You Can Beat the Binge!: Conquer the fear of losing control and lose weight for life
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About this ebook
When you’re afraid of losing control, food is your enemy. You dread every meal and snack. And, when you binge, it sets up a horrible vicious cycle – feel bad, promise to be good, fail, feel even worse.
For over 12 years I was trapped in that cycle, bingeing every day. I hated myself for having so little willpower. Then I discovered that willpower had nothing to do with it. That people who didn’t binge weren’t stronger or better than me, they just happened to be what I call happy eaters.
Happy eaters lose weight and stay slim without ever being ‘on a diet’. Their lives aren’t dominated by worrying about food. They enjoy the food they love. And they never deprive themselves of anything they really want.
I also discovered that you can learn to be a happy eater, and now I’m one myself. This book includes all of the strategies that made such a huge, positive difference to my life; I hope they will do the same for you.
Domini Stuart
Domini Stuart is an author, journalist and speaker who writes about health, business and financial issues for publications including Company Director Magazine, Franchising Magazine and Currency Magazine. She has also written extensively about health, well-being and work-life balance for publications including My Business Magazine and The Sunday Telegraph.Domini’s aim is to help people feel better both physically and emotionally. In her talks, books and CDs, she draws on her experiences to show that staying well isn’t about struggle and willpower. A gentle approach makes positive change far easier to sustain.To find out more about Domini and to view her other books, please visit her website at http://www.doministuart.com/
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Book preview
You Can Beat the Binge! - Domini Stuart
You can beat the binge!
Conquer the fear of losing control
and lose weight for life
Domini Stuart
This is an IndieMosh book
published at Smashwords by MoshPit Publishing
an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd
www.indiemosh.com.au
Copyright © 2014 Domini Stuart
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the original place of purchase and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Contents
Disclaimer
Dedication
Foreword
Preface
Introduction: You can skip this bit if you want to
Chapter 1: Don’t be too hard on yourself
Chapter 2: Why most diets fail for most people most of the time
Chapter 3: A different kind of hunger
Chapter 4: Satisfying your emotional appetite
Chapter 5: Putting the theory into practice
Chapter 6: Everyday happy eating
Chapter 7: Do I really have to exercise?
Chapter 8: Meditation
Chapter 9: What now?
Chapter 10: From happy eater to happy person
Chapter 11: Goal setting for people who wouldn’t dream of setting goals
Chapter 12: When things go wrong
Chapter 13: The power of choice
Addendum
Disclaimer
This book is intended to give general information only. The author does not dispense medical advice or prescribe, either directly or indirectly, any technique as a form of treatment for physical or medical problems without the advice of a physician. The author, publisher and distributors expressly disclaim all liability to any person arising directly or indirectly from the use of, or any errors or omissions in, the information in this book. The adoption and application of information in this book is at the reader’s discretion and is his or her own responsibility.
Dedication
For Lucas, Julius, Clio and Piers
Foreword
Those of us living in typical western countries such as Australia are surrounded by a rich, abundant food supply. As a result, we are getting bigger - not upwards, but outwards. In many western countries, overweight and obesity have reached epidemic proportions. In Australia alone, 60% of adults are considered overweight or obese and, alarmingly, one in four kids is carrying too much weight.
Being overweight is not just a problem that can affect a person’s body image and self-esteem. Obesity brings with it serious health effects such as a dramatic increase in the risk of diabetes, heart disease and even some cancers. Yet we live in an environment where, everywhere we turn, we are surrounded by calorie-rich, readily available, cheap food. Worse still, we are continually encouraged to ‘upsize’ and ‘super-size’ our food in the pursuit of better value for money. At the opposite end of the spectrum, most of the technology around us is designed to make us less active – from the TV remote control and cars to escalators in shopping centres. Nutrition experts call all of this ‘the obesogenic environment’ we live in.
If you were to believe many of the self-appointed diet gurus whose books have sold in their millions, the reason for the rise in our weight is anything from ‘evil carbohydrates’ to our body’s chemistry or blood type. Walk into the health section of any bookstore and you’ll find the shelves filled with myriad books offering the key to quick, easy weight loss. Ask yourself – if the ‘key’ has already been found, then why are people getting fatter?
