Cut The Crap is as much about the nonsense the media feeds us - and which we swallow - about our bodies, dieting, superfoods - as it is about the crap we eat.
Around 97 per cent of diets fail - a ludicrous state of affairs when you consider the size and “success” of the dieting industry.
And the Grit Doctor has had enough. Enough of being told it is bad to eat carbs and good to eat egg white omelettes. Enough of being force fed images of stick thin celebrities just weeks after giving birth. Enough of mean spirited magazines and deranged reality television shows pointing the finger at people’s bodies and inviting us to laugh at and judge them. It is distracting us all from the real issues about food that actually matter: from food labelling to portion size, from sugar addiction to our insatiable appetite for processed foods - issues that demand our scrutiny so that we can make better food choices for ourselves and our increasingly porky children.
[There is a way into being healthy, reaching a normal weight and sustaining it without dieting: and this book shows us how. It starts with eliminating the very obvious crap from our diets (read muffins, cakes, biscuits, crisps cola) and our minds (believing certain fruits and root vegetables must be eliminated from our diets on the basis that they are too sugary? Or getting our knickers in a twist about eating bread and potatoes?) Carbs have never been the real enemy nor has any combination of food groups. Take it as read that if you are overweight, white rice is the least of your worries.]
My darling husband, Olly, (those of you who read Run Fat Bitch Run may recall he was a guinea pig for my brutal training regime) is back in the hot seat. At the start of writing the book he was two stone overweight, his only exercise was five-a-side football once a week and he was eating a whole load of crap. The book is also the story of his journey from crap-guzzling-couch-potato to six-pack-super-stud, okay I'm exaggerating, but he cut the crap and lost two stone along the way, and not a chia seed in sight. And if he can cut the crap and win, everybody can.
Some condensed extracts from Cut The Crap:
The Grit Doctor translates some popular diets Alkaline Ash: Steal vast quantities of litmus paper from your kids' school chemistry lab for peeing on to make sure your body's pH is bang on the money. Paleo: Because evolution never really happened did it?
Sugar Free: Eat only, err, meat and fats sugarkins. Beyond deranged.
5:2: Live like an anorexic for two days a week and lose weight. Surprise, surprise.
Dukan: Don't. Can't.
Atkins: Eat protein and fat and enjoy smelly breath, insomnia and constipation. WARNING: Heart attacks and kidney failure possible. Bad health guaranteed.
The Zone - Remove any joy and spontaneity from mealtimes. Get degrees in nutrition and maths so you can get those carb/protein ratios bang on every time. And you'll need to buy back the scales that I'm going to make you give away later, as you'll need them to weigh your food.
South Beach: Atkins renamed, revised and revamped.
Raw Food: How to lose friends and alienate people. Never EVER enjoy a normal meal again.
Juice: Regress to babyhood and allow no solids to pass your lips for a week. WARNING: Expect to faint. A lot. Or die.
Detox: Binge like a fiend and punish yourself afterwards through starvation.
Breatharian: Live on, err, fresh air and sunlight? Guaranteed death if followed successfully.
Fruitarian: Exist only on fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds. Mmm. Not God's Way.
The Grit Doctor says It doesn't take a nutritionist or a scientist to tell you that any eating regime which prescribes excluding entire food groups can be neither sane nor healthy, let alone sustainable or realistic.
The diet industry is bending over backwards to blind us to the basic facts that eating less crap and exercising more is all you need to know to maintain a healthy weight. Why? Because no one makes any money out of empowering individuals to take responsibility for themselves. The diet industry thrives on having us feel powerless, out of control and unable to succeed without them and their magic pill, potion or secret combination of food groups that will literally melt away our fat . . . and fears.
The Grit Doctor says
If the dieting industry worked, there would be no return customers and no profit - so failure is its raison d’être, its central truth. And that is deeply screwed up.
SETTLING DOWN WEIGHT So, the idea is that after a long-standing commitment to regular exercise and a crap-cutting way of life, your body with recalibrate itself to a kind of resting place - a settling point, a weight at which it is most comfortable and likes to stay around, give or take 6 lb or so. It has always been and will always be an artificial nonsense to choose a number of pounds to lose or to pick a specific goal weight. Or be dictated to by a diet that says "lose 7lb in seven days" irrespective of what your starting weight is. Let your body dictate, not a book or a 'diet'. Listen to your body and drown out the nonsense coming at you from outside of it. Once you are within the normal healthy weight range for your gender, age and height, then settle into it and make friends with the real you.
Diets get you to chase the impossible dream. A weight which is always out of your reach. Quite deliberately too, because the industry is invested in your failure. This is the ultimate fallacy, the absolute nonsense of dieting, because it turns genuine attempts to tackle poor eating habits into vanity waistline projects destined to fail.
You cannot decide in advance what your target weight is. You can decide the range via an online BMI calculator. My BMI range spans more than two stone. Somewhere within that range is where my body will choose to settle, give or take 6 lb fluctuations either way, and fighting that would be resigning myself to a lifetime of dieting.
Your settling point is your healthy settling point, and if you are overweight or underweight, you are not currently at it and you need to re-settle yourself. Once you have been eating a normal diet and taking regular exercise for a long time (at least 6 months) then you might be approaching that point. This of course depends on how far away you were from it when you started. It is the point really at which you stop losing any weight when you are eating normally and exercising regularly.
The Grit Doctor Warns That you feel quite settled on the couch munching a pastry, at a stone above your recommended BMI maximum, is not the sort of 'settled' I am referring to.
The really crucial part about your ‘settling down weight’, is that you are built to a certain specification that - up to a point - you cannot change without going completely bonkers. This may be why that last 5 or 6 lb on any diet almost kills you to lose. Why bother, if you are within the healthy range already and clearly have wide hips and shoulders? Faaaaark it, I say - chances are you have already dramatically reduced the medical problems associated with being overweight. For morbidly obese crap-cutters, this is welcome news because just getting rid of some of the excess weight brings massive health benefits, such as reversing or preventing diabetes, lowering blood pressure, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, improving sleep problems - not to mention having a huge impact on your self-esteem and energy levels. It is a big enough challenge just to keep that weight lost without adding in another vanity 6 lb into the mix. That’s just unnecessary, counter-intuitive and counter-productive.
The Grit Doctor warns Guard against an artificially high settling point. Your settling point is never one that is overweight and reached while still eating crap and/or not exercising, excusing yourself with the 'big bones/same build as my aunt/slow metabolism/fat gene' rubbish or whatever other bullshit excuse you have been hiding behind up until now.
