How to lose weight and keep it lost.

 

January has produced the annual bout of media chatter about New Year Resolutions, with prominent among them this year  losing weight by injecting  drugs, which if bought privately cost from £139 to £299 pcm according to a quick Google search.  According to a BBC panorama programme to be broadcast tonight (13/01/25) if the drugs become available free on the NHS they will cost £10bn a year and bankrupt it

To save the NHS, and anyone interested the private cost, the dangers and the side effects of the drugs I’m pleased to publish below a “memoir” I wrote 25 years ago for the benefit of a colleague, let’s call him Melvin, (not his real name), and a fellow church-goer – hence the occasional  pious allusions.

 

                                                                                                                           10^th February, 2000

Dear Melvin,

Thank you very much for asking for advice on dieting.  I consider myself an expert  and it has been my intention  to write a “memoir” on this topic ever since I retired.  This could be the start of a  “best seller” which will make my fortune.[i]

Herewith  therefore background information on how to lose weight (and keep it lost rather than put it back on again, which is what most people do.)

1.    1. The ONLY way to lose weight is to use up more calories than your body  consumes.  There are no shortcuts.

2.   2.  It is not a fair world.  Some people seem  to consume huge amounts of food  and hardly ever put on weight.  Others seem to eat hardly anything  and still get or remain fat.

3.    3. The reason for (2) above is that people have different metabolisms.  Some people  burn up more energy  more quickly than others.  They are often very nervous people.  It is possible to increase your body’s metabolic rate  (see number 21 below), but on the whole you have to put up with what you’re born with.

4.    4. All people are different and what works best for one does not necessarily work so well for another.    We each have to adopt  the basic principles  to suit our own personalities and metabolisms.  For example, I have never been much good at “cutting down,” and have found it much easier to “cut out” a fattening item altogether (eg chips) rather than just eat fewer.  You may be different.

5.   5.  I have in my lifetime read hundreds of diet and cookery-books. The best in my opinion is “The F-plan Diet” by Audrey Eyton[ii],  I picked up a second-hand copy at a Liberal bazaar 16 years ago and I’ve felt fuller, fitter and happier ever since.  I’ll let you have it if I can find it.  Don’t follow it slavishly, (for example the intake of too much bran is now thought to be bad for the bowel) but read it and take in the general principles, which are sound.

6.    6. Most “cutting down” diets leave you feeling hungry.  The trick is to eat plenty of less-fattening foods, and fewer of the more-fattening foods, so that you don’t put on weight.

7.    7. The “downside” is that most of the “tasty” foods (bacon, crisps, meat , rich sauces) are fattening, and most of the less-fattening  but filing foods (rice, pasta, potatoes) are somewhat bland (to put it mildly).  So you tend to jazz them up  with a rich sauce, and that makes them fattening.  Ergo there is a price to pay.

8.   8.  But persevere: even a plate of spaghetti  with no sauce  at all tastes delightful if you’re hungry enough.  I now thoroughly enjoy  a good chewy piece of wholemeal dry bread: butter would ruin it

9.     9. ALL FOODS (with the exception of celery, the chewing of which uses up more calories than it contains, so they say, and one other glorious piece of good    news , of which more later) ARE FATTENING. – even fruit and the above-mentioned dry bread.  But it you eat more of the less-fattening ones and less  of the fattening ones  you should be able to lose weight  without feeling too hungry.

1110. The only way to keep the weight off is to change  your diet permanently.  Think of a complete change of lifestyle rather than just abstinence for a period.  The latter approach is a waste of time.

1111.Have three or four regular meals a day.  Don’t miss a meal, because that just makes you hungrier for the next one and you eat more.

1112.NEVER EAT BETWEEN MEALS.  (If you get desperate munch a carrot.)

1113.Cut out absolutely  butter (or any other spread) on bread, sugar in tea and coffee, all sweet biscuits, chocolates, fancy cakes  and confectionery, cornflakes and full-cream milk, pudding and custard, anything fried – particularly deep-fried, and including fish and chips.

1114. Cut down as far as possible on fat in cooking[iii] (use polyunsaturated or olive oil), red meat , sauces, thickened gravy, milk, cheese, sugar in cooking or anything where it is not absolutely necessary.

1115. Use skimmed rather than full-fat, or even half-fat, milk.  I use powdered fully-skimmed low-fat milk from Tesco’s as I hope you can use more an get the flavour  without, if the label is to be believed, getting a large amount of fat.

