Still Not Losing Weight (EAD)

You cannot repair a leaky boat if you cannot find the leak. If you are not losing weight it means you are eating too much of something – no ifs, no buts. You need to find out exactly what it is and when you are in danger of eating it. Then we need to manage it. Maybe you will decide you would rather eat it than lose weight. But to have ‘fully informed consent’ to bring on your early death by choice you need to know exactly what the benefit is versus this cost.

Therefore, if you are serious about losing weight you must start by doing your own Eating Awareness Diary (EAD). And you need to repeat doing your EAD until you know exactly where the leak is. There is a sample page at the back of this book. Photocopy this and enlarge it by doubling it to A4 size. If you are handy on a computer then many of my clients find it just as quick to set up a table and type in the headings. In filling it out you must put in every single item of food or drink thatgoes in your mouth over a five day period including a weekend.

Do not try to change your behavior for your first EAD, just eat as you would normally. Over the same period measure your energy expenditure with a pedometer as discussed in the chapter on exercise.Now you understand mindfulness, note how much you savored your meal. (Again, this will increase as you observe it, by definition.)So be aware of our tendency to lie to ourselves and to those around us by forgetting. Lying to ourselves is an important sign that we must learn to recognize because it is the giveaway sign of self-sabotage – which we now need to look at in more detail.

List the foods you eat so that later you can check their GLs against the table. Once you have completed the EAD, sit down and go through it with a highlighter pen. Highlight everything that is either high in fat orhas a GL over 10 that was eaten for afternoon tea or later. Note everything with high fat or a GL of more than 20 that was eaten at lunch. Don’t worry too much about what you eat for morning tea or breakfast.

As you know, this is the time to be eating your high sacrifice foods that will often have spectacularly disgusting GLs. If you are someone whogets fat on eating too much high fat or rich carbohydrate foods before lunch, you will need more help than this book can give you. Contact a well qualified therapist. Analyzing your EAD will give you a clear idea of what you need to do differently – provided you did not lie to yourself.

How weird would that be – to lie to yourself, to try to look good to yourself – when nobody else is watching! That might sound silly but, can I tell you, we do it all the time. In fact, research shows that overweight people under-report what they are eating by as much as 39%.23 Not so surprisingly, what people mostly under-report are fat and carbohydrate rich snack foods. I know, because I did it too. Use your EAD to discover what’s happening. If you are gaining weight, or not losing it quickly enough, the answer will be there. This is the most important investigation I can do in this situation. The sooner we write down what we eat the less chance we have of lying to ourselves. The main way we lie to ourselves is simply by ‘forgetting’.