Weigh Yourself Slim

What I am about to offer you in this book is a simple philosophy, using an easy-to-follow and common-sense approach, but also with structured steps to help you get there. In addition to that we will talk about a series of techniques and practical tips that I have gathered through my own experience. I have also tried and tested them not only on myself, but also on people close to me, and I know that they work. The aim of this book is to help you reduce your weight down to your ideal weight and maintain that weight forever. I do not intend to put you through some kind of adult boot camp or subject you to a miserable and painful process which you will have to endure over a long period in order to look a little better and then suffer for the rest of your life. Neither is the Weigh Yourself Slim a '10-day therapy' to make you lose weight, after which you will go back to your old ways and regain the weight again. It is meant to be an enjoyable experience so that you will be only too happy to keep on doing it for the rest of your life. My main ambition is not just to help you lose weight, but to turn you into a slim person. There is a huge difference between those two things and you will probably know it very well, especially if you have already managed to lose weight, but you keep putting it back on. All those who struggle with weight tend to think of themselves as 'us'and slim people as 'them', and don't understand what those slim ones are doing that is so dramatically different. If you look from the 'overweight'person's perspective, you can see that most truly slim people are not afraid to indulge in restaurant meals, enjoy eating cakes and even chocolate - and at first sight they look like they don't care about what and how much they eat.

So, how do they do it?

They seem to eat as much as you do, but in spite of that they are slim and you are not.

There are some people who eat only salads, but they are in a minority and just another extreme where we don't want to go. Just to be clear, we are only talking about those healthy and truly slim. Nowadays I consider myself a 'slim person'. I have a very healthy appetite and I eat everything - there is no food that I don't like. I eat three meals a day, I have snacks and I will not shy away from a good meal or dessert. My cousin once took me for a pizza with her new partner and the first thing she said to him was, 'Look at her - how slim she is. But she eats like a horse.' And not to disappoint her, I finished almost a whole pizza. Saying that, I still very much care what and how much I eat and, most importantly, I know how to balance my diet. That is the skill I want to transfer to you through this program. It is a misconception that slim people can just eat whatever they want. They are the same as you, but the only difference is that their ability to balance their diet has never been significantly disturbed, so they are able to do it naturally and to some extent subconsciously. They may look like as if they don't think about that and don't care, but they do. The good thing is that with this method you can become that slim person and learn how to balance your diet until it becomes second nature to you. The Weigh Yourself Slim program is not a quick journey - but it will be enjoyable and one-way only. I have deliberately written this book in plain English and with not many scientific references. The whole concept is quite simple, and presented in a way for everyone to understand, and although I can see you raising your eyebrow at the word enjoyable, I can also sense your hope. In theory any solution that is natural and gets us where we want to be with no pain, should work, although of course in practice, the dictum 'no pain, no gain' is generally true, and I am certainly not suggesting that Weighing Yourself Slim will not require any effort, and even, in the short term, what might appear to be 'pain' when we have avoided any discomfort in our lives, and grown fat as a consequence. However, it is also true that most of us think, 'Life is too short and we are who we are.' We may accept the fact that we must endure pain and suffering for a short while to achieve a greater good, but sooner or later we will want that pain to end. We will not put ourselves through suffering our whole life, which is what most of the current weight-loss programmes are offering if we want to stay slim. Yet as soon as we stop their regime, we will go back to the same situation as where we started. There is no point in eating apples for ten days and then reverting to a crisps and chips diet. A little exaggeration maybe, but you know what I mean. Unless we are desperate, we do not want to eat grapefruit and salad all day every day. The same can be said with high protein diets or slimming milkshakes full of artificial ingredients and chemicals. Even after 20 years I can still remember the sickening taste of strawberry milkshakes, which made me hate anything with an artificial strawberry flavour. I have heard stories of people falling sick and having bad breath during a protein-only based diet or damaging their health while trying to eat like cavemen in the 21st century. Equally, I can't help feeling sorry for people in boot camps doing exercises that they cannot do and feeling that torture is the only way to being healthy and slim. I am also not very keen (nor have the time) to count calories or weight-loss points and then sit in a circle discussing my 'weight issues' with a group. While I am not prepared to criticise other methods - and maybe they have worked for some people - I would be surprised if they achieved permanent results.

If we want to lose weight, look and feel better, under no circumstances should we damage our health.

No diet is worth that.

After saying all this, I am actually hoping that instead of being disappointed you are pleasantly surprised to open a diet book and not find ludicrous claims such as 'Lose a stone in one week'. There are no such promises with this program, because we all know that these kinds of gimmicky approaches are not going to work in the long run. On the other hand, while this program is so simple - and you may think at some point that it is impossible or naive - don't you think that it is much more naive to put your faith in empty, unsustainable promises? We may be eternal optimists and hope for a miracle, wanting to believe that a diet like that will come (and work) but deep down we know that it is not going to happen. In my experience, waiting for one of these 'miraculous' diets led me nowhere, and only left me disappointed (and still overweight). We rarely think of the word 'diet' in the context of normal eating habits, but instead associate it more commonly with a prescribed process, often involving a weird eating and exercise regime. In my opinion, the latter context for the word 'diet' should be forbidden. That's why this diet (program, as I prefer to call it) is about adjusting your normal eating habits and not blinding you with unrealistic promises. However, results can be achieved as quickly or as slowly, depending on what suits you and how much effort you want to put into it. Nowadays, when I look back and think of all the days, weeks and months I tried all those unrealistic diets in the hope of losing weight quickly and unnaturally, it reminds me of wasting a lot of time thinking of ways to cheat on exams instead of using that same time for actual studying. There is little point in cheating, because sooner or later we'll get caught. Even if not at the exam, it will catch us later in life when we don't know how to do things we are qualified in. Not much is different with feeding our body with just protein or onion soup for a certain period and not knowing what to do later. On the other hand, with the program I am proposing in this book you will learn how you can continue to enjoy food but in a balanced way.