I think anyone thinking about enhancing their health or losing weight should take a look at Pete Cohen’s Ultimate anti-health plan It’s a powerful way of thinking about the consequences of your actions and spurring you on to change.
We all know that food can affect us, but it’s so easy to know the facts- and yet not make the changes we need to make in order to feel healthier.
When you have a chronic health problem, it seems even harder sometimes to find the energy and motivation to change. When you are feeling completely and utterly ill, the last thing on your mind is ‘deprivation’. And I guess that’s where the problem arises.
We think of eating healthily as ‘deprivation’. I mean, how mixed-up is that? Somewhere, we have been wired to see the chocolate, cakes, ice-cream and crisps as some kind of ‘treat’ that we ‘deserve’. And to see the ‘healthy’ foods as the boring and bland option.
What if you had, say, a chocolate bar and an apple sitting in front of you. And you could have them both? Would you eat the chocolate first and leave the apple behind? Until the apple got all wrinkly and you had to throw it away?
So how can we turn things round to realising that making nutritious, wholesome food choices is in fact the biggest treat we can ever award ourselves? How can we start to believe that our bodies deserve to be fueled with energy- and vitality-giving foods?
How can we start to make the choices that will not only help us lose weight but also feel better health-wise?
Is cold-turkey the answer? Anyone who has ever tried a restrictive diet will tell you that it doesnt work like that- you end up craving the very thing you are denying yourself- until you give in and eat that ‘forbidden’ food like there’s no tomorrow.
But what if it wasn’t forbidden?
What if you saw that apple and chocolate, and you asked yourself, ‘do I want to feel energised and cleansed (apple) or wired and ravenous (chocolate)?’
And what if you could have some chocolate without feeling hungry the second the last crumb was gone? how could you do that? How about making a rule that for every piece of chocolate you eat, you had to have the apple FIRST?
Then you’d feel fuller, you might not even fancy the chocolate afterwards (who am I kidding?), and you would feel satisfied after having much less chocolate.
Worth a try?
Tags: CFS, chocolate, deprivation, dieting, healthy, ME, motivation
