Dear
Did you know that starving yourself can actually make you fat?
In a famous study into human starvation, biological researcher Ancel Keyes discovered that
reducing people’s diet to a state of semi-starvation produced symptoms of irritability, loss of
endurance and obsessive behavior around food, including but not limited to lying, hoarding
and stealing.
Even more telling, in the three-month period after the semi-starvation was ended and people
could once again eat whatever they wanted, their obsession with food continued. Many
people ate up to eight times as much food as they had done before the study began.
What I find most interesting about this study is that the “semi-starvation” rations from the
original study amounted to about 1500 calories a day – more than is allowed in any number
of the thousands of diets and weight loss systems currently in vogue.
Does any of this sound familiar? Starving yourself, obsessing about food, losing weight only
to pile it back on again the second you go off your diet?
What all this goes to show is that depriving yourself of food is the worst possible way to lose
weight. And if what you’re doing isn’t working, you need to do something different.
That’s why the first golden rule is this:
When you’re hungry, eat.
I still remember the first time I shared this golden rule with one of my private clients. She
was shocked!
“If I did that,” she told me, “I’d never stop.”
Isn’t it funny that some people are such experts on what they’ve never done?
It’s time to end the self-inflicted torture of diets and semi-starvation rations and learn to listen
to your body instead!
Make this commitment today:
I, ________________, promise myself that for at least the next 2 weeks, I will eat whenever
I’m hungry no matter how I feel about it.
