Barry Groves - Natural Health and Weight Loss

This is where it all started for me: if I and my wife, Monica, hadnt been overweight, I probably would not have written this book or any other.

When we were married in April 1957 I weighed 11 stones (161 lb or 73 kg) and Monica weighed ten stones (140 lb or 62 kg). These were quite normal weights as we were five feet nine inches (1.75 m) and five feet six inches (1.67 m) tall respectively.

Monica was a good cook, and used to cooking for her parents and sister as well as herself.

We hadnt got much money so Monica made her own bread; she also made cakes and biscuits. It wasnt long before we started to put weight on.

Over the next five years our weights yo-yoed as we tried low-calorie dieting, sweaty clothes, inert fillers and played tennis and badminton, swam, and walked everywhere. We lost weight, put it on again; lost weight, put it on again, and so on. Im sure you know what I mean.

Nothing worked in the long term. Monica weighed 12 stone (168 lb or 74 kg) at her peak and my weight went up to 13 stone (189 lb or 84 kg).

In 1960 we started to cut down on the (carbs). In those days it was the thing to do, but it only worked up to a point. Just cutting calories didnt work; we got hungry. Replacing the carbs with protein was not only expensive, we didnt feel right eating that way it was as though something was missing, and we still struggled with our weight.

, he said.

He had to be joking, right? We knew that fat contained far more calories than carbs or protein. It seemed ridiculous to suggest we eat fat. But, having tried everything else, we decided to give it a go.

It worked! By 1963 Monicas weight was 8 st 10 lb (122 lb or 54 kg), a loss of over 40 lb; mine was the 11 st 7 lb it had been when we married. That started me thinking. If what looked like a high-calorie diet was good for weight loss, why were we told to eat a low-calorie diet? I wanted to know.

At the time, being in the RAF, I couldnt do much research. Monica and I ate our fried egg and bacon breakfasts, fat meat followed by fruit and cream dinners and our weights stayed down. The fatter cuts of meat were also cheaper because they werent so popular and that suited us just fine. But the best part was that we had no difficulty living this way at all, and our weights continued to stay down.

In 1971 I started to give a talk about our experience entitled The Fat of the Land to clubs like Womens Institute, Young Farmers, and anyone else who would listen. By the late 1970s, however, we started to hear that the sort of diet we ate, which was high in animal fats, was bad for us: it caused heart disease, they said.

With my previous experience, I wondered how much truth there was in this. I therefore determined to leave the RAF as soon as I could, and research diet to find out. In 1982 I did just that, and have been doing full-time research into nutrition and health in general ever since. This book is based on what I have learned.

As Im sure you have discovered, the difficult part of weight control isnt actually losing weight, its keeping it off for life. Monica has now had 45 years of eating fried breakfasts, fat meat, extra-large eggs, full-fat cheese, and fruit and cream and so on, as well as vegetables and fruit. Her weight has been around 9 st (126 lb or 54 kg) and mine has been around 11 st 7 lb (161 lb or 73 kg) for as long as we can remember.

It is a diet that works for life!

Barry Groves 2007