Rangan Chatterjee - Feel Better In 5: Your Daily Plan to Feel Great for Life

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First published 2019

Copyright Dr Rangan Chatterjee, 2019

Photography copyright Clare Winfield, 2019
Design and art direction by Miranda Harvey

The moral right of the copyright holders has been asserted

Cover images Chris Terry

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

Colour repro by ALTA Image

ISBN: 978-0-241-39781-7

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TO MY MOTHER,
THANKS FOR EVERYTHING.

It never works, does it? That amazing healthy-lifestyle plan you swore you were going to stick to. That solemn resolution that you were going to exercise three times a week, eat wholesome food and lose that excess weight thats been bothering you for years.

It starts off well enough. You begin your new regime full of energy and optimism. You smash through the first day or two, beaming with pride, convinced youll be able to keep it up for ever. But then it gets trickier. The novelty wears off. Life gets in the way. You might last a week or two, maybe a month, perhaps even several months. But somehow, you always seem to find yourself back where you started again. So you beat yourself up. You didnt have what it takes. You didnt have the willpower. You just werent good enough. You failed.

Wrong. The very fact that the experience Ive just described is so utterly predictable should be all the proof you need that the problem isnt you. The vast majority of people who try diets and health-turnaround plans dont manage to make them stick. As a busy GP, Ive seen it time and time again smart, tough and worried people struggling with the basics of living well and promising to do better. They would embark upon their latest health kicks full of sincere promises that this time they were going to change their habits for good, and then Id inevitably see them in my surgery, a few months later, sad and ashamed of themselves, apologizing for their failures.

But these patients have nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of. And neither do you. The fact is, most health plans are based on the common, but incorrect assumption that you can make sweeping and lasting changes to your health by relying solely on willpower and motivation. Youve been promised you can simply decide to become a different person a new, energetic, healthy, zingy, glowingly perfect version of you and then become it. For the vast majority of us, this is just not true.

Most people who decide to change their lives using only willpower to get them through are pretty much doomed to fail. And the reason for that failure doesnt lie in them but in the method itself. Sure, willpower and motivation are important to get you started, but in the long term they are rarely enough. The proof is in the untold millions of sensible and determined people all over the world whove tried and tried and tried again, only to find themselves back where they started.

If this sounds like you, theres no need to despair, because in your hands you have a plan that is finally going to help you. This plan will not only have you feeling better within days, it will also lead to meaningful and long-lasting change. My plan is easy to follow, easy to maintain and requires only the smallest amount of willpower.

Feel Better in 5 is a programme that has been tried and tested on my patients. Busy people with busy lives, just like you. And it works so well because it has been created using the latest science on successful behaviour change and because it understands that the vast majority of health problems which people suffer from today are rooted in our busy modern lifestyles.

Its revolutionary because it will lead to noticeable change without demanding that you wake up tomorrow morning and magically become a completely new you. All it asks for is five minutes of your time, three times a day, just five days a week.

MY PLAN IS EASY TO FOLLOW
EASY TO MAINTAIN AND REQUIRES ONLY
THE SMALLEST AMOUNT OF WILLPOWER

Before we rush head first into the details of the Feel Better in 5 method, lets take a quick moment to understand why it is so effective. It is based on the simple fact that it is the way we choose to live, day in and day out, that mostly defines how healthy we end up being. If we consistently make good choices, well end up feeling well. If we repeatedly make bad ones, well end up struggling and getting sick. This may sound so obvious its hardly worth saying at all. But it might surprise you to know that this is not how we currently look at health.

Imagine that you go to see your doctor, complaining of a headache. Your doctor will listen to you describe your symptoms and give you a diagnosis based upon what youve said. They may say you have a tension headache or a migraine. Youll probably then be prescribed one or more medications to help you with your pain. This is how doctors are trained. Its how I was trained, in one of the UKs top medical schools.

Of course, theres nothing necessarily wrong with giving you a pill to help reduce your pain. But I believe a much better approach would be to try to figure out the root cause of your headache. For example, it might have been triggered by not drinking enough water, excess stress, a food intolerance, too much screen time, a neck problem or insufficient sleep. Sure, a pill might be helpful in the short term. But in the long term we should be aiming to understand why you got your headache in the first place.

This is the approach Ive taken in Feel Better in 5. It recognizes that for most of us, the source of good health, as well as bad health, is our lifestyle. About 80 per cent of the problems I see as a GP are not caused by a glitch in our system that simply needs fixing. Instead, they are usually a sign that something is wrong in my patients day-to-day activities. Im not only talking about conditions like type 2 diabetes and putting on excess weight, which many of us already recognize can be related to our lifestyles. Our collective modern ways of life also play a role in many other complaints, such as gut problems, mood issues, insomnia, low sex drive, poor concentration, hormonal complaints and high blood pressure.