Why slimming could be all in the mind
Sixty per cent of our New Year resolutions to lose weight will already have bitten the dust. According to one woman on a mission to get us to think thin, most dieters gave up just five days into 2010. What's the answer? Use your loaf, says Alison Tynan
Ditch the diet and think yourself thin? Who is she kidding?
No one; Alison Tynan is adamant that too much dieting actually makes you fatter. And, she insists, 90 per cent of our problematic relationship with food is mental rather than physical.
Once you stop dieting, and deal with what's in your head rather than on your hips, you can get slim - and stay slim, she says.
Millions who have been spoon-fed the weightloss plans, the meal replacements and the super-skinny yoghurts will think she's off her rocker. But Alison is as calm as your low-calorie cucumber.
"I help people to change from within," she says.
"You don't need to count calories or deprive yourself of the foods you love. You just have to change your beliefs about yourself and your attitudes to food," she says.
A hypnotherapist and master neuro linguistic programmer, Alison vows she can get you thinner without putting you on a diet, or the scales.
"Dieting is a massive industry and a major preoccupation. Just look at the amount of advertising on TV because the New Year is supposed to be a time for creating a slim new you. But the truth is, diets don't work," she says. "Not in the long-term. You can slim down over six months to fit into a wedding dress, but once you stop you will put the weight back on. And the more you do it, the bigger you will get.
"Diets slow down your metabolic rate. They put your body into famine mode so that it can function on smaller amounts of food. You will need to eat less and less to counterbalance it. And when you get fed up, come off your diet and go back to your old way of eating, it takes a while for your metabolism to adjust - and you gain weight as a result," she explains.
Over the last three years, Alison has coached scores of South Yorkshire men and women to slimness in one-to-one sessions and 18 months ago launched her Kick The Diet workshops for up to 30 people at a time. Many are yo-yo dieters who have battled with their weight for most of their lives and are at their wits' end. Stage one involves getting them to admit the truth to themselves about the amount they eat and the exercise they do
"Many have a lot of misconceptions; they fool themselves," she says. "I get them to keep a food diary but I think most of them are not honest in filling it in. I'd say 20 per cent drop out - I've had some leave straight after I've told them what their body fat percentage is."
Stage Two is even harder; she persuades them that they need to eat the food they have always considered bad, including the word that will stop a perpetual dieter's heart faster than you can say egg and chips... FAT.
"It's a fact that 30 per cent of your dietary intake needs to come from fat," she says, explaining that if your body doesn't get enough fat, it will store calories and make it. But 60 per cent of people in my classes are what I call Fat Phobics. They go pale when I tell them. It actually terrifies them, even something like switching from skimmed to semi-skimmed milk. These are people who for years have eaten dry chicken salads, ultra-low cottage cheese and skinny yoghurts without controlling their weight.
"It's important that they get past their phobia. And once they see that they are eating food they thought they had to avoid and their clothes are getting loser, they are on their way to success.
"Of the 80 per cent who stick with the course, all of them go down at least one clothes size. And because their attitude to food has changed, they stay slimmer. I'm in touch with people I coached two years ago who have not gained weight."
Alison became a weightloss coach after a long career managing health clubs. She felt people were quitting having only got temporary result and believed they needed help on a deeper level.
What also spurred her on was personal experience. She suffered from negative body image as a teenager and despite being a size 10, fretted so much about her weight, she tried to avoid all fatty and sugar-laden foods.
"I kept a very rigid diet regime - apart from on the days when I felt particularly fat; then I'd eat anything," she says.
Studying for a degree in sports science changed her.
"I started doing more sport and had to relax my eating habits to fit in with student life. I realised that the thing I'd always feared had not happened - my weight had not gone up. I think my body's metabolic rate settled down," she says.
We're sitting in the cafe at Hillsborough Leisure Centre, where Alison's workshops are based, and to prove her point that no food is out of bounds, she's piling up a plate with all the things I'd ever thought were fattening - crisps, a French stick oozing tuna mayo, chocolate muffins and a mince pie. I'd eat any one of these, but not all of them in one day," she says.
"Some people can't do that; they would eat the muffin, think they've blown it and tell themselves they might as well eat the mince pie and the crisps as well," she says.
"I tell people they can give themselves permission to eat what they want. Permission is a key word; food should not be a sin or a reward because then there are emotional connections."
It's well documented that emotional eating is a major cause of obesity: "Some people don't deal with emotional issues and instead turn to food for comfort in the same way that some turn to drink or drugs. If their progress during the workshop is slow I use hypnotherapy or neuro linguistic programming, a form of psychotherapy which encourages self-awareness, to try to find out what is at the bottom of their eating habits.
"Often there is a history of food being used either as a punishment or a reward. Children are told they must finish everything on their plate or they can't go out to play. Or kids get food put into their mouths to shut them up when they cry.
"I can understand why mums do it; their child is screaming in the middle of the supermarket and giving them something nice to eat quietens them down. But that teaches them that emotional discomfort can be eased by food."
Encouraging people to put exercise into their lives and retraining people to feel hunger and fullness is another part of the process.
It's hard to believe that it isn't hunger that pushes people to over-eat, but Alison explains:
"A hormone called leptin triggers the appetite on and off. It's what causes a baby naturally turns its head away from milk when it is full, but over the years people learn to over-ride it. But the good news is you can become receptive again - and listen to what your body is telling you."
Case study: dieting made my life a misery
There were times when Michelle Wheeler was so thin, people thought she was suffering from cancer.
And times when she was so fat her clothes were a size 32.
From the age of 13, her weight had raged from 5st10 to 17st9 during pregnancy. She head from anorexia, bulimia and extreme over-eating - and, she says, diets were the cause of all her misery.
"I went on my first when I was a teenager convinced I was chubby; I was a size 10 but I felt so much peer pressure to look perfect," she recalls. "Anorexia dominated my life for six years but diets for many more. Food has always been a massive issue to me. It made me so unhappy; I would get thin to be happy, then find out I was miserable.
When someone told me they thought I must be having chemotherapy for cancer, I dismissed them as jealous.
I know I totally messed up my body. I got to the point where I didn't know what hunger or being full felt like and I would binge eat on chocolate. I could eat 25 KitKats in one night and not feel sick."
The married mum of two, who runs her own fireplace company Woodform Interiors, found Kick The Diet 20 weeks ago after joining exercise classes at Hillsborough Leisure Centre.
"Alison used hypnotherapy to stop my desire for chocolate; it worked but then I craved pork scratchings and ate bag after bag. she realised my problems were deep-rooted and tried hypnotherapy again. We also discovered I had gluten intolerance and I'm on a gluten-free diet.
"It's working and I cannot believe the change in me."
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