of the year. Her picture was everywhere and although the deal was to be in touch only for the duration of the story (I can't, unfortunately, stay in touch with all my dieters) I'm always thrilled to hear how they are doing. Jane emailed me often about her family, her holidays and her daughter's wedding. She had a gorgeous figure and loved wearing gorgeous clothes, clothes she could never have dreamed of wearing when she was overweight.
I stopped hearing from Jane after a while. This is not unusual. Then a year or two later, I ran into her. She was actually trying to pretend she didn't see me, but I knew she had. She was embarrassed. She had gained back at least three stone. She didn't look groomed. We all have off days but this was more than that. She had given up. The first words many people say when we meet is "I'll be getting back into my diet soon, I really will!". or "I've been a bit naughty since we last met". Now, these people are friends and acquaintances of mine. If people come to me professionally for help, I will say something if they want my opinion, but I don't expect to meet a friend in the street and talk about diet. In fact, I hate it. If people give up on their figure, it's nothing to do with me. I hate being on a night out with friends and people saying "I had better not have a pudding as Monica is here". I don't care what they look like and I don't make judgements based on their weight. But what Jane said to me was what I hear, and I bet you hear too, often. "I can't seem to get back into it".
She had lost momentum. Like a lot of people who lose weight, she had seen the goal as an absolute in itself, something that would change her life and make all the difference. Instead, once her friends got over her new appearance, life got boring again. The bills were still there. The shopping still needed to be done. She felt fitter and healthier but she thought her life would change and it didn't change. Only her appearance changed. Jane was trapped in the doldrums.
When you are on a roll, it feels amazing. You have achieved what you set out to achieve and have every reason to be pleased with yourself. But you can't stay in this place without effort. Although you should think big and never give up, you must be prepared for the worst.
Back in 2009 I was in trouble. At first
I said to myself "I am in the pits. I’m going down and life will never be the
same again”. I thought, ”Every dog has its day and I have had
mine”. This was big stuff. None of this was about money or business, thank goodness. I hadn't lost everything, but I lost my spirit. For fourteen years I had gone from strength to strength. I
felt I had the right to focus a little less and start enjoying myself. I believed I had made it and
I could devote more time to other things. But
while you can diversify and change the emphasis, you mustn't lose focus. I took
my eye off the ball. Reality taught me that I couldn’t be successful and
take it easy at the same time. I looked in the mirror
and saw a person who looked defeated. I began to avoid
people. I had lost focus and this was not something I could afford to do. I had to earn my living and find my momentum again.
I was in the health business. I could not afford to look
bad. I had to get back into it.
Waiting out the doldrums
Everyone
hits the doldrums sometime. The doldrums was an old maritime expression,
describing parts of the oceans that had low-pressure zones where nothing
happens. There is no wind. Hundreds of years ago, sailing boats used to be
trapped in these calm areas for days or weeks. There was nothing anybody could
do.
Everyone knew the Trade Winds would come along at some time: they just didn’t
know when. Eventually the Trade Winds picked up, ships could set off again, but
in the meantime the ship’s crew didn’t sit around idly. Knowing they could do
nothing about the weather, they used the time profitably doing
maintenance.
We’ve
all been in our own doldrums. Sometimes you have nothing to do and can't move forwards or backwards, like when you have no job. Most times
you have plenty to do, only it’s not the sort of thing you want to do! You can
be the busiest person in town, but you’re not on a roll. The job is grinding on, the bills are
being paid; the kids are still at school, your husband walks in at 6 o’clock
sharp every day and the salary is in the bank every month. Don’t get me wrong;
there are millions who would love this kind of settled life. They crave
it! They have had enough of
uncertainty and chaos. Most people, however, find a settled life has no momentum. They get depressed and can't move on.
Being patient when you are in the doldrums is hard, but you must do it. The great Mohammed Ali, the world champion boxer of all time was a superstar of epic proportions who talked big and acted bigger. Better than that, he thought big. He said “I’m the greatest” and he was. Moreover, it got to his opponents!
A lot of sportspeople are told constantly that they are the best but they don’t believe it themselves. They have often been plucked from obscurity and had stardom and huge sums of money thrust at them. A few years ago, 2007 I think it was, I had the privilege of sitting next to the brilliant footballer Carlos Tevez at a dinner at the Ambassadors Club in London. He was very young and hardly spoke any English. For one reason and another, I was left talking to him because his manager, his agent and my old Editor at the News of the World, Phil Hall, who has an exceptional PR company these days, were discussing Carlos’s future. I admit I didn’t know one end of a football pitch from the other.
“Wow
Carlos,” I said. “There’s a lot riding on you. You’re pretty awesome!"
He shook
his head. He was only a boy, a piece of
moneymaking meat to the middle-aged trio across the table and Carlos was totally bemused
by the whole thing. He didn't look thrilled.
"You think? I don't know” he said, and gave a rueful, embarrassed smile. He looked at the floor.
I could see he didn’t believe his luck.
ACT LIKE YOU’RE A WINNER
However
much things have gone wrong for you, it is important to act like a winner. It
costs nothing and is about attitude. If
you behave with confidence, you will win people’s respect. Act like someone whose opinions are worth listening to. The problem with my friend Jane was that while she had lost weight, she felt the same inside. She was slim, but she still had the attitude of the old fat person she'd been. If you have always felt insignificant and unattractive you probably have the personality and attitude to go with it. Change this. Make an effort. Don't say "but it's difficult". It may be, lots of things are difficult but that doesn't mean we don't do them. You must get beyond this attitude and become a person who can do anything she sets her mind to.
Think of where you want to go - and go there.
Mohammed Ali knew he was the best. He never had any doubts. He had trained since he was a boy and of course, his was a one-on-one sport unlike Carlos Tevez who was part of a team. Mohammed Ali could play by his own rules. But one thing happened to him which has been my guideline ever since.
In 1967 Ali was banned from boxing. The reasons are long and complex and involve controversial matters that I won’t go into here, but he was banned. He had no idea how long the ban would last: three weeks, three months or three years. In the end it was three years. Here’s the amazing thing. Ali kept up the same level of training the whole time. As the months passed, one year and then two, it would have been so easy to lose heart. He could have lost momentum as the hoped-for lifting of the ban never happened. He could have watched all the re-runs of boxing matches and become jealous or resentful. But Ali believed in himself. He thought of himself as a champion. However bad or down he got, inside he had an unshakeable belief and in his eyes, it was the men in suits who were small and misguided. Ali wasn’t going to give up all he had put into his career.
He kept up his training exactly the same for three long years. He watched the re-runs to see what his opponents were doing. He studied every detail of their form and kept up his diet and fitness levels.
“When the call comes, I will be ready to fight at twenty minutes notice” he said.
I love that story, What an inspiration!
I deal with a lot of people who have simply lost their momentum. They argue that it is easy to look good and feel good when you have access to personal trainers and nutritionists, like the celebrities. I tell them that thinking big costs nothing. Celebrities are slim because they focus on their image, not because it is easier for them. Focus on your image and who you want to be. The rest will fall into place.
What has this got to do with losing weight and getting a whole new figure? Everything. The people I meet are mostly serial dieters. Many have spent their entire adult lives either fat or slim, sometimes changing shape every year for thirty years. They wake and think of their weight. They cry about their size. They lose weight and gain it all back again. Then cry again.
