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.
10th
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 F-plan trick is to eat plenty of
less-fattening foods, and fewer of the more-fattening foods, so that you feel full 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 and 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 love (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 to 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
