Beyond Temptation?

Gretel Hallet, is a Trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich - perfect for beginners to experience the core principles of Beyond Chocolate and equally great as a refresher for any Beyond Chocolater. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate or her workshops, get in touch with Gretel.

I recently attended Sophie and Audrey Boss’s first ‘Beyond Temptation’ workshop and can recommend it 100% - it will definitely help those of you who have been working with Beyond Chocolate for a while to move up to the next level. It will also serve as a good introduction to anyone who is looking for a new way forward that takes them away from self-destructive over-eating and dieting.
Before I say anything else, I would like to thank those ladies on the course who told me they read and enjoyed my blogs – I was very humbled and pleased to know that what I write is helping other people – I write very much to help myself process things I’m learning about myself and about being a Beyond Chocolater and it’s great to know that other women find that helpful with their own practice.
I loved being on the workshop; it was a very safe space with very lovely women all speaking the Beyond Chocolate language of non-dieting and managing food and our eating in a more caring and productive way. Every woman on that course was truly inspiring, truly beautiful in her own right and I hope they all got as much out of the day as I did.
So – am I now beyond all temptation? Can I walk past a bakery without being sucked in as if by some horizontal Charybdis? Do I turn my nose up at buffets? Am I eating only salads and ‘healthy foods’? Am I getting my five-a-day? Am I exercising religiously? Do I follow all the Beyond Chocolate principles to the letter? Would you hate me if I said ‘yes’ to any or all of those?!
Because actually the answer is ‘of course not’! That’s not what I want for my life. I love bakeries, buffets and salads – I don’t want to be beyond some of them and grimly champing my way through others because they’re ‘good for me’ … after all, if nothing else, the goal-posts on what’s ‘good for us’ changes almost daily.

I want to be able to eat cake when I want cake. The difference now is that I know when I’m hungry for cake and when, actually, I really do want the freshness and crunch of a salad, or a crusty French stick, or the soothing smoothness of home-made soup, or the rich meltiness of Cadbury’s Giant Buttons.

One thing the Beyond Temptation day reminded me was of the importance of finding out about myself, my appetite, my needs and desires. If I don’t know what I want, it’s likely I’ll eat something that’s available and if it doesn’t satisfy, I’ll eat something else and something else until I’m either so stuffed I can’t possible eat any more, or until I hit something that is satisfying. Eating by trial and error is very much part of learning how to utilise the Beyond Chocolate principles in my life.
So, I will be practicing Tuning In for a while. It’s easy, cheap (!), quick and virtually undetectable. At least it will be once I can do without closing my eyes and muttering to myself … The more I Tune In, the more I will find out about myself, the more likely I am to be able to spot more exactly what I want to eat, how much and when. And when it all matches and I don’t over-eat, boy does it feel good! And that feeling acts as a spur to me to do it again and again.

So, as I said, I don’t want to be beyond all temptation, but I do want to be in control more often than not – and I also want, on occasion to dive headfirst into a very large, very sticky cake! Hooray for Beyond Chocolate!

The Truth About Exercise

I am very excited. Excited enough to write a blog post first thing on a Sunday morning.

I have just watched the BBC Horizon programme The Truth About Exercise. Have you seen it? Here is a scientific, television documentary which backs up and validates the Beyond Chocolate MOVE! principle 100%.

It supports what Audrey and I and many women have known instinctively for years; that we don’t have to go to the gym or put ourselves through formal exercises regimes in order to be fit and healthy and that exercising for weight loss is rarely helpful for the vast majority of people.

The Truth About Exercise backs our view that while it’s fine to go to the gym, to go running, to attend exercise classes and that doing so may be beneficial in some ways for some people, those forms of exercise are not necessary or helpful for everyone. It also suggests that the government guidelines about how much exercise we should do are pretty useless because they don’t consider the individual and how differently we all respond to different types of exercise. The guidelines are based on the average person and, as we all know, there is no such thing as the average person. And the programme also makes a new a somewhat shocking revelation… more on that later.