Isn't it desperately sad that whole lives are dominated by their yo-yo weight gain and loss? It is all manageable if you get on a roll and keep the momentum going. Maintaining a shape is a fraction of the battle of getting there. Like doing up a wreck of a house, it can take a year of very hard labout but you don't haver to keep that effort up. Once the house is done, you only need basic maintenance. You won't have to diet forever. You diet hard, get there and then maintain it. But you must never take your eye off the ball and let yourself go.
I have a very good friend, a fantastic person, who as a teenager dreamed of being a glamour model. I’ll call her Louise. To be fair, as she told me later, she hadn't been good at school and her prospects were limited. She had the personality and she certainly had the body. It didn’t take long before a local agency snapped her up and her topless photos appreared in the local evening paper. Pretty soon, Louise got noticed and with her effortlessly gorgeous looks and figure, she was soon on a roll. Then big things happened. The Sun newspaper, a brilliant paper with the biggest daily newspaper circulation in the world, noticed her and decided to do something big. Now, I have worked in newspapers quite a while and these sorts of things happen. Newspapers often hit their own doldrums like everyone else, and the Proprietors are leaning on them to get circulations up. They need to think up something big quite fast to get people flocking to the newsstands. Newspapers may be about news, but often there isn’t much news around and they have to put features in to tide readers over with a bit of fun. They sit in conferences trying and think up something that will capture the public imagination and maybe get some great merchandising out of it. Newspapers think big, and there is no better time to think big than when times are hard.
Louise was plucked from obscurity and promoted with a vigour that I have never seen before She became the girl of the moment. She never knew that if it hadn't been her it would have been someone else, but the fact was, they picked Louise. She soon had clothes ranges, her own jewellery lines, TV shows and she even did a tour of battle zones abroad to cheer up the troops. The national excitement and appetite for Louise was breathtaking. She was on gigantic billboards everywhere. She ditched her agent and hired a smart London PR firm. She got a top lawyer. She moved out of her modest home with her parents and was soon in a massive country pile with stables and several acres. She never stopped being a lovely person and I interviewed her many times, but she was on a roll. Her agents were taking their percentage of her money, which is entirely normal business practice, but they didn’t want to think of the downsides either. Whatever Louise said was OK by them. She was praised, feted and fawned over. When I touched on her plans for the future, she would shrug. Her people would take care of that, she said. She had no idea what was in the contracts. Right now she was having an amazing time and as far as she was concerned she need never work again.
I did an
exclusive interview with Louise for the News of the World about her beauty and
diet regime. She didn't have one! She never went near the gym and her
figure was truly astonishing on a diet of alcohol and parties! These days,
celebrities are more responsible and try to set an example to younger readers. They don’t mind saying
they eat healthily and never touch alcohol. Back then it simply wasn’t cool. Louise didn’t live healthily at all. She
was effortlessly gorgeous. She took it all for granted! Unfortunately I could see her downfall coming a mile off and as I predicted, the newspaper and the public inevitably got tired
of her and she was replaced by someone younger and more fashionable. As I said, business is hard and nasty and you have to keep up your own momentum.
I didn’t see Louise again for about five years. I was a little shocked by her appearance. She was still a gorgeous-looking woman but she had lost her luminosity and gained weight and looked a touch matronly. Her baby weight was still there. Things weren’t good for her. Sun readers had voted to ban models with breast implants from their Page 3 pin-ups. She had married and had two children but the marriage had failed and the newspapers, being what they are, splashed every detail of the breakdown. She had gone down with it, unlike Mohammed Ali as I told you before, who refused to believe he was anything other than a champion even when the whole world said different. What the newspapers give, they can also take away. I had tried to warn Louise of this, and her PR agent certainly should have told her, but maybe she didn’t believe them. Louise had never wanted to listen to this kind of irritating detail. She assumed people were jealous and trying to put her down.
Louise lost focus and momentum. She did not want to be bogged down in the small details. Mundane matters are important, and if
you don’t take care of them, you lose the plot. Louise had taken a lot for granted. She hadn't planned for the day the managers and agents would disappear from her life and not call her. These people are not personal friends and once they aren't being paid, it is not unreasonable that the disappear and find new clients. It isn't disloyal - it's business.
ACCEPT THE INEVITABLE – AND WORK WITH IT.
Beautiful young girls get lazy. We all knew them at school. They don't need to try. They are used to compliments and praise. It is usually the plainer, less able girls who make it to the top. I was one of them.
I was nothing special as a girl and was easily overlooked. I was quiet and wouldn't speak up. To make it in the world I had to work ten times harder than the outgoing, pretty girls. They literally hadn't a clue how to make an impression because it had always happened for them. They walked into a room and conversation stopped. I would walk into a room and nobody even looked up. Well guess what - those girls are now doing nothing because they took it all for granted. They didn't even know how to diet because they'd always looked amazing.
We spend
more of our lives old than young. It's just a fact. Our older years last forty years or more. If you are in the
beauty or fitness business and make a living through your youth, you had better
watch out or be in for a very nasty, painful time of it.
Louise didn’t want to think about the mundane things. She married an idiot and lost a lot of money. She had been on a roll and this guy came along and flattered her. Lots of people made money from her. One by one, things went downhill for her, all because she didn’t know where she was going. Louise bought houses with swimming pools without thinking how she would pay for them in the future. Jane worked for her great figure without working out how she would look after it.
If there was an easy way to lose weight I would have discovered it and become very rich. The pharmaceutical companies spend billions every year trying to outdo one another finding a pill to control weight. It hasn’t happened and it never will. We have to accept the inevitable. A diet may not be easy. But it is all we have.
Women who won't accept the inevitable are in for a tough time keeping the weight off. Many people hate counting calories and find exercising boring. They say that life is too short. Too short to be saying no to delicious desserts and they feel they deserve a naughty treat. This may well be true, but I hate the upset and despair that comes when someone loses momentum and focus and gets stuck in the doldrums. They gain all their weight back again. All because they could not face the mundane and boring task of counting calories, being disciplined and going to the gym.
Mundane
matters are the backbone of life.
I do my VAT and pay my council tax and put the bins out. These things
don’t need momentum. Some people think they are too big, too important to do these mundane things. People who
don’t pay attention to these matters get out of control, things pile up and
stress takes hold. The bills mount up and everyone is hassling them. There’s
no momentum in this kind of stress. Pressure is when a force is applied to you and you move forward
with it. Stress is when pressure is applied and there's nowhere to go. Women are good at complaining of the pressure to be slim instead of accepting it and going with it and enjoying the momentum that pressure gives them.
ALWAYS FIND A ROLE MODEL.
When you have a problem, it is tempting to associate with people who have the same problems. This is a mistake. I completely agree with support groups when you have a serious problem like drugs or alcohol but associating with other overweight people is a mistake. It doesn’t mean you don’t lend support to those friends, but it leads to what I call an ‘oppressed minority’ group. Making yourself a member of an oppressed minority, especially if that group centres round your collective failures, is a huge mistake. Think of where you are going, not where you have been. My model friend Louise was stuck in her past, like the brilliant footballer Paul Gascoigne who could not move forwards when his career ended. Paul Gascoigne was a genius but he folded with a lot of problems when he could not play football any longer.
