Weight Loss for Food Lovers

Binge Buster

If you want to lose weight, forget counting calories and hours at the gym - eat chocolate instead. A specialist obesity expert tells Marie-Anne Keeffe that it's now possible to have your cake and drop the kilos as well.

from Sunday Times Magazine, July 2006

Food lovers rejoice! It's the eating plan the world has been waiting for - Coco Pops for breakfast, chocolate for morning tea, a glass of wine with dinner and no need to slog it out at the gym. And if you think it sounds too good to be true, it's not. But it's also not quite as simple as it first appears as there's some fairly serious mind science to master before you're able to get your body in order.

The starting point is to recognize that food is the world's most addictive substance and for some people their attachment to it is so strong, it's almost like having a second relationship. While we can physically live without nicotine and alcohol, food is the fuel necessary to keep our bodies functioning. It's a terrible catch 22 for those trying to escape its clutches, especially when you consider that every major event, celebration or gathering in life revolves around eating, drinking and indulging. The reality is, we just can't escape it.

"If a heroin addict had to go through the day getting up in the morning and going to the fridge and finding syringes of heroin there and then going to the pantry and finding syringes in their pantry and then leaving home and going past cafes and finding beautifully presented heroin syringes in the windows, we wouldn't expect them to get very far through their day without using again"

According to Dr George Blair-West, a psychiatrist and group psychotherapist specializing in obesity in Australia, dieting is not about what we eat, but why. He says that for far too long we have been bombarded with quick fix low calorie, low carbohydrate, high starvation eating plans that have frustrated and patronized people and destroyed their ability to stay slim. His mission is to stop the weight loss merry-go-round and solve the mystery as to why is it that we go on a diet, lose weight and then with almost as much vigor, put it all back on again. A Director of the Rehabilitation Unit at Brisbane's RiverCity Private Hospital, Blair-West daily helps morbidly overweight patients regain control of their lives and believes the key to it all is understanding a few simple principles - firstly, it's more about what's in your mind than what's in your mouth.

"Food becomes a currency, it becomes much more than something we run our bodies on, it is something that is used to deal with a whole range of issues other than hunger. We use food to deal with emotional needs like stress and of course people who get stressed by being overweight then eat to deal with stress and that becomes a very vicious cycle. The complexity of that currency is enormous."

And secondly, the news that will come as a relief to those who have tried and tried only to have never succeeded is that, contrary to popular belief, self discipline has absolutely nothing to do with long term weight loss. While it's always touted as being the crucial stay slim factor the reality is that when self discipline is put up to battle with the deep seated and well rooted reasons for overeating that lay embedded in our subconscious minds, it becomes an impotent force that just can't compete.

When it comes to comprehending the strange mind machinations that lead dieters to ruin their best efforts over and over again, Blair-West refers to recent research on Restraint Theory. Widely unknown to many GP's and nutritionists, it basically shows that if you give up too many of the foods you love, this sparks a slow rebellion and with great delight you not only end up breaking your diet, but often then continue to eat and undo all of the good work you have done.

"Restraint Theory tells us that if we have a sense of deprivation about food, then because of the deep attachment and its complex currency what happens is we start going down a path that leads to sabotaging our weight loss plan. Our subconscious mind has a difference agenda to the one we have consciously and sabotage is when it runs the game to its agenda rather that to our conscious desire to lose weight"

In response to this mind trap Blair- West has developed what he calls his 'Low Sacrifice Diet", fully outlined in his new self help manual "Weight Loss for Food Lovers". He boasts it is low in self-discipline and high in food pleasure, but warns that before you even start to get your head around it you must first come to an understanding of the powerful psychological forces at play.

"I would argue the challenge in helping people to eat less is much greater then the level of complexity we faced in getting people to give up smoking. I was treating a woman who was very overweight after being in a emotionally abusive marriage for years. She lost weight after she separated from her husband but she ran into him and he made a comment about how much better she was now looking. And guess what happened? She put all the weight back on again as that became a trigger; unconsciously she could not let him win as he had abused her and she just could not give him that satisfaction. So while consciously she desperately wanted to lose weight for herself, to make a statement to her ex husband she had to regain weight from an unconscious point of view. When it comes down to our unconscious doing battle with our conscious mind, our unconscious will always prevail. This sort of scenario is happening day in and day out in many women's lives in this country"

Dr Blair-West says he daily sees Restraint Theory in full swing in patients who present with the widespread problem of binge eating disorder, most suffering from it without being aware or diagnosed. "If you have an eating session where you feel out of control and are eating more than you need to and that is occurring at least once a fortnight (for many it's occurring one or two times a week) then you are a binger. It's somebody who is on an overly restrictive diet and every couple of days they have what I call a mini binge and when you first talk to these people they cant understand why they are not losing as they eat very healthily but every few days they have these little mini binges where they can have a couple of thousand calories and this is just enough to stop them losing weight overall'

This binging is sparked by an eating pattern most of us can relate to at least a few times a year on big food occasions like Easter and Christmas. Blair-West has cleverly called the downward descent into uncontrolled overindulgence the "What The Hell Effect" saying that studies clearly shows that once dieters break their strict plan they think "what the hell" and start rebound overeating, often then consuming everything in sight.