So, here, as I understand them, are some of the points made by the The Truth About Exercise which dovetail beautifully with the Beyond Chocolate MOVE! principle:

The most important thing is simply to MOVE, it doesn’t have to be exercise, in fact it’s just as good, if not better, if it isn’t formal exercise. It’s most effective when it is part of your everyday life - being active, moving around as we go about our day is the best kind of moving we can do. Even if we do ‘sit down’ jobs, incorporating more walking or moving around of any kind into our lives will have a positive impact on our health.

Walking is great. You don’t have to walk fast and furious. You don’t have to break a sweat. Just walk.

Exercising more won’t necessarily make you fitter, healthier or thinner - our responsiveness to exercise seems to be genetically determined and so some of us can spend hours exercising frantically and it will make very little difference.

It is visceral fat that’s the cause of disease, NOT subcutaneous fat. So losing weight will not necessarily make you healthier.

Exercising to lose weight can be a thankless task - we have to do one heck of a lot of exercise to burn fat so only the true die hards who are willing to put a lot of time, effort and energy into traditional forms of exercise are likely to sustain weight loss for any period of time in this way.

Doing something you will do, making moving a part of your life, an almost effortless part or enjoying what you do if there is effort involved are critical, since if you don’t then you won’t keep doing it for long.

As humans we were not designed to workout in the gym - that doesn’t mean that there are no benefits from the gym nor that if you enjoy it you shouldn’t do it - it does mean though that if you push yourself through arduous regimes which don’t make your heart sing, there is probably far, far less benefit than you imagine.

There is probably more - so do add anything I’ve missed in the comments.

And here is the surprising revelation from The Truth About Exercise, which I am curious to experiment with myself (in the spirit of being my own Guru I don’t just believe it because the TV tells me it’s true. I want to experiment and see for myself). The scientists have discovered that 3 minutes of very high intensity workout a week (that’s not a typo - I really did write 3 minutes a WEEK) - just one minute, three times a week broken down into three 20 second bursts, can significantly help prevent diabetes (by improving insulin sensitivity) but it also improves our overall cardiovascular health - in other words it’s great aerobic exercise. Fascinating.

What I love about this idea is that it fits with my thoughts about us as humans. I doesn’t makes sense to me that we should spend hours sitting in offices and that we can undo the damage of a sedentary life-style by going to the gym every day for an hour.

It does sounds right somehow that we are designed to be almost constantly moving at a very low level of intensity (as I do when I am at home pottering about the house and garden - my absolutely FAVOURITE activity) and occasionally (only 12 minutes total a month) moving at breakneck speed for a minute or so, and not without pause for breath, just as we would naturally do… running for the bus, digging over a particularly tough section of the garden, scrubbing viciously to get rid of a stubborn stain at the bottom of the pan, dancing furiously to loud music just for the hell of it…

If you haven't watched The Truth About Exercise - Horizon, I would highly recommend it, as you’ve probably gathered.

Oh, and many, many thanks to D for sending me the link. Would hate to have missed it.

Should I stop eating bread?

When I was a child, I would listen to my mother and aunt spend hours comparing notes on awful they felt when they ate this or that. My mother did terribly on green beans and just couldn't eat bread without bloating like a balloon whilst my aunt reported migraines with cheese and terrible side effects from onions. 

As a child who had a stomach of steel and could eat an entire sweet shop without suffering any of the dire predictions regarding tummy aches, I couldn't -  for the life of me - understand what they were going on about. I just could not compute the idea that eating certain foods could make you feel unwell.

As a teenager and young adult I would roll my eyes and shake my head with scorn when I heard them go on about what they could and couldn't eat. When I heard about sleepless nights blamed on cheesecake and painful bloating pinned on onion soup, I would shrug my shoulders, and happily take another bite of donut thinking  that old people were, well just a bit pathetic, really. 

And then suddenly one morning I was one of those old people. 

Over the past few years I have noticed that - to my dismay - I really don't do very well on certain foods.

I love lentils and when I eat them I bloat horribly and get trapped wind. It's painful and very uncomfortable.

I adore garlic and nowadays if I eat it in more than homeopathic quantities I get awful headaches, nausea and, when eaten raw, diarrhoea. 