By contrast look at the model and businesswoman Katie Price. Now, you might not agree with her and feel she is a waste of space, and many millions have banded together over the years to say exactly that. They pour insult upon insult over the Internet, but she has ridden out the storm. She has had failed, disastrous relationships, but she has made them work for her. She has been criticised for her mothering skills but she knows she is a great mother. Katie Price is incredibly successful and wealthy. She has written books and had several TV series. Now I happen to know that some of her books have sold very few copies and some of her public appearances scored very small audiences. Her TV shows have not been massive hits. You never hear Katie Price even defend herself over the poor sales of some of her books. She believes in them. She looks forwards and always has something else in the pipeline. I have no doubts that in private, a lot of this hurts but she has incredible self-belief and she never stops thinking of the next thing. Better than that, she is changing with the times. She knows she can’t be a pin-up model these days so she is capitalising on her image as a mother and as a woman-of-the-world. She now writes a brilliant new column in the Sunday Sun newspaper. She has toned down her image. She listens to her critics. I have no doubt that when she is a pensioner, Katie will be giving style advice to the fans who have grown old with her.
FOCUS AND DISCIPLINE
Being disciplined is a habit. You need to find something to believe in. I had a good friend who loved his fillet steaks. He married a strict vegetarian and soon came to believe that eating dead animals was wrong. Whether or not he was misguided is not up for discussion here, but his whole life changed and as he loved his wife and this was important to her he agreed to become a vegetarian. Did he have to exert incredible willpower in staying away from meat? Did he sneak out for a cheeky beef curry? No he didn’t. Vegetarians have no trouble because they don’t believe in eating animal products. They don’t have to fight with themselves because they are sold on the idea.
I am a huge believer in this. If you have lost
focus, find something to believe in. Losing weight for the sake of it, banning
foods you love and fighting yourself constantly is a recipe for failure. Find a
regime and believe in it. This is not easy. Focus is a very difficult thing. Life is unpredictable but failure is not defeat. Never accept defeat
or beat yourself up. If you gain all your weight back again, don’t descend into
negative thinking. Don’t say, “I’m hopeless, I might as well give up."
I hear it time and again in my massive mailbag. Really bad self-hatred is destructive and unhealthy. Most of all, just because you have tried and failed twenty times, don’t take this as the end. Learn your lesson but don’t dwell on it.
My mother had a great way with lessons. She was a teacher! I remember taking a special scholarship exam and wanted to tell all my friends that tomorrow was the big day. My mother took me aside.
“Don’t tell all your friends,” she said. “If you don’t get in, twenty friends will be asking and you will have to say twenty times “I failed”. This will compound it in your mind. Imagine that, saying it over and over again for a week "I didn't get in". This is bad for you. By not saying anything, if you do get in, you can give the good news just once and the news will travel.”
If you are going on a diet, don’t tell everybody. I know some people want support, but this is my best advice if you want to succeed. Then when you do succeed, everyone will be amazed!
I got
out of my terrible year eventually. I made those bad times work for my by
concentrating on what I knew best. Life went a bit quiet but I sat at home, writing. My real love is writing. I took matters into
my own hands. The market had changed a lot and publishers didn’t want to
produce glossy diet books just yet. They wanted to wait a couple of years while the recession lifted, but that was no good to me. I set up my own publishing company, Montgomery Books,
and set about writing two new books. The Daily Express bought the serial rights
to my book ‘Calorie Revolution’ it
appeared in January 2011 and was a huge success. I also had it published in digital
form, and it was wildly popular. People can now buy my books from as far away
as Australia and the Indian Ocean and they don’t have to wait for the post. I
was soon on a roll again, thinking big and never giving up.
I also started writing for other newspapers. I have a reputation for being tough and telling it as it is. Not many health writers have the guts to do this, and I soon found out why.
FINALLY…..
What you look like and how you present yourself to the world says a lot about you. It may seem politically incorrect to say this, but I don’t care. This is the way of the world and people can only form an impression of you from what they perceive.
So….
· Act like a winner.
This costs nothing. Get an attitude that you are an important person and your opinions count. You don’t have to be boastful or conceited but you must believe in yourself. Look and act smart. Don’t just put on clothes every day: get dressed. If you go to a meeting, speak up at least once. Make people realize that you have a view and it counts.
· Use the doldrums
In the depths if despair, I used to repeat to myself “this won’t last”. It didn’t. Use your doldrums to read more, get yourself in order, lose weight or gain it if that’s what’s needed. Get fit. Don’t sit around going over and over all the things in your life that are unfair, or dwelling on what a bastard your ex was. He may be, but far better for him to see it had no effect on you. You rose above it. When people finally see you again, make them amazed. Make sure they’re wondering what your secret is!
·
"We'd like to make a fitness video"
Some
opportunities never come again. Take everything on offer with one eye on the
day you are in an Old People's Home where nobody cares about your
opinion and nobody is offering you more than a cup of cocoa. Be grateful anyone
is offering you anything! Be aware that you are young and it won't last.
I had been called to the Promotions and Advertising department of News
International. Under my exclusive contract, they would like their money's
worth out of me. It was the summer of 1999. I had a book out called 'Get Back Into
Your Jeans'. This vast panel of advertising executives sat in a row and I was aware this was a fait accompli. They had already spoken to my literary agent. They wanted me to make a video with the same title and flog both as a
box-set? Fitness was more of a rage than it is now and this was certain to be a
good seller. They woul push it in the paper for all they were worth, offering a £5 voucher off the price of the set. We couldn't lose.
People often ask me now why I don't make another video or DVD. Because
the costs are astronomical! I am talking £200,000+ and that's a conservative
guess. I would never fund one myself. You have to sell an awful lot of videos to make any kind of profit.
Luckily I was a fitness professional so I knew what to do, but the idea of doing it in front of a film team instead of a class of women was
still terrifying. I was never, and will never be, a TV type of person. I get shy
and embarrassed. Shove a camera in my face and I freeze. How on earth I was
going to make a video for millions to watch I couldn't imagine, but I had to
try.
The next few months saw me getting two aerobics instructors on board, Amberley and Natalie, and
rehearsing the programme at my house. I was able to devise a good routine the readers could do at home. I then had to
liaise with a music producer in Soho that the paper put me in touch with, and they made the backing music. I organised free stuff from
Adidas for the three of us: trainers, leotards and pink leggings, to wear on the shoot. It was a lot of work, but we got there somehow.
Unfortunately, any ideas I had about spending a nice day working out in an airy gym or studio were soon blown out of the water. We went to a 'location flat' somewhere in
Wapping. These are trendy warehouse apartments that the owners put on a
register and when the call comes, they move out, film people move in and the owners get about £2,000 a day. They rented this apartment for 3 days, painted the
walls the same colour as our leotards, royal blue, and moved in a vast army of
cameramen, equipment, tracking, lighting and a posse of make-up and hair experts. They stood around clutching brushes and hairspray and dived in after each take to spray any stray hairs back in place. In the middle of this lot was a space about 3 yards square for us to
move about it. I couldn't imagine how we were going to manage.
I am fit, but this was different. It was
boiling in there. We couldn't open windows because of noise. We couldn't have air conditioning because of the noise. We couldn't sweat
because we couldn't have damp patches. We couldn't keep re-applying make-up, so the minute we broke out in perspiration on our faces, we had to stop and get powdered. We couldn't look more tired after six hours than at the start because of continuity. We did this over and over and over again. It was a fiercely aerobic routine, and after a while I could barely speak and breathe at the same time. I
was instructing, too, so I had to remember what to say. If we repeated a section,
which we did a lot, I had to remember exactly how I said it the last time. On
top of all this, we couldn't actually hear the music as we flung ourselves from one end of the flat to the other. It had to be a guide only, only
just audible, and finally laid as a track on top of the finished video weeks
later. Dear oh dear. But it was quite an experience and I'm glad I did it.