The truth is that any diet, when followed to the letter, will result in weight loss. No matter how the reasons for that weight loss are dressed up, the real explanation always comes down to the person eating less food or becoming more active. However, the problem for most people isn’t achieving an initial weight loss, it’s keeping the weight off. This is why, inevitably, all diets will ultimately fail. The more extreme the dieting regime, the quicker the diet will be broken.
The reason why people gain weight is the same it has been throughout history – eating more kilojoules than the body needs. This isn’t a secret. When asked, almost everyone will say that eating less food and becoming more active is the key to weight loss. Yet having the knowledge doesn’t make this an easy thing to do. It sounds simple but, if losing weight were easy, everyone would be able to do it.
Domini Stuart presents here a very different approach to the problem. There isn’t a recipe or step-by-step diet guide to be found. There’s not even a claim for weight loss. What Domini writes about is a simple yet frequently-overlooked approach to eating and weight loss: first become happy with yourself, both in mind and body, and then tackle your attitude to food.
Domini writes from a very personal perspective, sharing her life-long battle with an eating disorder as well as personal tragedies. However far removed these are from a reader’s own circumstances, the key messages – changing your attitude to food; maintaining a practical, positive attitude; and being realistic in your goals – are all valuable lessons that anyone will be able to take on board.
The pages that follow offer practical, realistic advice and tips on how to become happier with yourself and to put it into practice small lifestyle changes that will give you the best chance of not only losing weight but of keeping it off.
Simply realising that you have control over what you eat and that guilt and food don’t need to coexist will be a powerful message for many people, and one that will help them start the journey to a healthier life.
Associate Professor Tim Crowe, a nutrition academic at Deakin University and an Accredited Practising Dietitian.
Preface
I believe that, in general, men and women differ in their attitude to food. I also believe that women would make up the majority of people fitting my definition of an unhappy eater.
However, this book is not intended to be for women only, and I apologise for the fact that it is written that way.
The problem is that, in the English language, it’s just about impossible to be gender neutral, grammatically correct and concise all at the same time.
I have a personal aversion to using ‘they’ and ‘their’ when I really mean ‘he or she’ or ‘his or her’, and that can lead to some incredibly convoluted sentences. So, I made an executive decision to go for simplicity. If you are a male unhappy eater, please forgive me for appearing to exclude you.
I’d also like to clarify my use of the world ‘slim’. I’m afraid the language has let me down again; I just haven’t been able to find a word for ‘an appropriate and healthy weight for your particular height and build’. I promise that’s what I’d like ‘slim’ as it’s used here to mean.
Introduction
(You can skip this bit if you want to)
I could hardly write a book about becoming what I call a happy eater without including my own experiences as an unhappy eater. However, this is not essential reading. If you’d rather get straight into the business of becoming a happy eater yourself, turn straight to Chapter 1. You can always flick back to this bit later on if you feel you’d like to know.
My distorted relationship with food started when I was thirteen. I became obsessed with chocolate and either ate it instead of all my meals through the day or ate it as well as meals and exercised furiously for hours in order to burn it off.
But it wasn’t until I was sixteen that I became obsessed with dieting. I wasn’t overweight. I was actually quite slim, but I wanted to be thinner – though I didn’t really know how to go about it. When the first magazine dedicated to slimming was launched, I fell on it with joy and anticipation.
I can still remember the cover photo. More to the point, I can still recite the calorie value of many of the foods included in the special pull-out Calorie Counting Supplement.
That supplement became my bible – and the way I thought about food changed overnight. While I had always known that chocolate wasn’t the best staple diet, suddenly all food had become ‘good’ or ‘bad’, with ‘bad’ food to be avoided as if it were tainted with arsenic.
Once, when I was still quite new to dieting, I had been ‘good’ all day until dinner. I then had a salad with a small amount of Edam cheese (less ‘fattening’ than cheddar) and one of those old-fashioned crispbreads with the taste and texture of compacted floor sweepings but a very low calorie count and therefore ‘good’.
When I finished, I realised that I had, without thinking, accepted the mayonnaise offered by my mother and added about a tablespoon to my plate. I had eaten ‘bad food’! I was absolutely distraught – close to tears – because, in my head, eating ‘bad’ mayonnaise negated everything ‘good’ I’d done all day. I comforted myself by bingeing on biscuits and the promise that I would start dieting again the following morning. A new, destructive belief was firmly in place.
The lure of the permanent diet
I became dedicated