Faulks Martin - The Zen Diet Revolution: The Mindful Path to Permanent Weight Loss

I F YOU WERE TO SEE ME ON the beach, in the street or in the gym, you wouldnt think I was anyone who thought about food. Nowadays I have very low body fat and carry quite a bit of muscle. People often say things like Well, youre lucky; you can eat like a horse and never put on weight. Little do they know the irony of that statement.

Ever since I can remember, I have had a great passion for life and for food. There are few things I dont like to eat and meal times are a daily pleasure. Now that was fine when I was young but things started to change as I got older. My job included a lot of business meals, and I had developed a terrible habit of eating out as a means of celebration. I exercised every day and I think that made me feel immune to any extra calories. One day, I looked in the mirror and I was fat. I didnt need weighing scales or a body-fat monitor to tell me, it was obvious! I was just like most of the other businessmen I know. I had a giant belly and looked terrible. The only difference was that I had a slightly stockier frame from daily weightlifting. I knew the next step was a heart attack. It was something I had seen in many others. Besides, at 30 years old I should be fit and healthy. What kind of an example was I setting to my daughter and to others in the martial arts community? Something had to change.

As a fitness enthusiast and the son of a well-known food scientist I was the ideal person to skim off the pounds, right? Wrong! As soon as I cut my calories, I started to spend every waking moment thinking about food. It was horrible! I fought through it for a month or two and lost some weight. As soon as I stopped the diet, I went back to my old routine and then the weight went back on, which was so frustrating. I started to realize that the problem was more than just a simple change of habits; it was a complete and permanent change, both in my habits and my attitude towards food.

I needed a permanent solution. I started trying all sorts of standardized diets, including ones where I would eat salad for dinner every night. Some of them had great effects on my body composition, but it was so hard to live a normal life and impossible to keep to in the long term. I kept changing my meal plan, searching for a solution that would work forever, but with little success. Anything I tried ultimately was artificial and forced and couldnt be maintained for any length of time. What I didnt know, and what took me a while to realize, was that my thinking was all wrong. Your diet and your weight/health management is a skill. Its not something that you can cure with a silver bullet; one quick-fix change is not going to be the answer. It is something you need to work at and improve as you go along. Everything takes an ongoing effort: your food choices, your rest and your exercise. It even takes a while for your body to develop the ability to burn fat. Thats right, your fat-burning response, if you have never used it before, actually gets better and better. When I realized that, everything changed. I started applying the disciplines and philosophies I had learned from other areas of my life to my diet and body-weight goals, with amazing results.

This book is the result of many years of my studying the art of weight management, diet and exercise. Everything you read in this book is something we have tried and tested and proved to work. The science is sound due to the kind help of my father, world-renowned food scientist Richard Faulks. In your hands you hold the key to total control over your body weight, your looks and your health. You need only turn the key in the lock to open the doorway to the new you.

This approach isnt just for people like me it is for everyone. Philippas story is somewhat different. For many years she was really quite skinny and desperate to put on weight. On the following pages she explains her Zen Diet story.

I was always being asked stupid questions about my weight and food habits, and was continually under suspicion of being anorexic, which wasnt helped by the fact that I had suffered from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and incredibly low energy levels since I was a teenager. I certainly tried to eat healthily and was strictly vegetarian for about seven years until I decided I needed more protein than could be obtained from a vegetarian diet. This was due to a basic intolerance of the main protein source of soya, beans and pulses that chronically aggravated my IBS. Many of my vegetarian friends were horrified when I converted back to eating meat and fish, insisting that I could get just as much protein from eating soya and could put on weight adequately with a veggie diet, and so on. However, I then watched what they were eating, and far from getting most of their protein from the healthier options of beans, nuts and soya, they were, in fact, almost always supplementing their protein (and I now know, their calorific requirements) with large quantities of cheese, milk and cream!

So, back on a meat-enriched diet I still didnt put on much weight (although my general mood got better) until I reached the fabled (and dreaded) age of 35. Now, I have a feeling a lot of ladies will know exactly what I experienced I swear that, overnight from the age of 34 to the morning of my 35th birthday, my bottom expanded and some inner biological deployment of fat occurred. Since then I have had an ever-increasing battle with firmly deposited bulge. One thing that had been a problem from my teens was my intolerance for exercise much as I enjoyed my foray into jazz/ballet dance that I did in my youth, and later some Pilates classes, I found it incredibly hard to keep up any exercise for extended periods. I would often feel exhausted quickly and had reoccurring flu-like bouts after exercising for any length of time. I shrugged this off as yet another annoying part of whatever it was that made me so tired all the time; after all, my doctors kept telling me nothing was actually