Anyway, it was a success. My picture, dressed in blue jeans of course, was spread across the top of the paper. Amberley and Natalie were fantastic. It took two full days, from 10am to 8pm, over and over, and I was the stiffest I have ever been. It took all week to stop hurting. The result was worth it, however. I lost my
nerves and relaxed and the video was a great success. People still write to me now and ask if there is a dvd. Sadly, when the News of the World closed in July 2011, the copyright of the video closed with it and now it will never be seen again.
_______________________________
If the News of the World SUNDAY Magazine helped
me find my feet in the late 1990s, it also kept me on my toes. Ideas had to be
constant, fresh and new. It was no use putting a new diet in the magazine every
week and expecting readers to flock. Lots of our
readers didn't want to lose weight. Some had other problems like thinning
hair, poor nails or fitness issues. I soon learned that there were three types
of weight problem: the long-term overweight, the what I called the 'Born-again Babe'
and the Vanity pounds. All of them needed a different approach. Born-again Babes might have been a little chunky but they knew what to do. They didn't need lectures on fat grams and calories and healthy swaps as if they didn't know what broccoli was. They knew what to do but couldn't get back into it. What they wanted more than anything else was to be the Babe on the dancefloor every man had been after ten years ago.
Vanity pounds were what they said they were. The pounds only YOU know are there!"
After the Kathleen fiasco, I decided we should take a different stance. Instead
of promising the earth, how about asking the question? Can you lose a
stone in four weeks? Can you drop a dress size in two weeks? Can
you lose weight with exercise alone? How does a ten stone fit woman
compare with a ten stone unfit woman? For this I went to my local butcher, I
recall, and asked for 3lbs of fillet steak (the steak being pure muscle) and
3lbs of fat. I put them side by side and took a picture. It said everything.
The steak was much smaller than the fat. "If you are nine stone of
muscle,' think how much smaller your body is than nine stone of fat. " I cajoled.
Gayle Welch was one lovely lady who stepped up for the inch-loss challenge. How
much can you lose if you go for it?" I wrote. I had done an appeal for volunteersand
as always, the postman had been gasping up my path with a sack of photos and
letters. This time I wanted bikinis.
Galye was great because she didn't look perfect and had hips like shelves. The
rest of her was gorgeous. Very pretty, blonde and smiley, she sent a picture in
a turquoise bikini, tanned and glowing, but with these hips. We decided to send
her away for 4 weeks dieting and smashing the gym and see what happened. She carried on her normal life. I
warned Gayle that I would publish her photos anyway but there was no pressure.
If nothing happened, so be it. That would be the story. Don't knock yourself
out". or better still Don't leave it to the last minute.
Well, it was a triumph. Gayle dieted but she didn't go mad. With my help, she stopped eating between meals, a bad habit of hers. She didn't need snacks, which only ended up on her hips. She stopped being terrified that she would get low blood sugar and faint. If you have extra fat bits on your body, they are food you didn't need. Your body put it aside for later. I taught Gayle to think, when she felt hungry, 'eat that' and mentally focus on her hips.
She walked to
work and went to the gym every other day. She really blasted out the crunches and side bends. But nothing excessive. After 4 weeks we brought her into the studio, put
her in the same turquoise bikini and snapped away. The results were amazing. Side by
side, you could see her waist was much smaller and her hips had shrunk by about 4 inches. She had the
perfect figure, but more importantly we could say 'this is what you can achieve
in a month".
Buoyed by this, we did a legs special. A girl with thin calves did a programme. Calves are hard to shape and in a way, this was borne out. The results were poor but we could tell readers why. We got in four different young women each with a leg problem and see what worked. I particularly liked the inner thigh success - Miranda who did this for us, shrunk and tightened her wobbly thighs by two inches in three weeks.
That was 2002. I so wish I could see those ladies now. I desperately wish I could trace those people and see what happened to them.
What all this taught our readers, I hope, was that if you can't change the Big Picture, you can make a massive difference changing just one thing. Not many people hate every bit of their bodies. Our readers were happy just to have got rid of their bra-bulge or midriff bulge.
_______________________
Going Transatlantic.
The American book market is tough. The American diet book market is brutal. So when I was told that the mighty Time Warner bought the US rights to 5 days, I was struck dumb. What a break!
People often think that authors sit at home doing deals and pushing themselves forward and this is almost entirely untrue. You have to make the initial approach or more often, you have an agent. Once you have your idea all mapped out, called a Proposal, the agent does the rest. There's no certainty of a deal. You have to be very, very patient because bookshops and publishers are usually planning a year ahead. What I had going for me was the connection with the News of the World, because I could be guaranteed publicity. Books can be published, but they don't sell themselves. Publishers spend an incrdible amount of money bringing out a book. They want to make money! As a rather snooty buyer from WH Smith said to me once, "the thing is, Ms Grenfell, we can put this book on all our shelves, but what are YOU going to do to make sure it comes off again? "
In other words, people need to buy it. To buy it, they have to know about it first. Everyone wants their cut. And why not?
Deals are done behond the scenes and authors are just a part of the process. It's amazing how you can feel like a piece of meat. Not that we're not treated well because we are. I went for a lot of smart lunches. I was well paid so that I would spend months writing. But deals on foreign sales and Rights and box-sets were done without my knowledge. I think it is more or less like this for every writer. It is one of the reasons I started my own publishing company in more recent years, though I could never complain about Pan Macmillan or Time Warner. I worked with two amazing Editors, Gordon Wise and Ingrid O'Connell. I was on a roll and had 3-book deals. I love writing books more than anything.
I started by jetting to the swish offices of Warner Books on 6th Avenue, New York. If you have seen the film 'The Devil Wears Prada', the big building Meryl Streep sweeps into is the buiding that housed Warners.
My editor was an amazing woman called Andie Avila. Young and sharp as a pin, she guided me through what they wanted. The UK version had been soft in tone, using gentle persuasion and subtle guidance. The back jacket had been a glamorous picture of me in a pretty skirt, high heels, resting back slightly girlishly on a chair. There were a couple of paragraphs of my wisdom, gently phrased so as not to put the readers off. "This isn't hard" I seemed to be saying. " It's a vital part of every woman's life - to make the best of herself."
Well, the American market doesn't want a pretty skirt and an expert who looks like a girl. It likes doctors in white coats. It likes men in suits with the title 'Professor'. A new photoshoot was quickly arranged in London. I was trussed up in a black trouser suit and crisp shirt with a lot of discussion about whether I should lean on a desk or perch on a stool. I perched. I had a shorter haircut I regret to this day whenever I look at that book. I cringe. I have done a lot of cringing in my career. Appearing in a newspaper is one thing: tomorrow the newspaper is lining a budgie's cage. Being in a book that hangs around in bookshops and languishes on eBay for ten years is a constant reminder not of how young you looked - that would be nice - but what hideous taste you had in hair and make-up.
( I'm going to tell you something here: When I appeared on the front page of the News of the World to promote Get Back Into Your Jeans I kept the cutting but blanked out my face. I know, crazy. I have the cutting to show people now, but I can't show them my face. Back in 1999, as far as I'm concerned, I looked appalling.)
The back cover of the new book also got the USA treatment. i wasn't even consulted on that. When I saw the first draft in print I nearly fainted. Instead of my soothing persuasion it said
Flat stomach MYTH Flat Stomach REALITY!
....followed by a list of do's and dont's on diet sodas and stuff like that. It certainly didn't look like anything I would ever say.