1116. Most unfortunately, alcohol is very fattening indeed.  It helps to cut it out altogether  for a period (eg Lent) and then drink moderately of the less-sweet drinks (dry red or white wine).  Avoid sweet sherry, liqueurs, strong beer and stout.  Even fruit juices with no added sugar contain lots of calories.  Water doesn’t and, if you’re in a pub, slim-line tonic with ice and lemon or soda-water with bitters are pleasant  drinks which don’t do too much harm  and produce fewer funny looks than they did 20 years ago.

1117. What, you will be wondering, , can you eat?  Well, the more you eat of anything the less weight you will lose.  Concentrate on:

                        Porridge (no milk, cream, sugar, honey or treacle, of                                             course;           

                          Pasta, rice, potatoes (no butter or milk to “cream” them().                                   Jacket   potatoes are  excellent.  Instead of butter try a little                                  low-fat cheese or low calorie coleslaw;

    Green vegetables until the cows come home: cabbage, broccoli,         cauliflower, green beans (not baked beans from a tin, which                contain a lot of sugar.)  Don’t undo the good by swamping in thick sauces or butter.  Raw vegetables are chewier and last longer in the mouth  than cooked ones.  Raw carrots  for times  of desperation  are a good standby.[iv]  I eat a lot of coleslaw which I make myself  with finely-shredded cabbage as the base.

Fresh fruit – apples, pears oranges, peaches melons, more or less anything except bananas.  Each piece of fresh fruit contains about 70 calories so it is not a harmless alternative, but it is healthy, chewy, tasty and lasts.

If this section sounds grim, remember millions in the Third World[v] would give their eye teeth  for a diet so rich and varied.

1118.Traditionally we regard a meal  as a meat or fish dish accompanied by two veg (one a “filler” such as potatoes, the other a fresh vegetable).  Try to get away from this  and think of a meal  as mainly potatoes, pasta or rice “flavoured” with a little meat or “sauce” and accompanied by lots and lots of  vegetables – something to fill you up and keep you healthy.

1119. Do not expect that when you have lost weight you will look like Charles Atlas or become a sex symbol.  You won’t.  Weight tends to come off first in the places you’d prefer it not to, such as the face and neck, and last, if at all, from the waist and stomach.  So you end up looking haggard but still with a pot belly.  However, you will feel and be a lot healthier.

2 20. Losing weight (and keeping it off) is as much a psychological as a physical thing.  In my view it needs mental preparation, and you have to want to do it.  I suggest you don’t start this regime at once, but think about it for a couple of weeks, enjoy for the last time  the things you enjoy (eg oven chips,  - though you will gradually come to regard them as poisons) and them make a start on Ash Wednesday, with the resolve that you will keep going  at least until Easter.  By then it could well have become a habit.

2 21. Aerobic exercise is the way to increase your body’s metabolic rate.  To achieve this you need do exercise that increases you heart rate for at least 20 minutes on four or five days a week  This creates an oxygen shortage in the blood.  If you do this for long enough (several weeks) , and then keep it up, your metabolic rate increases, and your body automatically burns off more calories., so you can eat more.  I achieve this by jogging four miles[vi]  (not very fast , alas) most days .  Others do it be work-outs in the gym, or aerobic classes.  It is important to realise that it is not the exercise itself that burns off the calories, but the change in metabolic rate  produced by aerobic exercise over a period of time.  Before attempting this it is probably wise to consult a doctor

2 22. Normal exercise , such as walking to work rather than driving, using stairs rather than lifts, is fine and healthy and good for the environment but not much use for losing weight.  It takes an astonishing number of trips up stairs  to use up the calories  ingested from just one chocolate, and exercise tends to stimulate the appetite and thus make you want to eat more.  So don’t rely on exercise (other than aerobic as described above)  as part of your weight-losing regime, but as an additional means of keeping healthy.

2 23. The best piece of news since St John’s Gospel is that there is just one quite tasty piece of food  the eating of which actually does help you to lose weight. Half a grapefruit taken every morning (without sugar, honey  or other additives, of course) causes you to lose 30 calories a day. A third of a tin of (unsweetened ) grapefruit is even more effective.  This is really true: I saw it reported in the Guardian  from a meeting of the British Association several years ago and desperately with I’d kept the cutting.  The reason is that grapefruit contain something that jazzes up the metabolism  a little and therefore  uses rather than adds energy.  Unfortunately the effect is nullified rather than doubled  by eating a whole grapefruit or two thirds of a tin.

