Controlling your weight is easier once you are aware of what happens inside your body when you swallow a bite of food. Did you know that eating is hard work for your system? This article is about the digestive system, about where the food comes from that some of us eat, and about losing weight with the Sneaky Fast Plan, all part of the EasyFitness series.

Paradoxically glossy pictures of delicious looking healthy dishes only make you want to eat. Talking or reading about food makes you desire it, can make you crave it. If I write the word chocolate, your taste buds and saliva glands are programmed by your brain to go “yum, yum!”, ever since you were a child. On this hub I want you to stop thinking about food. Food is for eating, not for thinking, talking or reading about. Once the problem of being overweight is detached from the food issue, you are on your way to improving your shape.

The Digestive Cycle

Why not become acquainted with your body instead? And not only from the outside, trying to resemble Jane Fonda in her former prime. Here you will take a look at the inside of your body as well. Now don’t be repulsed; the inside of your body is incredibly beautiful and clever. Everything works coherently together to give you the best out of life. Why should that repulse you? Especially since your insides are the most important part of yourself. Please watch this video before we continue.

It takes a lot of energy to digest food. The body likes to be at rest when food is digested. You cannot be physically active on a full stomach, hence the siesta in Southern countries.

I've often wondered what the substance is that makes a pot belly. OK so there is a considerable layer of fat on top; you can pinch and feel that. But underneath the layer of fat, there is more bulge  inside the belly which makes some men look like they are 12 months pregnant. What is that stuff? Well, as I've just learned from the above video, the large intestine processes undigested food and turns it into feaces. Can you can draw your own conclusion?

When to Eat or not to Eat

An overfed, stagnant body that never moves much is going to become very unsatisfied. Not aware enough to identify the real cause of its discomfort, the food-addicted body is not sure why it is feeling unsatisfied and attempts to appease the vague sense of ‘want’, of feeling ‘empty’, by sneaking to the refrigerator, the chocolate box or the drinks cabinet for unnecessary, even harmful nourishment. This cycle not only makes you fat, it also creates guilt, harms your self-esteem, can give you indigestion, piles, candida, colonitis, or stomach ulcers, make you obese, anorexic or even bulimic. You may think you are unable to change, but change is waiting just around the corner.

Change is Life

A common misconception about the body is that it cannot change. By instinct, your friendly body always tries to feel better. Another delusion is that moving is tiring. On the contrary, good movement is reviving. Sitting perched on an office chair for eight hours a day is more tiring than a mixed variety of recommended revitalizing stretches, breathing routines and good movements.

The Fat Issue Disclosed

There is nothing wrong with fat. Fat is not evil, it is not to be feared. Fat is comfortable, cuddly, and has many useful purposes. What is the function of fat? Fat serves to maintain body temperature and to provide padding, protection and support. A mother’s belly stays fat after she gives birth because her baby needs this soft cushion to lie on while she is breastfeeding. That is, if the mother feeds her baby sitting on a chair. If she lies down on her side to feed, her belly will soon go away.

Fat Protects

Fat protects the precious marrow-containing bones. Fat is a safety device acquired by the body so that when you accidentally fall over you don’t so easily break your limbs. A fit muscle contracts (becomes hard and bouncy) on impact. The bone is then safe. If a muscle is so weak that it is not resilient and bouncy enough to protect the underlying bone from possible damage, then the body has to resort to the next best form of padding: fat tissue. The padding quality of fat also helps those who are less fit support their body parts when they are stuck in static positions for too long. People whose movement vocabulary is small, who don’t use many muscles, often grow cushions of fat to be more comfortable.

How do you get rid of fat?

Unused muscles are very easy beds for fat to grow on. Fat doesn’t like change. Fat is harder than relaxed muscle. It is lazy, static and prefers not to be reminded of itself. Muscles can be toned up. Fat can’t move, but it can disappear. The friendly body’s first instinct is to be comfortable. It is therefore not going to keep a cumbersome lump of fat sitting on a spot where it would be in the way of a movement or even a position. As you vary your positions more your muscles tone up and the fat is no longer needed. It humbly retreats, to be absorbed and rejected by the body quite naturally.