Months were spent with late-night phone conversations lasting an hour or more. The time difference meant I had to stay up past midnight. I was still writing my weekly column and a third edition of Fabulous In A Fortnight was in the works for an April 2005 publication. In 5 days I had used a recipe for Shepherd's Pie. That had to change. Shepherd's pie? In America? Courgettes were changed to zucchini and Bio yoghurt to live and active cultures yoghurt - quite a mouthful. But the funniest thing one night came when Andie asked me about a simple baked fish recipe.
"It sounds a little complicated" she said across the oceans.
"No, no!" I said. "Not really. You put a fillet of cod in a dish or even a throwaway container, cover it with milk and - er - put it in the oven to bake."
There was a silence. I thought she'd gone. "Andie?"
"Well....... y'know Monica, I just don't think people are going to be bothered to do all that".
We went through a lot of that. One night, it was cilantro.
"Ah Monica. You know we have Jamie Oliver here - Jamie Olver? - Ok well he's a massive hit here and we saw the other night he uses a lot of cilantro.
"Cilantro?"
"Correct." She was gleeful; bubbling with excitement "Well, we were wondering if you could use some cilantro in your recipes too! Whaddy'a think?"
I was Googling cilantro like crazy. This was before the days of high-speed broadband. "Er... Andie, i'm not quite sure......"
"... for example Monica. That fish recipe. The baked fish? Or the fish in Parsley sauce? How's about cod in cilantro sauce!!!"
I'd found it. It was coriander.
"Coriander sauce?" I said weakly. "With cod?"
"uh-huh. I just LOVE the sound of that!".
Warner Books wanted me to write for the New York, Manhattan type woman. Sex and the City. They'd do anything for a flat stomach, but they wouldn't bake fish. I got the message.
The day the book came out, in May 2004, was brilliant. I was flown to the states and did a tour of bookshopslasting 5 days. One day at Barnes and Noble, I saw a long queue and thought it couldn't be for me. It wasn't. Sylvester Stallone was signing his autobiography in the same store. For a giddy few minutes, we were left together in a side room while they got the place ready. He was completely fabulous. He asked me for a copy of my book, signed. I was so bowled over, I forgot to ask him for a copy of his book - something that still burns a hole of regret in me!
American women have a totally different attitude to weight loss. Despite the obvious fact that America is a universally obese nation, they aren't scornful of their diet experts. They listen. In the UK I had given up on TV because I would be shouted down by the inevitable band of anti-diet feminists, bussed in to give people like me a hard time. I did an Esther Ranzen show once, which felt like a public execution. Over in the USA however, I did a lot of TV and loved it because they were interested in genuine solutions to weight problems. They respected my expertise and qualifications. I got a fair hearing and the book sold well. OK, I made money from it but I certainly earned it. None of this was a piece of cake!
After all these years, of course I am asked all the time about my top tips for losing weight. Eat three square meals day and no snacks. I truly believe in not eating between meals. You eat to feed your body, as well as giving it energy. But one of the big mistakes is saying food is 'only fuel'. Not true. Food FEEDS.
All our growth processes need feeding, Since I started writing this passage a few minute ago, billions of my cells have died. New ones have been made. This is happening while we sleep. Muscle is being maintained and repaired. My heart is beating. Blood is being replaced. In 40 days time, my entire surface skin will have been replaced by new. You can't do all this with a few packets of crisps or pizzas - or even salads!
Protein is the nutrient of growth. You could live quite happily without any carbohydrate at all: it isn't ideal, but you would live. Without protein though, you would die. Carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals fuel energy and other processes. Protein feeds maintenance growth and repair. I always advise people to maintain a good protein intake (about 55g a day for women, 70g for men) but to cut starchy carbohydrates. Not because they are bad, but because you can manage without them.
Something else that I disagree with is using exercise to burn calories. The value of exercise is using your body. Muscles, joints, blood flow and your brain all need exercise. Your arteries need exercise to keep them elastic. Your joints need moving. Your shoulder is the only joint that goes in a complete circle - when did you last put it through its paces?
Exercise is not about buring calories. Calories fuel exercise, but you shouldn't eat more in the hope of burning off your food. That starts a dangerous game of bargaining with your appetite.
And do remember that if an exercise uses, say, 420 calories an hour, (running could be 7 calories a minute) you haven't burned 420 calories extra. If you sat in a chair you would probably use 120 calories doing nothing (2 calories a minute). Running at 420 calories an hour only uses an extra 300 calories. Get it?
Finally, when to eat. The golden rule is to eat After exercise. Think of it like emptying your fridge. use every last ounce of energy (glycogen) doing what you are doing and then re-fill your empty muscles and liver. After 1600 calories, the rest will be stored as fat so never eat a meal of more than 1600 calories in one go. Eating in the evening does not turn to fat. Eating when relaxing feeds you... it isn't turned to fat. Food goes to fat when there is a surplus, pure and simple. Whether it is night or day makes no difference.
Eating regularly avoids bloating and discomfort. People who eat erratically have a slower system that gets sludgy. If you are used to eating proper , normal meals, you should have no trouble digesting it. Your body is already working at top speed and top efficiency. Those internal stomach muscles are toned and working like clockwork. It is the rare, picky eaters who get bloated as their poor alimentary canals are lazy and sticky. There is often a lot of bile sludge. Sorry about this, but it's true!.
Next time: your perfect diet.
Dear Monica,
I hate vegetables. Please don't tell me to try eating them - I'm 43 and have never eaten vegetables since a baby. Why should I have them and can I manage without?
Shauna, Wisconsin
Hello Shauna
You tell me. Can you manage without them? Are you managing?
People in different countries exist on diets we have never even heard of. Things I can't imagine eating. Up in Scandinavia they have fresh veg for such a short time of the year, they eat what they call 'cooked salads' - peas and beans and suchlike, cold in a dressing. These are still vegetables but my point is that just because a western diet includes vegetables it's no reason for you to do something you find repulsive.
If you feel well, are free from bugs and diseases and colds, then you're pretty healthy. A truly balanced diet is tricky to achieve. I do advise vegetables because of the fibre they contain and the antioxidants and so on. We all need fibre for a clean gut but you can get fibre from cereals, nuts and fruits.
The only vegetable I truly beg you to get down you is a daily carrot. Ok, you can't. But for other readers, one carrot a day is an incredibly rich souce of betacarotene, so give that a go. Otherwise, don't worry. Stressful eating is a bad idea, full-stop.
Monica
The other day, a newspaper carried an article claiming that diets made you fat and were doomed to failure. Well, let me explain why that is completely untrue – and why calorie-reduced diets will always work.
There is almost no difference between the physiology of primitive humans
and that of us humans today. With the exception of the appendix, which is
there to process bark-like substances and is now redundant, our bodies are the
same as they always were. We digest food just the same. Our brains work just as they always have done.
We are hunters, designed to eat a huge amount
of meat after we have first found it, killed it and prepared it. Back then, nothing was instant. If you go back to, say, the 14th century, you can't even count apple trees or potatoes. There were no cultivated fruits or vegetables. they ate berries from the hedgerows when they were available in the autumn. Most trees had to be cut down for fuel or shelter. anyway.
Animals that graze, graze on low-calorie food
like grass and leaves, and need to eat constantly to get their energy. There aren’t many calories in grass! So the concept of 'grazing' for humans isn't natural. If it works for you by all means skip the rest of this and do your thing. We're not 14th centruy humans any loner and I daresay f they had been able to get a Mcdonald's they'd have loved it. But I'm talking about why diets work and why we need them in th first place. Humans shouldn't eat little and often. Seriously, grazing on high protein foods or starchy carbs is a mistake for humans.
