Eva Orsmond - The last diet : cook yourself thin with Dr. Eva

Shahroo Izadi is a Behavioural Change Specialist whose approach to lasting habit change is influenced by her frontline addiction treatment work in a number of different settings. Through this experience, Shahroo developed a knowledge of how to elicit selfled, sustainable and meaningful change, even in those who are most resistant to it. Shahroos first book, The Kindness Method, has been translated into five languages.

The Last Diet was created largely from my experience in two main areas:

1. A lifelong struggle with my weight
2. A career in addiction treatment

Theres no denying it, I was a chubby baby. At some point in my childhood, I started realising that my body was causing concern to those around me. When I was around nine years old, my mother began worrying that my weight was becoming an issue. So she started changing what she cooked at home and drawing my attention to the things I ate that I shouldnt eat so much of. She didnt tell me outright that it was because those foods were causing me to gain weight and that gaining weight was a bad thing. And, as a child, I simply picked up on the fact that there was now a new way to be good or bad. This was the first time I realised that some foods were naughty and that eating them would make people unhappy with me.

I had already started to suspect something was up. I remember kids in junior school asking me why I was bigger than them. I remember being in a school uniform shop once when I was about ten and the shop assistant telling my mum that the sizes didnt go up any higher, and that shed have to start altering my skirts. My mum then started to sew extra panels into the side and, when I went to school, I realised that parts of my skirt were a very slightly different shade to other girls.

As I became more aware that there was something wrong with me, I became more dependent on behaviours like bingeing and secret eating that would cause me to gain a lot of weight very quickly. As soon as I had a chance to consume the foods that my mother had controlled at home to slow down my weight gain, I would eat them like there was no tomorrow. I would obsess over getting my hands on them and strategise to ensure I could be alone with them. I would lie about how much of them I had eaten. Im not proud to admit the lengths Id go to for hit of the forbidden foods. And it was very much a hit, because thats the other force that was embedding my dependency on the forbidden foods: they were very high in sugar and fat. Food addiction was a very real part of my life before I understood what it was or indeed that it even existed.

In a similar way to what happens with many drugs, my tolerance grew and eventually I needed more of those hits more frequently to get my fix. As a result, I continued to gain weight at a rapid pace. By the time I was about twelve, the GP was telling me I was obese, and I had already grown very accustomed to being told by my peers that I was fat (and that being fat was a bad thing).

During secondary school, I started believing that boys didnt fancy fat girls and fat girls arent popular unless theyre funny or have something else to bring to the table. These assumptions began to turn into a self-fulfilling belief, where for example I would choose to stay at home and binge instead of going to a party, because I decided that while I was fat, I wasnt going to have much fun. TV shows and movies didnt help either. It seemed to be a very common storyline that it wasnt until someone lost weight that they became desirable, popular and self-respecting.

Both my relationship with food and with my weight started to become a problem I desperately wanted to deal with. I went to my mum asking for help and, with the best intentions in the world, she started calling for back up. She approached the issue from every angle you could think of. Anything to stop me crying when Id come home and say someone had made fun of me at school. Wed go to nutritionists, slimming clubs, dieticians, herbalists, hormone specialists and hypnotists. We came at the problem from two angles:

1. Find out whats wrong with my body
2. Find out how not to be fat anymore

My mum would sit there and explain (what she thought was) the whole story to the experts over and over again. What she didnt know was that at this stage I wasnt sure whether it was my secret binges on the forbidden foods that was the issue or if it was a problem with the way my body was working. By this point, I wasnt aware of how much I was already using food as a drug to help me cope with all the social, physical and emotional discomforts of being overweight. Since so many of my impulsive, rebellious, opportunistic eating habits had developed in secret, I didnt register how my actions were spiralling. Plus, I was just a kid!

During the initial consultations and assessments, I was made very aware of how long my weight had been causing concern. I witnessed countless pitches from experts who I realise now could only sell my mum a fix if they concluded that I needed fixing. I became more and more conscious that something was the matter with me and that it was costing those around me time, money and energy to try to fix it (however hard they tried to hide this fact from me). Behind every consultation room door was a new person who would weigh me, prod me, confirm something was wrong with me and offer me a cure.

As a result of many of these appointments, I would adopt various expert-recommended crash diets, and I genuinely wanted them to change my body and my life. But of course, they never did, because every time I fell off the wagon, I would binge. By my mid-teens, I seriously didnt want to be overweight anymore and was prepared to do anything to make that possible. Plus, my mum and I were a team, and although she never put pressure on me, she knew the rules I was meant to be following for each different attempt. Quite naturally, she was disappointed when I couldnt keep up the plans because she knew how desperately I wanted to be slimmer. The problem was that she couldnt really be the team mate she wanted to be because she didnt know the level my dependence on food had reached. Even if Id wanted to, I didnt have anywhere near enough insight or self-awareness to explain what was going on for me.

So, over and over again Id fall off track with these plans, become disillusioned and end up heavier than when I started. Any success they brought eventually became a curse, because the diets that gave me quick transformations were the ones I couldnt sustain, the ones that made life miserable. People would applaud me when I was visibly smaller, but they would notice every time I gained weight too. This of course made me feel self-conscious and afraid of being judged, as well as fostering the belief that people preferred me when I wasnt fat.

I reinforced this belief throughout my life, associating not being able to manage my weight with disappointments in other areas. I would look for evidence to confirm my suspicion that being fat was bad. And of course, growing up in the nineties as a girl in the Western world, there was a lot of it flying around.

Since my eating habits became entirely associated with my weight from such a young age, from birth to the time I went to university to study psychology, my way of eating had looked like this:

• Breast milk
• Food my mum knew was healthy for kids in general
• Food my mum knew would help me lose weight + secret binges
• Extreme diet plans
• Extreme diet plans + secret binges
• Food my mum knew would help me lose weight + secret binges