Rules for eating less

1. Empty your bowels before you eat
2. One or at most two meals a day
3. No drinking while eating
4. Stay well clear of meat

Empty your bowels before you eat

Sorry to begin so crudely, but the order of things demands that you empty your bowels before you eat. If you have not been to the toilet today, don’t eat breakfast, or even lunch, until you have. The body is a mere container for passing energy, thought and feeling. If you fill it up before it is emptied out, you will create blockages and traffic jams inside which will soon cause you discomfort. Fasting for a day or two has never done anyone any harm. It will clean you out, ready to start afresh. If you do decide to fast, drink plenty of water, not fruit juice; you don’t need the acid or sugar.

One, at most two meals a day

An adult can live happily on one good meal a day. This meal is best taken in the late afternoon or early evening before relaxing or retiring, after the day’s work has been done. ‘Oh, but I would pass out if I didn’t eat a little every few hours!’ we hear you say. If you feel very hungry or tired during the day, eat a sandwich, but wait! Try this first and it will pick you up like a fresh breeze:

1. Find a place to lie down somewhere for a few minutes.

2. Stretch out fully, breathe deeply and relax.

3. Sit up and drink plenty of fresh water.

This simple procedure will give you instant energy and you may not need that snack after all. If you really must eat something, have a piece of raw vegetable or fruit.

No drinking while eating

A meal should be balanced in such a way that you don’t need to ‘drink’ your food down. A bite of food should contain enough raw, juicy vegetables or salad ingredients to moisten the mouth while chewing.

If you need to drink while you eat, it means that the composition of your meal is not right. Swallowing mushy, overcooked, dark brown food isn’t appetizing and is bad for digestion and for the teeth, as it does away with the preliminary digestive process of chewing when saliva and its useful enzymes mixes with the food before it descends into the stomach. Rinse your mouth with water after eating (to clean your teeth) but don’t, as a rule, drink during meals unless a special ‘wine and dine’ occasion demands the odd toast for good form.

Unless the reason for your oversized figure is glandular, or related to some other disease, there is only one solution: eat less frequently, give the stomach a well deserved rest. Simple! This can be achieved painlessly and systematically with the Sneaky Fast Plan.

The Sneaky Fast Plan

Forget calories, nutritional values, additives, food with expiry dates, vitamins, minerals, pounds, kilos, inches or centimeters. Instead of food solutions to your weight problem, I suggest a different menu:

• for starters: relax in the ‘child pose’ and say hello to your tummy.

• main course:­ some well-done back arching moves

• afters — the sweet feeling of permanent weight loss.

Stay well clear of meat

Caution. The following story may contain text which might be offensive to some readers. But I take the view that although the story below may be a little unpalatable to read, it is a true account and an important lesson in health and safety..

Why I became vegetarian

A dance and fitness studio I managed was situated in an inner London courtyard shared with the back entrance of a butcher’s shop. Every morning a large van delivered huge carcasses of beef, halves of pigs, etc., which would then be weighed outside on a huge scale. The legs of beef that were being carried into the butcher seemed much larger than the leg of any cow I had ever seen in a field. The meat seemed swollen and was bright red. Flies were zooming from the bins to the meat, happily gorging themselves on fresh blood. In the late afternoon, when all the butchers had gone home, stray dogs, cats and birds would negotiate any spare bones and leave their excretions behind. Sometimes the odd drunk would enter the deserted yard, looking for a corner to urinate.

It wasn’t long after moving in that we called the health inspector, but it took a year to get the yard cleaned up and the butcher’s scales moved inside their premises. On Tuesday nights I taught a class called ‘Big is Beautiful’ for our more weighty clients. Some of these people’s thighs were so large, they resembled the carcasses of meat brought into the butcher shop in the morning. Their thighs were so fat, they were rubbing together, causing soreness and impaired walking.