Yes, we are designed to have massive appetites. This is normal. A massive appetite is Nature's way of ensuring the survival of the species. We can eat half a lamb in one go. Primitive `Man would have been walking around with a gigantic stomach. Hundreds of years ago, food was only available seasonally. In the winter there were no vegetables, no fruits, no leaves: nothing except meat and fish for months on end. In the winter, when it was dark at 4pm, people went to bed when light failed and stayed there until light, 14 hours or more. They got thin. There was nothing to do except tend animals. In summer and autumn they had a feast of nuts and seeds and berries and leaves as well as the high protein foods. They could eat until later in the day. They gained bodyfat to see them through the winter. Bodyfat was there for a reason; people were glad to get fatter so they wouldn’t starve to death in the winter.
Wild animals don’t get fat. It’s only when animals are domesticated that they get fat; when the laws of nature are overridden.
Now, we have anything we want, any time. We don’t even have to prepare it.! Almost anything is ready-washed, ready scraped and peeled and doesn’t even need more than a few minutes in the microwave. How about the take-away! You don’t have to do anything.
A diet is the same as scarcity. It cuts out a whole lot of foods as if they weren't available. A diet says ‘you can only eat 100g of this
and 50g of that.” It says
“absolutely no chocolate or sweets except once a
week." A diet bans certain foods and limits portions. You might hate is and you might think it’s pathetic. But it mimics what
our ancestors had to deal with. It artificially
rations food. In the modern world food is available all the time, night and day, Winter and summer. So we need to draw up rules for
ourselves. Plain and simple. It's called a weight-loss diet and it works.
A diet is the only way to lose weight and keep it off.
Dear Monica
I have read with interest your dairy diet and you say that science has proven that dairy calcium helps reduce visceral fat. The studies were convincing but I wondered – how exactly does it work? How were the studies carried out? What is it about dairy food that does this better than any other food or calcium supplements?
Diana, Worthing
Dear Diana,
A lot of research findings come about by accident. Back in 1980, some studies were being made of animals in
America, and it found that some of the animals lost abdominal fat when fed dairy-based
foods. Nobody thought much about this at the time and I think it was just put aside. A couple of years later a study was being
done into diseases of African-American women and the same thing happened. It
wasn’t a study of food or diet, but this side issue of weight loss caught the researchers’’
attention. Over a few more years, this developed into a full-blown study and so
it went on. As research needs funding it can take years if nobody comes up with some money to pay for it. Eventually
the link was made and scientific papers were written and now we know for sure
that dairy calcium speeds weight loss in the visceral area.
You asked how it works but the truth it, nobody really knows. We just know that it does.
So three–a-day dairy for all!
Today’s question comes from John in Winchester.
Dear Monica
I am an office-bound guy who travels a lot. I train hard and like to maintain my very bodybuilder-ish physique. I take 3 chicken breasts per day with a sweet potato, snacks of raw vegetables and hard-boiled eggs and I avoid sugar, starchy carbs, fruit and alcohol. I’m happy with my muscles but still feel I have a layer of fat. This won’t shift. Any help would be appreciated, especially as the bodybuilding magazines go heavily on supplements that I can’t really afford”
Jay.
Dear Jay,
You don't need supplements like the ones you told me about in your longer email. You can make great protein shakes using almonds, fatfree yoghurts, skimmed milk and raw egg whites. The protein gluttony of
many bodybuilders is slightly bizarre. Protein is our most essential nutrient
as it is the nutrient of repair and maintenance of all tissues. You could eat a completely carbohydrate-free diet and live quite well. (I don't advise it, but you could manage without carbohydrate) Without protein you would die - amd very nastily. However, there’s
an absolute. You can’t get healthier than healthy. You can't get fitter than fit.
Fitness means a series of tests including strength and endurance and flexibility within certain parameters for your lifestyle and age. I could certainly be more fit than I am but I don't really care. I am as fit as I need to be. I ould run from danger and carry a child out of a building. I can stretch enough so if I fall badly, I won't tear every ligament. I train enough so I have a feminine shape. (Obviously we all probably put vanity first!) Please remember this for yourself. .
Eating more protein won’t give anyone
bigger muscles. That comes through training, as you know, but I am writing this for other readers wihout your knowledge. When the body is put under
stress, fibres grow to accommodate the bigger workload. You need enough
protein, not more than enough, to feed that extra growth.
If you do have excess bodyfat, then you’re eating too much. You need to make sure of this with a monitor or scan, rather than guessing. You might have become a little sensitive about your look, which is normal. But do check.
Sweet potatoes are good but do eat the skin for fibre. I know many people avoid the skin because of the sodium content underneath but this is only an issue for serious competitors. You need sodium. If you lack sodium you then start using potassium and will suffer from dehydration and muscle weakness.
I think your protein intake
is marginally too high. Count a gram per kilo of your bodyweight if you are
seriously training, and I ight even go to 1.3g per kilo if you were particularly massive. You didn't say. 0.75g otherwise. Take more fibre and for you, I suggest
nuts. Brazils and almonds will give you vitamin E and selenium, two important
anti-oxidants. Anti oxidants guard against bugs, colds, stress, degeneration of
the body and basically everything that wears your body down.Fibre cleans your gut effectively and cleansing is vital for a healthy body. The waste products of what goes in today, ideally should come out tomorrow.
If you want to shed more bodyfat, carry on eating what you’re eating, but make portions smaller – e.g. 6ozs chicken instead of 8ozs or whatever.
Finally, this is a huge area of debate but I wouldn't have any 'go-mad' days. When anybody asks me (and they are usually men) if they can have a day of ice cream and KFC, I say "I thought you were serious about this?"
That stuff is junk. If you see food like that as a reward you must screw your mind back on. It'll ruin your looks.
Same goes for alcohol.
I hope this helps.
Monica.
Monica’s Mailbag is back.
Please write to me using the contact form on this site.
Karen from Stafford wrote to me yesterday asking about the new news about avocados: That they have amazing properties for the heart and guard against stokes. Karen asked if this was really 'new' news of just a re-hash of something old to help sell avocados?
Well. a bit of both. Californian avocado farmers have a red hot publicity machine. I get a lot of press stuff about them. Right now, with Australian avocados out of season, California is the place for avocados. What they claim is true. On the research side, yes a lot of news is new news because the science of research is improving all the time. More heart disease and more strokes mean more reason to conduct research.
If you don't like avocados, avocado oil is the new olive oil. Add it to salad dressings. I use walnut oil which is another marvel. A granary sandwich with mashed avocado, crushed walnuts and a drizzle of walnut oil is completely yummy. It'll give you the skin of a baby. Truly.
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I spotted a news item last week that I wanted to rake over a couple more times..... gaining all your weight back.
In 1988,
there was a huge scare about eggs in the UK. Government authorities said all eggs contained the deadly bacterium salmonella. Poultry farms went out of
business overnight and there were huge signs everywhere saying ‘our eggs do not
contain salmonella.' Salmonella is a deadly bug and can kill. Even if it doesn't kill, it can render you useless for two weeks.
Well, about that time I used to bake a lot of cakes to make extra money. I’d bake a couple every day and like most people, when the mixing bowl was nearly empty, I licked the wooden spoon before I put the tins into the oven. How I loved to lick the spoon! It was raw mixture, of course: butter and raw eggs and flour and sugar.
