Eat Less Fatty
Authors: Anita Scott
Eat Less Fatty
By Anita Scott
An Anti-Diet Book
Chapter 1: You probably don’t need this book
Chapter 2 Why I hate diet books
Chapter 3 The Big Secret: Portion Control
Chapter 4: Diet Food: Is it worth it?
Chapter 5 There are no bad days or Why you need cake!
So a pretty harsh title, right?
This book was inspired by so many people avoiding the real reason why they are gaining weight.
It’s not body shape, or metabolism, it’s not age, sex, having kids, being unemployed and so on.
The vast majority of us are fat because we simply EAT TOO MUCH.
I was inspired to write this book for a number of reasons.
Watching overweight acquaintances complain that they gain weight while eating healthy and exercising (generally while they were tucking into a heaving plate of carbs) was motivation.
My own weight fluctuations were another.
But probably my biggest reason for writing this was that I am simply sick of all the diet books, diet plans, magical quick fix remedies and ridiculous eating solutions.
Worse than mere nonsense, many of these businesses (they are there make money after all) are preying on people who are vulnerable to anyone promising to make them thin, successful and beautiful.
I will not do this.
Reading this book will not immediately make you thinner (unless you are jogging on the spot right now!), it will not make your more successful, or more beautiful.
But it might make you a little happier.
And if you follow the recipes in the book, do a little exercise and most crucially REDUCE YOUR PORTION SIZES you may lose weight.
So here are my central themes for ‘Eat Less, Fatty’
1.
Portion size is key – it doesn’t matter how healthy your diet is if you’re eating three times as much as you should be.
2.
Metabolism does not matter.
If you actually learn anything about metabolism you’ll find out that the fatter you are the FASTER your metabolism is, as your body is working harder to move the extra weight.
Metabolism is an excuse.
3.
There is more to life than food.
There is more to life than losing weight.
If you focus on only this area you will become depressed.
Make sure you have a life outside your diet.
4.
Be wary of people who will take your money, just to tell you that salad is better than chocolate.
5.
I have no qualifications or medical training.
If you have medical problems then please be very careful about following this or any dietary advice.
Contact your doctor and ask them to provide you will nutritional guidelines that cover your medical needs.
A bit about me.
I am not hugely overweight, and I never have been.
I don’t think this disqualifies me from writing this book, in fact it means that I know how to avoid the dangers of becoming obese.
My weight fluctuates.
Sometimes I am under nine stone, which makes me happy, my favourite clothes all fit.
Sometimes I am pushing ten stone, which makes me a little unhappy.
Generally I am somewhere in the middle.
When I put on weight I know exactly why it happens – I am eating too much.
Why are you eating too much?
The simple answer to this may be that you’re unaware of portion sizes.
More complex reasons may be that you are unhappy, so you comfort eat.
I am not a psychologist, and if you feel that you have major emotional difficulties you should contact a professional.
In general though, this book will try to teach you that your weight has NOTHING to do with how good a person you are.
I like cake, that in no way makes me a bad person.
In fact, my personality would be much, MUCH worse if I ate nothing but lettuce.
The anti-diet
As you look through the chapters of this book, I’ll go into more detail about what to eat, what not to eat (this is a surprisingly small category and largely consists of rice cakes.
I mean rice cakes?
SERIOUSLY?), how to move beyond food and think about overall health, calories and how to use them, the dreaded exercise issue, and, most importantly, having a life outside of food.
So here’s where I shoot myself in the foot, but let’s face it, I’m not in this for the glory.
You probably don’t need this book.
You know yourself how to lose weight, you just don’t want to do it.
There is no magic formula, but if there was it would go something like this…
a + b + c = d
In this formula a = eat less, b = exercise, c = good self-worth and d = attaining a healthy, happy weight.
So just eat less, do a little bit of exercise, don’t beat yourself up all the time and you will be slimmer and happier.
