You Can Be Thin: The Ultimate Programme to End Dieting... Forever (16 page)

As you become more skilled at visualising yourself thinner you can also use your powers of visualisation to turn yourself off bad, unhealthy food. If you want to stop eating and to stop wanting any type of food ‘rebrand’ it; make the picture wrong, make the descriptive words unpleasant and you will have successfully used your mind to want to eat only the right foods while feeling indifferent to or disgusted by the wrong foods.

We are brainwashed into eating the wrong things by food manufacturers because it’s so easy to do and it works. Food manufacturers constantly manipulate us into eating rubbish by giving it healthy and natural-sounding names and it’s very effective. I call it re-labelling (although lying is just as good a description for what they do) – using a familiar name to make some unacceptable unhealthy food sound desirable and wholesome: we are encouraged to eat cakes for breakfast because they are called muffins; a sunburst muffin sounds so healthy and kind of sunny, but in truth it is made of flour, sugar, fat, chemicals, preservatives and dried fruit just like cakes. Blueberry muffins are nothing more than blueberry cakes. Breakfast bars are no different to chocolate bars in terms of their nutritional value, and most people would not have a bar of chocolate or a cake for breakfast, yet the sugar and fat in most breakfast cereal bars are the same as in a chocolate bar. We are conned by the branding that says this product is a healthy bowl of cereal in bar. Umm no, actually it really isn’t, and who wants a bowl of toxin-, pesticide-, sugar-laden cereal anyway? Many brands of breakfast cereal are nothing more than confectionery. Eating a bowl of cereal is the same as eating a packet of biscuits broken up and drenched in milk. Though Sunny Delight has reinvented itself now, you may remember the original product which sounded like a delightful healthy drink – er, that’s odd because it was, in fact, loaded with oil, colours, chemicals and preservatives and had little relation to juice. It was because of this that some supermarkets refused to sell it. Of course if it was called Chemical Delight no one would have bought it as it sounds wrong and conjures up the wrong picture. Likewise fruit juice drinks are full of sugar and colour with little or no fruit in them, and similarly fruit bars tend to be 50 per cent sugar and are not a good alternative to fruit. Crab sticks often have no crab in them at all!

My daughter recently brought home a packet of biscuits that were labelled ‘sun-drenched apricot and raisin bars full of goodness’ so I read the ingredients and they turned out to be full of sugar, refined syrup, colouring, salt, milk fat, lactose, emulsifiers, preservatives, flour, oh and, of course, some apricots and raisins. Not so full of goodness then. If you want to eat them you can – I didn’t stop my daughter eating the bars – but don’t kid yourself it’s healthy. I picked up a box of cereal bars in a supermarket and they were labelled ‘naturally healthy made from the finest Swiss ingredients’. I then read the list of these ‘Swiss’ ‘nutritious’ ingredients and the highest one was cane sugar. Since when did sugar cane grow in Switzerland?! It’s just more brainwashing and we are totally conned by these companies because they have found a technique that works. The techniques in this book also work but they work in your favour and for your benefit.

Food manufacturers on the whole don’t care about your health, they care about making a profit and will use any misleading description to help them sell their products. They can call their foods fresh, pure, natural and wholesome, even if they are none of these things. The labelling is meaningless; it’s the list of ingredients that tells the real story. Frequently, the worse the food is the more often it has names with healthy-sounding words incorporating vibrant images such as the sun or ‘Swiss’ and descriptions like farm enriched, barn fresh, wholesome, fibre-full, etc., and pictures on the packaging to reinforce how healthy they want us to believe it is. Instead of being suckered in by this brainwashing you can use your brilliant brain to defy it, to see that food for the garbage it really is.

When you re-name or rebrand a particular food in your own mind it will lose its desirability and appeal for you. An example of how I do this is calling cola ‘osteoporosis in a can’, or ‘liquid osteoporosis’, because carbonated drinks leach calcium from the bones so I am reinforcing the fact that cola has no appeal for me even though I used to love it. An attendee at one of my seminars said that she kept hearing that description in her head and stopped drinking cola overnight when previously she had drunk several cans a day. When my daughter was under four I was amazed at how many of her little friends drank cola. I didn’t want to tell her she couldn’t have it so instead I put one of her baby teeth in a glass of cola along with a chicken wishbone and a penny coin. Every day she watched with interest and within a week the chicken bone and her tooth had disintegrated and the penny was shining as the acid in the cola had stripped away all the dirt from it. She has always remembered that the acid in cola ruins teeth and bones and she will not drink it, it’s no effort for her as she has a mind that is set against it.

You can set your mind against any food if you choose to. Just think about why most people can eat cow but not horse – they just can’t imagine eating horse flesh as the picture is all wrong. Many people, including me, can’t eat rabbit, snails or pigeon for the same reason. To me snails are so slimy and pigeons are flying vermin, way too disgusting to eat, whereas rabbits are just too cute to eat. I know that sounds illogical but that is how we eat: if the picture in our head looks right we eat it and if the picture looks wrong we don’t eat it, it really is as simple as that. I can eat pork but I can’t eat suckling pig because the picture it makes in my head is of a cute piglet still suckling from its mother. I can’t eat it because I feel like I would be eating a baby, and I don’t eat veal for the same reason. Vegetarians don’t see a steak or a chop as food, they see a dead animal and can’t bring themselves to eat it. You can use this same technique, this same effectiveness to change your whole attitude to food. Think about some of the things you won’t eat and think about the reasons why you avoid certain foods. As you do this you will have to conclude it’s because you don’t like the picture they make in your mind. Very quickly you can feel the same way about foods you were previously unable to resist.