How long did it take me to give up this habit after the anouncement about salmonella in raw eggs? ? About two seconds. I’ve never licked a spoon or eaten raw cake mixture since.
There’s a fear factor in some things that overrides anything else. However much I loved that spoon of cake mixture, I was more afraid of getting salmonella. I didn’t like cake mixture enough to risk being ill or dying for!!
I thought of this last week when reading of the respected journalist and Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray’s battle with weight loss. She’s 19 stone. Last year she lost 5 stone on the highly publicized Dukan Diet and wrote a weekly diet column in the Daily Mail detailing every morsel. She was crazy for it. Sales of the book went through the roof.
In April
last year, AOL Daily magazine asked me to write a piece for them sprngboarded from the Jenni Murray complain about clothes sizing. I admit it was a little bitchy but this is what they asked me for.
http://www.mydaily.co.uk/2011/04/05/are-plus-sized-women-actually-clamouring-for-better-clothes-or-m/
Last
week Jenni Murray was back in the Daily Mail saying she’d gained every pound back again.
70 pounds! That means she ate enough for her needs, 2,000 calories a day and on top of that, an extra 245,000
calories since January! That's a LOT of food. Jenni knows she can't blame thyroid or slow metabolism as she's pretty healthy. Indeed, large people have a migh metabolic rate just carrying themselves around. It is smaller people who have a lower Basal metabolic rate.
She’s doing Weight Watchers this time and will be writing a column about her progress.
Now I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t live with 19 stone. Jenni Murray couldn’t live with it. Except she did.
My point is this: people like Jenni Murray don’t have a problem with food or diets. They have a problem with their minds. They don’t want to lose weight enough.
My most successful clients remember gaining a little weight and how it feels. They describe it to me like this “I knew I was getting fat when I felt my bra bulge and saw in the changing room mirror those tell-tale rolls on my back. It wasn’t much, but I’d always been slim. I’d never had to think about my shape. Now I could literally feel the fat bulging. I went out for the night and my fantastic dress was straining. I held myself in all night. I could sense all my friends looking at me, thinking, “She’s starting to get fat”.
I never want to feel like that again.
Like the salmonella scare, this is aversion therapy. I don’t want people to spend their lives being scared of eating, but people with a morbid obesity – obesity that will kill – must learn to be afraid of being so fat. This will determine their food choices when something tasty comes along. Jenni Murray wrote movingly about her size and she was determined not to feel so huge and unfit ever again. Yet when food or temptation came again, she didn’t use the trick of remembering how bad she’d felt. She had thought, “I can make up for this. I can diet tomorrow. I can go without breakfast. I can do a longer walk”
She was bargaining with her mind and that’s one of the worst things you can do. It’s a gambler’s mentality.
Being unhappy about anything is a cold, dark place. It is an emotion that is there to save you. You don’t want to go there. Remembering how unhappy you were stops you choosing the wrong love affairs. Remembering unhappiness stops you neglecting people or being bitchy. Well, that’s how it’s meant to work. Every emption is there for a reason. Remembering how bad you felt when you were at that party or on that date and nothing fitted is one way of sticking to a diet.
Remember those bad feelings – and turn round and walk away.
I have known thousands of dieters. I have never known anyone refuse a dessert and wake up the next morning, sorry they didn’t eat it. I have never known anyone who forced themselves to have a walk and felt worse for it. We feel good when we do the right thing because that’s what Nature wants us to feel.
If you are on a diet and feel tempted, stop. Remember how you felt and looked when you were fat. Remember how unfit you were. How embarrassed you were. You don’t want to feel like that ever again. Turn around and walk away from that miserable place. There’s no fun to be had there.
If you have a question for my mailbag, write to me at the contact form. ALL names are changed and kept confidential. I will respond within the week.
ALL LETTERS ENTIRELY GENUINE AND APPEAR IN THEIR ENTIRETY.
________________________________________________________
Dear Monica,
I lost my job in August and with it, I lost my corporate gym membership. I also lost my income, my social life, my friends and everything else. I wish I could describe how I feel, but I feel I will only keep my sanity if I can still look reasonable and not face my friends in 6 months time looking a fat failure.
I can't afford to join a gym - they're about £60 - £78 a month round here. What can I do at home that's as good as the classes and the equipment I used to use, and please don't suggest bottles of water pretending to be weights. Sorry to go on. Can I also stay healthy without the expensive meals I used to treat myself to?
Frances
Bristol.
Hi Frances,
Your letter recalled the story of the great world champion boxer Mohammed Ali when he was banned from boxing for a long time: he kept up his training so when the ban was lifted, he would be ready to fight at an hour's notice.
I'm not going to patronise you - I recognise that being fit is important to you and you're not willing to give up on that feeling. So I'm just going to offer practical solutions. I know Bristol very well and the whole city is built on hills and quite a challenge - so you can spend hours walking at speed up those hills which will tone your hamstrings and bum better than any treadmill.
Fitness DVDs are essential. Get a schedule together so you don't just take one at random - routine is going to be very important. My favourite at the moment is Jillian Michaels Killer Buns and Thighs which is three, 30 minute workouts and very good. It's about £9.99 from Amazon. Karen Voight, the supreme American professional does a great Yoga DVD called YogaSculpt (www.karenvoight.com) and Kathy Smith, another evergreen US professional, has a fabulous catalogue of back numbers including a step workout on her DVD Fat Burning Fast which includes Pilates. Take a look. You can buy steps from Ebay and I just saw some good ones from £3.00 to £22. A decent library of DVDs will only set you back about £30 but the compilation DVDs are best, so look for Jillian Michaels' mix of 30 day Shred, Killer Buns and Thighs and more.
I appreciuate that this is quite a cash layout but you don't have to get them all at once.
You can also use the step for step-ups, maybe running on and off and double- footed jumps and squats. I find this exercise nicely challenging, especially when I mix up my own circuit doing maybe 10 squats sandwiched between press-ups and ab crunches, or a minute each. Experiment. And don't forget stair running, if you can. I'm not talking about 'take the stairs not the lift' which is a given. I live in a building of four floors and when I get bad cabin fever, like in this terrible weather and long dark evenings, I get the trainers on and run up and down for a set time or number of runs. You'll get puffed out and this will lift your mood and keep you healthy.
I'm not sure about weights. Unless you have lots of storage space, they clutter the place up and are limiting. Try a flexband instead and you can get one here on my website. By varying the length of the band you increase or decrease resistance. I'm not fobbing you off with spending money on my own merchandise but flexbands really are the best: very portable, and I usually have one tucked in my suitcase when I go away.
There's a DVD in the 10 Minute Solutions series, which uses flexbands. Look it up on Amazon.co.uk
Frances,, you will stay healthy on a less rich diet. Healthy is an absolute: you can't be MORE healthy simply by eating double the quantity of something nutritious. You just end up with more calories. A typical piece of salmon is massive these days so eat half. In place of lots of vegetables, take a multivitamin. Get fibre from porridge which is cheap, cheerful and good for cholesterol. Sainsbury's and Boots have a terrific range of really cheap supplements, so get cod liver oil, vitamin E capsules and a B Complex. That's the important one, because it helps the nerves. Oh, and an iron supplement like Spatone, though that can be expensive. Two pieces of fruit per day is enough and I urge you to have tinned fruit in juice because there's not much difference between tinned and fresh. Buy one carrot a day (about 12p) and don't be afraid to go to the deli counter and ask for one slice of cheese etc. I live on my own too, and shop like this all the time.