Of course most of us slip up on this.
We might manage eating less, but we can’t be bothered exercising.
We might go to the gym five times a week but ruin our self-belief by obsessing over every pound lost or gained.
Just because the solution is easy, doesn’t mean it’s easy to achieve it.
This is where you may just need this book.
Imagine me as one of those rare friends who is brutally honest but has your best interests at heart.
Instead of saying, ‘I really don’t think the guy who has been sleeping with your sister is right for you’, or ‘Are you sure you should be playing so much on-line bingo?’ I am telling you to change your lifestyle for the better.
And diet TV shows.
One of the most awful things I have ever seen was on a diet show.
A certain TV nutritionist (BEWARE this term, you need no formal qualifications to be a nutritionist, unlike a dietician) was attempting to ‘help’ two people trying to lose weight.
Instead a sensible diet plan, she started boiling up some brussels sprouts in water, with no seasoning.
Gad, I thought, brussels sprout soup without even a stock cube, how awful.
But no.
She then proceeded to REMOVE the sprouts, and serve them slightly green sprout cooking water!
I have never seen the like.
So what can we learn from ‘un-brussels sprout soup’.
Firstly, never trust an extreme diet.
Yes, you will lose weight if you eat un-brussels sprout soup, but it’s simply not sustainable.
The same goes for any extreme food solution.
That is why I’ve based the anti-diet plan in this book roughly around a simple reduction in calories.
So when you reach your target weight simply increase your calories to the average for your gender (2000 for women, 2500 for men).
After all, when you’re dieting you are playing with your health so be very, very careful about anything that tells you to drink pepper water, or eat nothing but meat.
And you will notice my recipes do not contain brussels sprouts.
In fact, none of my recipes are specifically ‘diet’ recipes, and I hope that means that you can enjoy them with others.
It also means that you can enjoy them, and keep eating them, long after you have stopped trying to lose weight.
Oh, and one last thing about diets.
Never trust anything where you have to keep giving them money to keep doing the diet.
A friend at the moment is doing a dvd course that involves exercises and a diet plan.
The dvds cost £150.
And if you want to keep going with it?
Well then you naturally have to pay extra for all the add-ons.
That is a whole lot of money.
And I bet I know what it’ll tell you: eat less, exercise more.
No one would be getting hundreds of pounds from me for that advice.
If you only take one thing from this book, this is it:
YOU NEED A SMALLER PLATE
That’s it.
I said it was simple.
To lose weight you just need to buy a dinner plate with a diameter of nine inches or less.
So here’s why.
Standard dinner plates seem to be continually getting bigger.
To keep your weight down, I advise a nine inch plate, but most dinner plates are considerably larger than this.
Put simply, if you have a bigger plate you will increase your portion size to fill it.
If I was an unscrupulous diet pusher I would right now be directing you to a website to buy a special, branded ‘Eat Less, Fatty’ plate that cost fifty pounds or something.
I’m not.
My advice is have a look on-line for a nine inch plate, or – better still – try the charity shops.
Other things to consider
Be really careful about the amount of carbs that you eat.
I don’t believe for a minute that carbs are bad for you.
In fact, diet’s that cut out all the starchy carbs make me mad, you need them for energy and to make you feel full.
However, we do tend to eat far too much of them.
For example, my family would make spaghetti bolognese and fill a huge dinner plate with the pasta.
Go to Italy, home of pasta, and you get about a fifth of that amount, because the Italians understand that carbs are only one part of the meal.
The internet is your friend here.
Search for single portion sizes of rice, pasta, potatoes etc. and weigh them until you are confident with how much you need.
Another tip: love your Tupperware.
It is very easy when making a meal in bulk to eat more than a single portion.
My way of dealing with this is to tub everything into single portion sizes and pop them in the fridge or the freezer.
This is also great if you are a singleton – rather than making a supermarket ready meal, you can take something delicious and homemade out of the freezer.