Grease- The Story
What it boils down to is that everyone else is
wrong. Standing in line at the supermarket checkout, it's clear that all
women's mags offer diets to 'lose ten kilo's in a week'. If that sounds like
hard work, there's another one explaining how you 'can eat all you want and
drop three dress sizes before summer!' . Watching the telly tonight, there was
a minor uproar because a 130 kg woman was refused an operation- probably a
trivial one- in her local hospital on account of her size. There's weight
scares, outcries why the government isn't doing something, and not a day goes
by without a promising 'cure' for fattiness getting splashed on pages and
screens all around me.
This is all very well. I've lugged an 18 kg
rucksack about in the mountains, and it's hard work. Carrying a two-or
threefold of this in fat must be
torture. But as long as others carry the load I really don't care. Until I
became a GP again.
At least one person per day comes in to beg for
'slimming pills'. Another ten or so would probably cure their hypertension,
diabetes, shortness of breath and lack of zip by losing a couple of stone. And
on asking what they do about this, the scenario's always the same: the high-BMI
person stares into the distance, frowns, and says that the curious thing is
that they eat nothing at all. ' Take today! This morning I looked at a carrot.
I allowed myself to actually smell an apple for lunch. And -I binged a bit,
that's true- I had a whole lettuce leaf for dinner. I walk ten miles a day,
always on the go, have been living like this for years but this winter alone
went up from 140 to 150 kg! Perhaps thinking about food makes me fat?
Now if someone told me they were talking to the
pixies and that they flew in on their soaring pigs, they'd be locked up with a
division of assault-psychiatrists in no time. But deluding four meals a day
away and hallucinating twenty sessions at the gym seems to be fine by everyone.
Dedicated Alien Abduction Survivors who've just had a beer with Elvis would
blush.
Misplaced political correctness has so far
prevented me from having a massive Memisa poster of the sorry citizens of
Ethiopia on my wall to illustrate the effects of a low-calory diet. Also, I
think it would be about as useful as showing a picture of Napoleon's grave to a
persons suffering delusions of grandeur.
Knowing that Eskimo's do just fine eating naught
but whale blubber and that the Masai become elite runners on cow's milk, blood
and urine makes me a bit dubious about the value of any 'diet'. So far as I
know, whatever the stuff shovelled down, it all gets reduced to couple of very
simple things and halfway down the gut you can't tell Jenny Craig from a
hamburger. But that's just me. Everyone else seems to feel that it's WHAT you
gobble down that creates cancer, fights fitness and leaves one lardy. I must
admit that it is hard to imagine how a slice of bread could become a molecule
stuck on some outpost arm of a bit of the sarcoplasmatic reticulum, but there
you are.
So I used to advice people to please keep on
eating whatever, but LESS of it.
-But I already eat less!
' I mean, even less than you already eat less'...
- That's EXACTLY what I've been doing!
Truly, it's psychiatry. But here goes- I don't see
why the other fatfighting doctors should have a monopoly, I want to be a
multilillionaire too- here's MY diet:
Dr.Bakkers truly useful non-diet.
Dear person suffering fromn a high Body Mass
Index- You've tried exercise. You've had the beans, sherry, high, low and no fat
diet. You've done the unsaturates, the balanced low-calory, the Atkins and the
Jenny Craig. You know your Glycemic Indexes and ate troughs full of rabbit
food. And you're still FAT. The solution lies not in food, but in its opposite,
the hunger. Have more hunger and less food.
You see, we're all calory gathering machines,
that's how we survived the millennia. We love them. We want to shove them
greasily down our gullet because our chromosomes haven't figured out that a
famine is the least of our current worries. And if you fake the famine- eat
less than you want to- the most primitive and persistent bits of your crocodile
brain punish you with HUNGER. Very unpleasant. Every cell craves its calory
kick. They all scream in stereo that something must be done, that the higher
bits of the organism need go get their act together. Hit it with hunger until
it goes foraging! Drive it to the fridge!
If you ask an Biafran what the secret is to their
30 kg of skin and bones, they'll tell you that it takes 24/7 of hunger for
months on end. Now that's is a bit severe, so here's your hunger diet:
Start with a bit of hunger- say the hour before a
meal. Stick to it, don't eat till full but keep a little flame of hunger alive.
Nourish it. See what the hunger wants, find out how it makes you feel.
Experience what the feeling makes you want to do. Smile at it, chide it when
you find yourself halfway down the fridge. See how your personality can talk
with the hunger, how you can keep it from dictating your life. Some people can
revel in conquering it. Other people distract it with things like sport- nobody's
hungry while jogging. Some can bargain with it, others are pushovers.
Once you get a bit of a handle on what hunger does
to you, you can start to cheat it a little. See how you can get least calories
for least hunger- veggies, fluids and fruits are good cheats. But keep the
hunger burning. Be realistic- you'll lose the battle against hunger if it gets
too strong, but if the hunger makes you lose even half a pound over a week,
that's 10 kg over a year. Hunger gnaws- at your brain but also at the fat reserves,
and that's why it hurts.Imagine it clawing at the flab. One hunger this week,
buiding up to three by the end of the month. That's my prescription.
I thank you for your attention.