My heart goes out to you Frances, but that's not much use to you. Remember that things can change in an instant. I believe that the tide will turn, the phone will go and you need to be ready, fighting-fit, impressive and have lost none of your mental strength when it does.
Please let me know how you get on.
Monica.
Hi Monica,
A simple question but one that bothers me a lot. I'm 29, VERY fit, (into triathlons, weights, I watch my weight etc and only weigh 60kg. ) Yet my abdomen seems to be constantly big and blown up looking, and hard. PLEASE, please help as it's ruining my life. I eat very healthily indeed, plenty of the right things, low calorie etc (I control to 1,600 calories a day for maintenance) and yet nothing makes a difference. I can honestly say that nothing processed has passed my lips in 5 years. Is there anything you can suggest?
Chloe, Wilmslow Cheshire.
Hi Chloe
Oh, I do feel for you! This is probably the question I get the most, and which never changes over the years. I take it you've checked with your doctor which is always first port of call.
But I wonder if it would surprise you to know that it's also the problem that most female athletes and gym instructors suffer from.
In other circumstances, I would suspect that a high fibre diet with lots of fruit and veg was the cause. It may still be, but let's move to what I really think is causing this: the stress of being a competitive person. You said it yourself when you told me you 'control your diet to 1,600 calories'. Nothing wrong with being vigilant - I am too - but being conscious of your health isn't the same as being fixated by it.
The stomach itself and the entire alimentary canal (the whole lot, from mouth to the other end) is extremely reactive to conditions. Ideally, we should eat and rest. We are also intended to sleep twice a day, at night and again for a shorter period between about 2 -4pm. The so-called 'post lunch slump' is no such thing: we are meant to have a nap in the afternoon. Of course, few of us do.
So there you have an alimentary canal which is trying to process food and deal with your endless worry, checking your abdomen several times a day in the mirror (no doubt tightening the insides as you hate your look) controlling everything and worrying endlessly about calorie and fat content - this is one of the few occasions when I would say a good plate of wholesome chips and an evening with your feet up and a relaxing comedy DVD would be the best thing that had happened to your poor insides for a long time!
As to food, I could go on and on. Sugar-free chewing gum is a killer and causes flatulence. It's not an elegant topic but it's not an elegant look if you get it wrong. Apples and apricots have a natural compound, a sweetener called sorbitol that causes gas too. In my best-seller 5 Days to a Flatter Stomach there's a complete programme of foods to eat such as white fish, cheese, minced beef, chicken, scrambled eggs and of course, yoghurt. None of these contain any fibre so for the very short term they work, and your abdomen will shrink a few inches. However this isn't a good regime for the longer term and I am the first to admit that. We all need fibre, especially to keep a particularly nasty and painful disease called diverticulitis at bay and to promote natural removal of waste. I told you it wasn't elegant.
But I come back to my suspicion that it is your mental approach. You probably won't do this, but my advice is to try this experiment: take a week off, or if you can't manage this, do it for a weekend. Eat lightly, but eat as I suggested above, sit, watch Tv, walk and read books. hide the computer and mobile (yes). I regularly switch off my phone completely for a whole day or an evening nd amazingly, nothing terrible has happened when I switch it back on. Train people to know your routine rather than the other way round. Take a whole week off exercise apart from walking and maybe some stretching. Most people, when they have a week off go travelling, and we all know that travel these days presents its own kind of stress and general hassle.
I think this will do you the power of good because I truly believe your continued search for perfection is causing you body to digest food poorly.
This will definitely work. I promise you that. Whether or not you do it is another matter!
Good luck!
Monica
Dear Monica,
I was bereaved last year when my husband, who was only 37, died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage. I've been desperately lonely because I made the decision to move house to get away from the memories and it was a mistake. We never had any children.
I hope that one day I'll meet someone. I'm 32 and hope that in 10 years time I'll be settled again and happy, but here's the reason I've written to you: I've let myself go dreadfully since Rob died, gained 12lbs (but not nicely - my middle is just rolls of fat) and my skin looks appalling. The stress of Rob's death took its toll but I don't know where to start. Should I just eat healthily and let the weight come off slowly like they say you should? I want to get back in the game.
Karen, Lydd, Hants.
Dear Karen
Everyone who writes to me has a story - it isn't ever just a question of weight gain and starting a diet. The menopause isn't fattening, bereavement isn't fattening and breakups don't contain any calories, so I am always criticising people for blaming situations on their weight gain, but our state of mind dominates our choices. It takes a very strong will to keep focused on how we look when everything else is chaos.
What I think is this: don't live a life that doesn't exist yet. Don't look to ten years hence, to a life that isn't here or a partner you imagine might exist but who actually doesn't, because you know through your own experiences that things can change in an instant. I don't mean the 'live for today' approach, which is infantile. Of course you should plan for the future , but don't count on it.
Look at yourself right this minute. I'm not being insensitive, but if you are lonely with long stretches of nothingness, take this as your opportunity. Make something good come out of it. Many women are rushed off their feet with a family and friends knocking on the door and have no time for themselves. Loneliness is an opportunity to spend time selfishly on yourself so get out there, go walking, running, cycling. Lie in the bath and have a soak with a face mask. Cover yourself in oils and lounge in your bathrobe so your skin will be a treat. None of this need cost anything but one thing is for certain: it isn't going to make you look and feel any worse.
Get to grips with your diet now, not gradually. Make it a mission. You have time on your side, so go out and buy some fish, chicken and eggs and lots of salady things and make gorgeous meals. Don't just throw a bit of lettuce on a plate but make something pretty and colourful. Weigh yourself, keep tabs on your progress. It isn't obsessive, any more than it is obsessive to study for long hours into the night to gain a degree. It isn't obsessive to go for it, lose weight and get back to the gorgeous girl you used to be. It makes sense to me.
Eating healthily won't do it and I think you know that. "They say" losing weight slowly is best - who are these people who say these things? It's not true. it just got lost in the common mythology somewhere and because someone once wrote it, it suits us. I will say it again - it's not true. If you are very overweight, losing the initial weight quickly is the healthiest thing you can do for your body. Obese people who go into a metabolic clinic are given 500 calories a day.
I'm not suggesting you eat this little, but cut down to 1,000 calories of proteins and salads. Don't guess: write 1,000 on a piece of paper every morning and subtract as you eat. (It doesn't work to add up calories - you'll only end up going over your budget!).
Add a multivitamin and mineral supplement, fish oil capsule every day and drink skimmed milk which is high in protein and calcium, almost fat-free. You need proteins and good fats but not the calories of starchy foods, so no bread or rice. Breakfast on eggs every day, adding fruit juice into which you have put a sachet of Spatone iron rich spa water (from health stores, Holland and Barrett etc). You are probably iron deficient, so a daily dose will boost red blood cells and make you feel more energetic.
Lunch on more protein salads and only have a nice carb-rich meal in the evening, ideally with potatoes. No meat or chicken, just potatoes and vegetables. This is a form of Food Combining, but I believe in it.
The two messages are clear: take your time, don't be desperate but don't wait, either. Once life picks up you might not have time for yourself. I have known crushing loneliness too, but we all have to wake up every day and get through it somehow, so spending that time making yourself look and feel pretty seems a good plan.
Nobody knows what your beloved Rob would want, but you have told me what you want : you want to get back in the game.
Start right now.
Monica x
