There's More To Food Than Just Eating It

I drove along the coast road to Brighton early this morning. Where I was heading, it actually made sense to go back of town via the fast road, but I just couldn't resist driving by the sea. The sun was blazing down across the water from an entirely cloudless blue sky. It looked idyllic. But looks can confound, since there were less degrees out there than in Wandsworth Prison dining hall. A bone-achingly cold day.

I found myself thinking about how I'm really going to handle things when I get to my target weight, how I'm going to jump permanently off the yoyo treadmill. Why is it that so many of us fail, and fail repeatedly, while only a comparatively few succeed, and how do I really know that I'll be numbering myself among the elect?

As Paresh commented on my 'Keep Calm and Carry On' post yesterday, 'SDCM (self determination, control & motivation) are key to losing weight. After marriage I went from 12 st to nearly 18 st and it is SDCM that got me back to 13.5 st that I have managed to stay to until now (18 years).'

That is one dickens of an achievement, and it is a measure of the eternal vigilance we must all develop. But I don't think it's a guarded and suspicious type of vigilance. It's more a clear consciousness about who you are and your place in the world, allied to an ability to trust your instincts to not do the wrong thing.

I believe that maintenance ONLY happens when the attainer has undergone a number of really profound changes, not least because if, after abstinence, you revert to doing the same old thing, why of course you're only ever going to get the same old result.

You'll get fat again.

Once you're into, and committed to, maintenance, you'll have bought entirely into the concept of health. You'll trust your body more and more to heal itself, and you'll help that happen by giving it a higher grade of fuel. You'll then actively burn that fuel rather than cacheing it away, because you'll have learned the secret of portion control as well as quality.

Let's face it: this stuff is absolutely, blindingly obvious. So how come we've all managed to get it so wrong, many of us over and over again?

As it happens, and not saying this arrogantly, I think I'm lucky because I've never been into eating rubbish. As I've admitted before, my obscene weight came almost exclusively from bottles, and I am the walking repository of many of the world's finest vintages. A few months ago, though, I wasn't a walking repository. Let's face it, I could hardly bloody move.

The bull sessions at Fat Club have introduced me to a few people who have spent their lives eating really horrible stuff and seemingly have neither curiosity nor interest in food, or in how food can be (and taste) better. Someone tried to slap me down (this bloke seems obsessed with KFC. I've never even considered eating that stuff.) saying, 'some people can't afford to do that', 'that' being simple tricks like buying fresh veg down the market instead of pre-packaged stuff from the supermarket, not buying poxy processed ready meals but making your own, etc. He's a nice guy, but I could have been talking Martian to him, the level of mutual misunderstanding we achieved. He just couldn't see that I was holding out a healthier and cheaper option.

It's almost as if some people, while actually scoffing far more than has been good for them, have never once stopped to think about the stuff they've crammed into their mouths, considered what tasted good (and why) and acknowledged what was frankly disgusting. Or maybe they've never noticed anything having tasted disgusting.

I have. I've suffered from the motorway muck that we've had for fifty years to tolerate from the roadside caterers of the UK. The big catering firms know they are selling muck and they just don't care: we either eat their slop, or we starve. Food is not your enemy, but the food industry very often is.

Compare this to the situation across the channel. Pull into the restaurant of any of the aires de services in France, and they will give you real food, well and freshly cooked, good steaks, tasty, clean and interesting salads, and charge you a reasonable price (the roads are a damn sight better, too, and the speed limit more adult, but don't start me).

The fact is, when your head is in the right place, you wouldn't even be able to look at Great British motorway muck without turning on your heel and walking quickly away. It's a roaring shame that Heston Blumenthal only made over one of the Little Chef chain (it's at Popham near Winchester), but what the hell can you do? I'm sure that sales reps and lorry drivers would relish the delights of snail ice cream.

I genuinely feel that, along with teaching us how to get back to being thin, our various counsellors, mentors, loved ones and friends should be making sure we food addicts have learned how to shop and how to cook, and why these things are important. Otherwise people run the risk of coming to the end of their managed slimming process, however that be achieved, completely unprepared for returning to the world of untrammelled free-choice open plan eating.

One of the guys at Fat Club (who's lost about 13 stone since January - oh, yes, the LighterLife route works all right!), was saying that, now he can eat again, he is eating out most of the time, and he told us that he's eaten a chilli here, and had that there.

Why this gastronomic extravagence? Because he can't cook! At all!

What he seems not to register, is that, having controlled everything he's ingested all year (being entirely LL's magic powders and potions), he is now relinquishing that control to people who have no knowledge of, and certainly don't care about, what he's been through, and I fear he's leaving himself vulnerable. I hope I'm wrong but it feels as if it's really only a matter of time before he lapses. A recent long weekend away put on 7lbs. What would that amount to over a fortnight in Majorca? And would he go back into the process and deal with the issue? I hope so, but this is a mantrap which can - and must - be easily avoided.

Why throw yet more potentially destructive stones in your own pathway? Cooking plain, simple, wholesome food, using fresh, healthy ingredients is not difficult. It's just a basic survival skill you need to learn and internalise. It's one that anybody can do, apart from the terminally and unforgivably lazy. And even they can probably be kicked into it, if people care for them and love them enough. It's the only way to keep them out of the seductive but toxic embrace of Scary Ronnie and the Sinister Colonel, him with his so-called 'secret spices'. Try explaining those to a cynical police officer in Leicester Square on a Friday night. Secret spices?'Course they are, Sir. Explain it to the magistrate in the morning. Get in the back.'

If I could get the big food corporates banged up, I'd make it for life. And I'd feed them their factory food every single day of it. Revenge is a dish best forced down your enemy's protesting gullet. English readers will understand if at this point I insert the word 'Bootiful'.

When you've gone through an lengthy abstinent purgatory and lost all that weight, by all means eat out from time to time, simply to celebrate life. But make it good and special, something to look forward to. Not something you need to do for your quotidien stoke-up, down the local greasy spoon. Wake up and smell the coffee? A touch bitter? You can make it better at home.

And what does purgatory mean, anyway? It's to do with cleansing, purging - in this context of the rubbish you've eaten and the rubbish reasons you gave yourself for eating it. Your life is too valuable to go sliding back down into the hell of those fat badlands from which you've just struggled to escape like a victim of Stalin's gulags across the frozen arctic tundra in pitch-black midwinter (and I knew somebody that actually did that - we wrote a book about it - and he told me it was no fun at all, especially when the buggers catch up with you and drag you back...). So don't bloody do it. Get a grip!

If you seriously can't cook, search yourself out a teacher - a friend, or relative, or even get yourself signed up to an evening course. You owe it to yourself. For goodness sake, food is not a hobby like philately or crochet-work. You will have noticed that we have to eat every day, and given our particular and unsavory history with food, we need to get it right, particularly if we want to hit that target and then maintain successfully (and like my mate Paresh) - for ever.

Together, we're going to make our weight loss permanent. I'm not going through all this again. Why the hell should you?

I think the Boot Camp can allow a wonderful joke especially written by your humble scribe for our UK and Canada readers. American readers might not understand, because the key word doesn't figure in US parlance. It sort of means attorney. Here goes:

'Jenny's got a new boyfriend.'
'Great. What does he do?'
'Told her he's a barrister.'
'Wow!'
'Turns out he works in Starbucks.'
'Bummer.'

Till the next time,

Your old pal,

Fred