Rangan Chatterjee - Feel Great Lose Weight: Long term, simple habits for lasting and sustainable weight loss

If you do wish to eat bread, try to choose ones that are made with proper wholegrains, have ingredients that you can easily recognize and are made in a traditional style. Good options tend to be the dark German-style breads that are full of seeds and often come in squares.

Long-term, simple habits for lasting and sustainable weight loss

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CLARE WINFIELD

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First published by Penguin Life in 2020

Copyright Dr Rangan Chatterjee, 2020

Photography copyright Clare Winfield, 2020
Design and art direction by Miranda Harvey

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

Cover image Chris Terry

Names and identifying details have been changed.
Any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental

Colour reproduction by ALTA Image

ISBN: 978-0-241-39784-8

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FOR JAINAM AND ANOUSHKA

I HOPE THIS BOOK CONTRIBUTES TO A MORE COMPASSIONATE WORLD FOR YOU TO GROW UP AND THRIVE IN

Its time to stop feeling bad about yourself. Its time to stop beating yourself up. Its time to stop blaming yourself for all the struggles you might have had in the past about your weight. Its time to get smart about how to solve them. Its time for a new approach one thats scientifically sound, doesnt make you feel tired or ratty or hungry and one that actually works.

If youre someone who struggles with maintaining a healthy weight and tends to judge yourself negatively, I have something important to tell you. It honestly cant wait a moment longer. Its harder for you. Truly. If youre struggling with excess weight, its because youre different. You have a different body, which is functioning in a different way and has been on a different life journey to all those people who seem to be able to maintain a healthy weight so effortlessly. Its not your fault.

This book will help you understand the true causes of your weight gain and show you how to reverse it in a responsible way. It will also help you keep that weight off with some easy and effective techniques that are fine-tuned to fit in with your life. By the time youve reached the last page, I hope to have completely changed the way you see the issue of carrying too much fat.

Before we go any further, lets take a moment to deal with some of those unhelpful but, sadly, common myths about weight. The Western world has seen soaring levels of obesity since the early eighties. Its easy to jump to the conclusion that people whove been around since then are lazier and greedier than any generation that came before them. This is simply not true and I find it incredible that so many people seem to believe it.

Previous generations werent trying to be slim. They werent succeeding where weve failed. They were just going about their daily lives. The same is true for people who live in parts of the world that dont suffer from growing rates of obesity. Theyre not trying to be slim and managing what we cant. Members of ancient hunter-gatherer tribes, like the ones that we evolved in, werent trying to be slim. Neither are the members of hunter-gatherer tribes that still exist today. The idea that these people are fundamentally different from us, that they have more motivation and greater willpower, is crazy.

The truth is that evolution works extremely slowly. In other words, humans all over the world have been the same for hundreds of thousands of years. There wasnt a sudden change in the eighties that turned our mindsets fat. What changed was the world around us. No society in the whole of history has been surrounded by as many delicious and tempting calorie-rich foods as we are. On top of that, no previous human society has been expected to do work that requires such little physical activity. Most of us these days spend our working lives behind desks or steering wheels or computer screens and are exposing ourselves to disrupted and irregular sleep routines. Were more tired than ever, more stressed than ever and more likely to eat outside traditional mealtimes.

All these factors can play a starring role in weight gain. If you put your great-grandparents, or a member of an African tribe that existed a hundred thousand years ago, in a time machine and brought them to our world today, theres every chance that they, too, would develop a problem with excess weight. In other words, its not us thats changed, its the world around us.

Ah, you might say, but if its our environment thats making us fat, and not our laziness or greed, then how come lots of people do manage to stay slim? You cant blame the temptations of the supermarket confectionery aisle or the high-street burger chain or our sedentary lives when we have neighbours, friends and colleagues who dont seem to struggle like we do.

Whilst its certainly true that not everyone is carrying excess fat, some of that variation is down to the fact that were all wired differently. Our genes and past experiences, for example, can help to set the dial on how much we crave unhealthy foods and how our body responds when eating those foods. They can also influence how likely we are to cave at the sight of a chocolate bar at the supermarket checkout. Perhaps you grew up in a family that wasnt able to make healthy choices or you may have a job that makes it really challenging to have a routine around food. Or, maybe your life is full of stress that results in you prioritizing other things, like money and bills, before your health. Perhaps you are a carer for others and feel that you barely have enough time to sleep, let alone think about the quality of the food that you are putting in your mouth. You might live or work in an environment thats more likely to trigger unhealthy eating behaviours. Or, you may have suffered through punishing calorie-restriction diets that have made your problem worse. You could be all of the above.

But dont despair. There is hope. In fact, theres more than just hope. Over the last few years, scientists have made some incredible discoveries, and were going to take full advantage of them in order to solve your weight problems once and for all.