2 24. Once you have got rid of the weight you need to lose  you will be able to relax the regime a little and re-introduce  a few of the things you enjoy most.  But do be careful, as it is so easy to put back on all the weight you have lost (which is why Weight Watchers is a flourishing business.)  My own trick is to stick fairly rigidly to the regime when I’m at home, but eat more or less what I like when I’m out.  If I don’t have the things that are fattening  at home (eg ice-cream, sausages, butter, sweet biscuits, milk and so on ) then I can’t be tempted to eat them.  Admittedly this policy is easier  to implement if you live on your own, and is probably not worth getting divorced for.

Best of luck,

Peter.

 

I have not kept in touch with Melvin so I have no idea whether he tried it, and if so whether it worked for him. But it certainly worked for me, and still does

---

[i] My pension has proved perfectly adequate so I have no need of a fortune.  If anyone wants to try and  make their own by publishing  this, feel free,  Perhaps combine it with "How to stop smoking" (see below.)  But please acknowledge the source.     I wouldn’t mind a bit of renown.

[ii] https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-f-plan-diet/author/audrey-eyton/

[iii] This was written before air fryers appeared on the market, which may allow you to have more taste without more weight.

[iv] These are also very useful if trying to stop smoking.  See previous blog post on 31/12/2013

https://keynesianliberal.blogspot.com/2013/12/stopping-smoking.html

[v] As we called it then.  Now the Global South.

[vi] Now reduced to about 3k, but it takes a similar amount of time. tempus fugit

Abusing politics

 

I dislike the term “playing politics.”  “Playing” normally refers to games.  A good move or result in chess, football, rounders or whatever  can produce a rush of pleasurable adrenaline and a bad one, or outcome, periods of disappointment. But nothing serious or life changing.   

That is not true of a bad outcome in politics.  Hence I would describe the present shenanigans surrounding the Tories’ call for yet another enquiry into the abuse of children  as “abusing politics.”

The facts are simple.   

There have been several enquires into child abuse.  The major one  was headed by a Professor Alexis Jay  and she reported to the then Conservative government in May, 2023, making 20 recommendations. That Conservative government remained in power for a further complete year, yet implemented not one of the  recommendations in the  report.

Then, for reasons best known to himself, Elon Musk, the American social  media mogul, made accusation of complicity by British politicians in covering up child abuse.

 Immediately the present  Conservative leader, Kemi  Badenoch,  and one of her front bench spokespersons,  Robert Jenrick,  expressed desperate concern about child abuse and the need to protect our “young white girls” from molestation by “gangs who do not share our culture. ”

Presumably they  hoping that no one would notice that most of the proven abuses had taken place during the 14 years when their party was in power, or that  they had both been ministers during  that whole year when Jay’s 20 recommendations sat on the back burner with no attempt to implement them.

Or maybe they felt the media and their potential supporters would not let the facts get in the way of story they hoped would be “good” for them

This is an abuse of politics which is not just childish, it is infantile.

It is true that there is a problem of child abuse. Measure should be taken to reduce the possibility of it in the future and the present government is taking steps to implement the 20 recommendations.  Maybe it should have moved faster, but it has been a hectic six months since they took power and they are not short of other problems.

 There is also a problem of community relations.  In most areas various immigrant communities with different cultural backgrounds settle in amiably with the native population.  However, there can be outbreaks of inter-community discord, and even riots, and extreme right-wing groups have not been slow to exploit them, often on the basis of false information.

A mainstream party such as the Conservatives claim to be would be aware of the danger of inflammatory language and distortions of the truth.  Instead Mrs Badenoch and her party are seeking to exploit the situation and “stir the pot” for what they hope is their own short-term political advantage..

They should be ashamed.

That is an abuse of politics. It is an embarrassment that it is taking place in a highly educated and what should be a sophisticated and mature society.

Local governent: do as you're told.

 In the mid 1930s, just before I was born, there  was a proposal that our local Unban District of Birstall, with its own elected Council, should be merged with the next-door Borough of Batley. A referendum was held to judge public views on this and the results were:

For the proposal:     25

Against:               3500 

Spoiled papers:     190

Nevertheless the "powers that be" went ahead and forced through the merger (take over?)  

This enlarged Borough of Batley endured for just over 35 years when, under the  Heath Conservative government’s proposals, we in turn were merged (taken over?) to form the Metropolitan District of Kirklees. This is  a massive area which includes  Huddersfield , Dewsbury, Batley, Cleckheaton, Heckmondwike and  much of the Colne valley.   It could not be called Huddersfield because that would have annoyed the burgers of Dewsbury, and vice versa.  

So it is called Kirklees , which is one of the places where Robin Hood is alleged to have shot his arrow to determine where he should be buried (though that Kirklees is in fact over the border in Calderdale, the name imposed on what is otherwise Greater Halifax.)