"Some of the research into this is quite fascinating. In one experiment, they took two groups of university students and told them they were going to be taste testing ice-cream for a marketing company. Of course this was not true at all. Unbeknown to them, the students were divided into one group who were dieting and another who were not and what they were really interested in is if the group who were restricting their food intake would approach eating ice-cream differently to the group who weren't. So they told the students they were having a problem getting things set up and while they're waiting to just help themselves to as many milkshakes as they'd like. The researchers plied them with milkshakes and then invited the students to come and help themselves to as many different ice-cream flavours as they could eat and then to pick the best. What they found was, with the group who were not restricting, or the "normal" eaters, the more milkshakes they ate beforehand, the less ice-cream they consumed afterwards. And interestingly enough, the other group, the dieters, did exactly the opposite; the more milkshakes they drank, the more ice-cream they ate".

Why deprivation is such a terrible threat to any weight loss plan is because Blair West believes that coupled with starvation and justification it forms an unholy trinity which, once it's set in motion, is unstoppable.
"People set themselves up for the "What The Hell Effect" daily by having a really healthy breakfast, then skipping morning tea followed by eating rabbit food for lunch. By mid afternoon they are starving, so they've got starvation and a big sense deprivation because they haven't had anything good to eat all day and their justification is that one won't hurt, I deserve it and off they go. I believe if you are battling that unholy trinity, it doesn't matter how much self discipline you have I do not believe the normal person can beat it".

Controversially but probably music to the ears of some, Blair-West says exercise does not help people lose weight and worse, it can even make some people fatter. He is frustrated that doctors and dieticians tell people to eat healthy food and exercise more and place equal importance on both these factors when research shows this is simply not the case. While working out is good for general wellbeing, it is not a big player in weight loss, as what often happens is that afterwards people either become more hungry or otherwise misjudge how much they have burnt off and eat much more than they should, which is called exercise overcompensation eating. They then get totally despondent when the scales show no change, or a gain and the roller coaster, yo-yo dieting cycle begins all over again.

"A woman I saw was continuing to gain weight even though she was going to the gym three or four days a week. Then she let the cat out of the bag. I was talking with her about doing a food diary so I could see exactly what she was eating but she said she didn't want to change her diet as she was going to lose weight through exercise. I told her the truth of the matter is that while exercise has many benefits, it doesn't play a huge role in helping to lose weight. This woman was interesting as she stopped coming back when I told her that she would not be able to lose weight unless she was prepared to confront what she ate. She didn't want to do it".

The good news is that there's a simple solution - doing more incidental activity and just moving more throughout an average day. Put on a pedometer and do things the long way around so that you end up walking between seven and ten thousand steps everyday. The thinking here is that as the exercise is organically built into your daily routine it does not trigger that compensation overeating which threatens to destroy all your best efforts.

Now after putting all the mind and body puzzle parts together Blair-West says the last step is learning how to eat with his Low Sacrifice Diet. The golden rule is that no foods are forbidden, there are just some that need to be better managed and the trick is to draw up a list of fattening foods you love and divide them into two categories. The first is a list of the foods you flirt with, or in other words don't have a strong emotional attachment to, like for example potatoes or jasmine rice. Next draw up a high sacrifice list of the forbidden or favourite foods you have grown to love over the years, like chocolates, cakes, chips and cheese. Next you must allow yourself to have your high sacrifice foods in moderation to order to avoid the deprivation that sparks the mental rebellion and overeating. And lastly learn to savour or be mindful whenever you eat them and enjoy every mouthful.

Dr Blair-West's says Weight Loss for Food Lovers is not a diet book, but the book you must read before you try again to drop the kilos. He doesn't promise quick results, but real, long term results.

"The future of weight loss is going to be around embracing it as a psychological problem and challenge. The current thinking is that if you can't lose weight you are weak willed and lacking discipline. It is such a tragedy as what it is doing is just making people who struggle with their food feel like failures and we have to stop doing that."

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