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 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 friers 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
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