I was a bit of a heffer growing up. Not massively so, but enough that I couldn’t wear the strappy vest tops that all my friends were wearing and instead had to wear clothes that “flattered” – yawn. Who wants to be 14 and thinking that way? I kind of feel like I was cheated out of something. It sucked. I never stopped wanting to wear those strappy vests and I swore I’d have my day in the sun. So, it became my life’s mission to fix this problem.
At first I thought the key was just to exercise like a mofo – I thought I’d cracked it during the 8 hours a week of martial arts phase of my life, but alas, all the karate chopping and aikido rolling in the world doesn’t stop you sneaking chunks of cheese at odd times of the day and night, nor being physically unable to say no to the free samples in the supermarket (even though you just ate and violently hate ritz biscuits).
As it turns out, the key to becoming thin and staying that way, which I discovered some years later, is learning how to unhook yourself from food. As in, becoming able to see a load of leftover pasta in the pan, feeling the longing to go to it, pick up a load with a wooden spoon and shovel it straight into your gob but – and here’s the kicker – NOT ACTUALLY DOING IT.
When you’re there, you have won. Long term thinness is yours. It might take a couple of months for your body to shed the excess weight and catch up with your new moderate way of eating, but that is only the detail. The cause of the problem – not being able to stop yourself making a move towards the wooden spoon and leftover arrabiata – is gone. So the effect of the problem, the excess weight, is not long for this world either.
The dieting industry is worth something like 60 billion US dollars. This is not their overriding message, I can assure you, for it it were, that figure would be closer to 0 – and they know that. There’s no money to be made if you actually fix the problem. So they perpetuate it with diet plans and low-calorie meal replacements laden with ingredients concocted in test tubes. Dicks.
The real question, then, is how do we unhook ourselves from food? How do we become that magical person who doesn’t continue shovelling in the pasta long after their belly is stuffed?
Answer: by correctly identifying the source of the longing.
See, the source of the longing to keep eating is not the physical item of the spaghetti. An inanimate object can’t whizz up the feeling of desire and force you to feel it. The source of the longing, the desire, is your thought. Meaning the urge to eat is coming from inside you. It turns out, thought is the only thing in the world that can whizz up a feeling and force you to feel it.
Now, this is good news because, being thought, it means it’s super-easy to ignore the longing for more pasta because all that’s required is a change of mind. From, “oh christ, I want more, I can’t resist, I’m helpless, I’m fucked, I need more, I’ll never be thin… etc etc” to, “huh, there’s a thought telling me I want to eat more, so what?”
With this knowledge, in other words, you will be able to switch allegiances from being the believer of the thought to the observer of the thought, which automatically strips the thought of its power. End result? You feel the yearning / pining / longing for more pasta, but you don’t take it seriously. In fact, you laugh at it, you roll your eyes at it, you pop the pasta in some tupperware and go watch TV.
Do this a few times and the longing goes away. Because it’s thought, and thought doesn’t keep showing up where it’s clearly not wanted.
It’s a simple answer, but it just so happens to be The answer, and anything that’s not this? Is just taking you away from the truth.