When you stop eating certain foods and see them for what they truly are – fat, pure sugar, or a cocktail of chemicals – they will eventually cease to represent food to you. Call bread ‘glue’, call milk ‘mucus’, call cereals ‘toxins’. One of the reasons I refer to bread as glue and cattle feed in this book is because this is how I have lost my desire for it. I have done this for so long that now if I go past a bakery I don’t see rows of bread, cakes, pastries and biscuits anymore I see baked glue. Dairy produce causes mucus. I tell all my clients that it is full of pus, hormones and growth hormones because imagining cheese as a lump of concentrated mucus and pus works for most people. One of my clients told me he could never drink lattes again after seeing me and he was very happy about that. Do you want some pus on toast? How about some frozen pus in a cornet or some creamy pus in your coffee? No, me neither. Thinking about milk as pus has turned me against it. If you think I am exaggerating, here’s the proof: in the EU milk is allowed to be sold when it contains 400,000 somatic pus cells per millilitre. A teaspoon of milk can contain two million pus cells. A cup of milk can contain more than fifty million pus cells. In America the United States Department of Agriculture does not allow milk containing 750 million or more pus cells per litre to cross state lines (how reassuring is that!). When you see a cheese roll as a lump of bleached cattle feed and pesticide containing a filling of concentrated cows’ growth hormones its appeal diminishes very quickly. Do this with any kind of food you don’t want to crave anymore and you will be free of it. I wouldn’t want to eat a doughnut as I now see it as just sugar and batter so it has zero appeal. I don’t do this because I am some virtuous zealot, I do it because it’s easy and it works. If I wanted biscuits I would eat them but I find it so easy not to and since I ate them by the packet for twenty years I’m glad to be free of them.

When you change your attitude to some foods they no longer mean anything to you and avoiding them is easy. If you cannot eat steak tartare because in your mind the picture you make is raw meat or if you can’t eat a raw egg then you already know exactly what I mean. It is easy to learn to do this, to teach yourself to have a different attitude to foods that are best avoided. I used to love pizza, cheese on toast and cheese pasta and now I refuse them without a second thought. It’s not a hardship, I don’t even like that stuff anymore and I can hardly remember that I used to crave it. I used to mainline jelly babies until I realised they were nothing more than boiled up animal bones with lots of sugar and colorants added. Calling them boiled animal bones ended my desire for them.

I used to buy freshly squeezed orange juice for my daughter until I noticed it said on the bottle in tiny letters ‘lightly pasteurised’. Pasteurised means heated to at least 71.7°C and you either heat the juice or you don’t, you can’t lightly heat it to 71.7. No manufacturer is going to put the words ‘lightly heated’ on freshly squeezed OJ because it makes the picture in our head all wrong, we all know that heating it up it kills the vitamins and so the point of paying more for freshly squeezed juice is redundant. Once I had pictured it pasteurised I could not picture it as fresh and I don’t buy it anymore. I even asked the company why they heated it and they said, ‘We do that to kill any bacteria’. When I asked them, ‘But doesn’t that kill all the vitamins too and anyway you don’t boil oranges before sale do you?’ they became very vague. Paying £4 a bottle for something that has been rendered as fresh as marmalade is a con.

I want you to think of some foods you would like to stop eating and then change the description of them. Make the words and pictures unattractive and unappealing. For instance, if Swiss chocolate was labelled Third World chocolate its appeal would instantly diminish. Look at the relabelling in the table below for some ideas and apply similar descriptions to the food you are always drawn to and have had trouble resisting.

I try to make this as easy as possible, knowing that diets fail due to the complication factor. In a nutshell, our bodies are designed to eat everything that was on the planet when we evolved. Nature is very clever and when humans emerged, everything we were meant to eat and everything we could eat was already on the planet in the form of foods that grew or roamed. Our digestive system is designed to digest foods growing on the trees and bushes such as fruits, berries, seeds and nuts and what we could find in the ground such as root vegetables. Any animal that could be caught and its by-products such as its eggs are all digestible. Early man had goats’ milk but not cows’ milk, which is very indigestible and unhealthy for adults, since goats were much easier to keep than cows and they required a lot less water and pasture. This was the natural food, in fact the
only
food of our ancestors. Their diet was based on fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, and though they also ate animal products and animal by-products, they had limited choice and variety depending on what they could catch.

It took humans thousands of years to take the grasses that cattle and wild animals grazed on and make them suitable for human consumption by grinding, milling then baking them. The
Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine
states that the introduction of grains and milk has dramatically changed the way we eat as they are hard to digest. Wheat is not the healthy food we believe it to be, it was imported here from America while potatoes were imported from South America. We have been misled into thinking these foods are healthy when in fact for many people they are unhealthy. Cereals, milk, refined fats and sugar only became staple foods when agriculture was developed. Wheat, a type of grain, is comparatively new to our diets; we started cultivating grains about 10,000 years ago which is new considering man existed without them for well over two million years. Genetically we are almost the same as we were prior to the introduction of grains, and the foods we are best adapted to are the foods freely available to us on the planet at the time we evolved, the food mother nature provided for us: some animal protein, nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables.

The way to remember how to eat is what I call the 3
R
s