These, along with the Metropolitan authorities of Leeds, Bradford, and Wakefield were originally overarched by the West Yorkshire County Council, but this was abolished (along with the Greater London Council) by Mrs Thatcher because it persisted in electing a Labour majority. 

It is unlikely that Kirklees and similar Metropolitan areas will be affected by the present Labour government's proposals for local government reform sine we are already Unitary Authorities - we have no District Councils to deal with more local needs and services.  But most of the country still has them.  They are to  be abolished, as Labour's proposals follow the trend, of taking local government further and further away from the people it is designed to serve.

The proposals will reduce rather than  enhance local democracy.  In the words of the conclusion of the Guardian's leader when the White Paper was published just before Christmas, the effect is to streamline local government so that it might more effectively carry out the instructions of Westminster and Whitehall. (summarised as recollected from memory.)

Taking the administration of local areas further and further away from the people they serve reduces the sense of belonging and ability to exert influence.  Democracy only works well if people feel a real sense of involvement: that they can work together to "do" things, rather than have something done to them.

A  uniform and streamlined system of local government of large areas may sound more efficient, but it isn't.  It is now accepted that the UK is the most centralised of the developed democracies and this assumption that "Whitehall knows best" is one of the reasons why our performance in so many area is so relatively poor.

The proposals increase the number of directly elected executive mayors, whether local people want one or not. (West Yorkshire didn't, but got one anyway).  This system, borrowed from the US, places the emphasis on personalities rather than policies.  The personality may be  good at both publicity and policy (Andy Burnham?) or maybe just good at publicity (Boris Johnson.)  Government by councillors elected to implement policies may sound dull bit is likely to be more effective.

 The proposals seem to favour dividing the country into city regions.  This is a mistake:  rural, semi-rural and urban areas are not acolytes feeding the needs of the cities they surround: they have their own priorities and needs..

 Finally there are no proposals for  local government to have any serious independent powers of taxation.  The humiliating, wasteful and potentially corrupt (levelling-up funds for Rishi Sunak's Richmond constituency) system of competing for funds dispensed at the whim of the the centre remains in place.

As argued previously on this blog, there is a need of a root-and-branch reappraisal  of how the UK is governed. We should set up a commission, perhaps advised by  citizens assemblies, to try determine what structure will best serve our future needs.  In the meantime, the present parts of the imperfect system should be adequately funded to perform the functions required of them.

 

 

The Public Realm

 The end of the year seems a good time to compose an inventory of the state of the UK's public realm after 14 years of Conservative rule.

Prison estate: under-staffed, rat-infeed; so close to capacity that new government forced to release inmates to make room for  more recent offenders.    Courts:  buildings closed or neglected, insufficient functioning toilets for jurors, insufficient barristers, long waiting-lists (up to two years or more) for trials  NHS: Hospitals, crumbling buildings, long waiting-lists;             Insufficient  GPs;  few “designated “ doctors; 8am phone-call lottery.           Nurses; massive shortage; too few in training (result of abandonment of            bursaries.)           Dentists; completely unavailable in many areas.  Schools: restricted curriculum, arts/music etc neglected; crumbling concrete in buildings; shortage of teachers. Universities: many on brink of bankruptcy; grade inflation; overseas students discouraged.  Local government: savage cuts to grants: forced to abandon vital services  (eg Sure Start)  Social care: long-standing problem left unaddressed.  Roads: pothole infestation  Privatised industries: Inadequate regulations  and rip-off dividends to owners (often foreign governments.) eg Water; sewage pollution;                                                      Railways; inadequate services; cancellations Housing: failure to build sufficient for affordable rent or purchase  Stock Exchange: flight of key firms from.  Money laundering: London now the word’s capital for.  Key industries and assets: sold to overseas buyers (eg ARM!)  Poverty: percentage of families in poverty increased.  BBC: Savage cuts to this World Class institution, especially the World Service  House of Lords: unprecedented number of new “peers” created; failure to reform  Democracy: restrictions on voting, reduction of powers of electoral commission.   IIn my view this list, or something similar,  should be brandished every time the tories claim to be ready to form a government again.  I'm sure I've not thought of everything: amendments and suggestions for additions welcomed.   for balance, is there anything that is better at the end of 2024 than it was in 2010 .  Well, we pensioners have done rather nicely, thanks to the Triple Lock (introduced at the insistence of  the Liberal Democrats, who played a noble but unrewarded part in making the Tores less bad than they proved to be  after the first years of tTory Rule, when they escaped from our restraining hand.)  But the basic state pnsion still compares very unfavourable to those in similar developed countries.) Anything else. . . ?