When I questioned our heavier clients about their diets my hunch was confirmed. They all turned out to be regular meat-eaters, some of them eating meat with every meal, full English breakfast included. Were there any weight-enhancing drugs and colouring agents in the meat? I became a vegetarian just to be on the safe side.

Lifestock farming and climate change

The positive side of this nasty story is that once I stopped eating meat I discovered a wealth of new tastes, spend a lot less time cooking, and have gained better skin, hair, nails and teeth in the bargain. So if you are determined to lose weight fast, give up meat at once. After a few weeks, you won’t even like it any more. Cooked meat will look to you like rubber and taste like wet cardboard that stays stuck in your teeth. You don’t need meat, you are meat. If you think it inconceivable to survive without meat, eat it only occasionally and not more than twice a week (and make sure you know where and how it was produced – an almost impossibility).

The Sneaky Fast Plan, cont.,

The stomach is a bit like a child: give it something to eat and it will want more, until it is full. If you don’t start eating first thing in the morning, when your stomach is still half asleep and your belly has not even had time to empty its contents yet, your stomach doesn't want any food. You might be in the habit of eating first thing in the morning, but I assure you, your stomach does not need any food at this time. You have not been active since the big dinner you pushed down your throat last night so the energy gained from that dinner has not yet been expended. Therefore the first step of the Sneaky Fast Plan is to skip breakfast.

Week One – skip breakfast

Have a drink of fruit or vegetable juice instead of breakfast to help empty your stomach from the previous day’s culinary abuse. You may drink water throughout the day as much as you please. By lunchtime, provided you have by then emptied your bowels, eat yourself to the full and avoid meat if you possibly can. Ditto for dinner time. By the third day or so, your stomach will already have shrunk slightly from skipping breakfast and from being allowed to have had a rest by being empty for a few hours in the morning. Do this for two weeks. Do not continue to the next step of the sneaky fast plan until you are comfortable following it up to this point.

Week Three – skip lunch

Once successful with skipping breakfast (it might take you longer, you might fail and have to start again at the beginning) go on and skip lunch. At lunchtime, have one of your favourite juice drinks and get into the routine of doing something you enjoy like walking or sleeping or reading or going to the hairdresser or library or (if you must) go clothes shopping or whatever takes your fancy and distracts you from eating. In all circumstances, don’t binge. By teatime or suppertime, eat yourself to the full but go easy on meat.

After a few days of this third week, your stomach will have shrunk even more from skipping breakfast and lunch. Now you will require smaller portions to fill you up at your evening meals. Keep this up for two weeks (again, if you fail, go back to your last successful point in the Sneaky Fast Plan). By now you’ll begin to enjoy being less bloated, moving better and having more energy to do other things than digesting unnecessary food. You’ll also have more time to do the things you enjoy doing other than eating, and save money to go to the movies or buy some more essential oils for your bath pampering sessions.

After the third week your digestive system should gradually begin to function normally but you’ll only be sure of that if elimination takes place regularly, once a day in the morning shortly after you get up. If this is not the case, carry on skipping breakfast and lunch and eat dinner or supper only until you have reached that stage.

Objection: “I’ll faint if I don’t eat all day.”

Answer: Rubbish, if you are overweight, you have enough fat reserves to keep you going for at least three weeks without any food at all. So be quiet and enjoy the Sneaky Fast Plan or else I might put you on a week’s full fast, like some dieticians recommend, would you prefer that?

I wish you success with the Sneaky Fast Plan. Take the evening meal as close as possible to bed time. Yes, that means going to bed earlier. And don’t believe the myth that it is bad for you to go to sleep on a full stomach. This is only the case if the stomach is overfilled to the brim with excessively greasy, over-spiced, five course restaurant meals and alcohol. Stick to simple meals and you’ll be just fine.

EasyFitness

You can find all the other episodes I have written so far on fitness and weight loss here EasyFitness series.

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Let me know in a comment how you get on with the Sneaky Fast Plan

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