I am a fan of fruit, especially summer fruits: peaches, apricots, figs but when I eat them my belly swells and I feel pregnant.

I am very partial to crusty yet chewy sourdough bread but sadly when I have it I feel just awful: I bloat, feel a bit sick and usually want to lie down and sleep it off.

So does this mean I must cut out bread and pulses, fruit and garlic? No more garlicky, winey lentils with crunchy bacon bits? No more roasted garlic bruschettas? Bye bye summer fruit pavolva? Adieu bread - forever? 

I did for a while think that this would be the only solution. I reasoned that if I just cut out the foods that don't agree with me, I would solve the problem. What I forgot was that deprivation, under any guise, fuels cravings and overeating. As soon as I told myself I would forgo bread I found myself baking ciabattas like they were going out of fashion and eating 3 bagels for lunch. I  found myself eating sweets instead of fruit, just to taste something sweet. After years of having a balanced and 'take it or leave it' approach to food I suddenly found myself in diet mentality all over again: starting 'properly' on Monday, vowing to stay away from this or that food, having lots of last suppers to cleanse my kitchen cupboards of the culprits, rebelling and telling myself this was all a load of crap and NO-ONE (not even myself) was going to tell me what I could and couldn't eat and so on and so forth....

Luckily I know better. I went back to basics and to being my own guru. I became curious, I asked myself questions: how much of these foods did it take to make me feel unwell? Did eating them at particular times make any difference?  Did I need to cut them out entirely or was there a way to keep on eating them without paying with my health? Was I willing to face life without garlic and how did it feel to ban bread from my diet? I experimented and made notes and slowly began to untangle myself from the all or nothing mentality that I got caught up in. 

So, will I be cutting out carbs and all the other foods I love but feel terrible when I eat? Here's what I discovered... 

Lentils are defiantly a no-no. I do love them but not enough to suffer the side effects and not eating them does not drive me into binge mode. I can live without lentils. Arriverderci lentils.

Garlic is a tricky one. It's not just that garlic is delicious to eat, it makes such a difference to the flavour of so many dishes. So after much trial and error I have arrived at the following conclusion. I am not willing to eat raw garlic, however much I love the dishes it comes in. It's just not worth the pain and discomfort. However, I can cook with it in small quantities and have recently found the magic solution: garlic infused oil. Thanks to this wonderful invention, I can get the perfume of garlic in my cooking without actually having to eat any!

Fruit, I have discovered, is fine as long as I eat it on an empty stomach. It seems that when I eat fruit with other food it all ferments in my stomach and that's what causes the distress. So goodbye fruit puddings and hello fruit salad for breakfast!

Bread, is a tricky one. What I've found out by trial and error is that the problem is caused by yeast, especially fresh yeast. So it's not just bread, it's all types of yeasted carbs. And it seems that the more I eat, the worse the symptoms get. I can eat a slice of bread or a croissant but 2 isn't great and more than that for more than one day in a row makes me feel generally yuck. The thing is it's not like the lentils which have a really massive effect or like the garlic with which I feel very ill. No, with the bread and yeasty stuff it's a general bloaty, sluggish, lack of energy feeling which I can - and do - live with. It doesn't keep me at home within reach of the toilet or in bed with a sick bowl. It doesn't disrupt my life. I just don't feel as well when I have a lot. And I'm just not willing to cut bread and baked goods out. So I'm still debating this one, still experimenting with how much I can get away with. Nowadays I make sure I only eat really fantastic bread and truly delicious baked goods. I savour each bite, enjoy it and make it last rather than wolfing it down in a couple of mouthfuls. I am going for quality rather than quantity. 

My experiments have given me useful information with which I can make informed decisions. I now feel I have a choice about what I eat. And choice is so powerful. It means that when I go for the egg salad instead of the egg sandwich I am making a choice. A choice to look after myself. A choice to care for my health. And this feels very different from the self imposed depravation that I started out with. It feels kind and respectful. It feels good.

This is what I love about the work we do at Beyond Chocolate - it's all about empowering women to make choices that feel good, good about what we eat and good about our bodies.

Oh, and it touches so many other parts of our lives too. After all these years I feel I owe my mother a public apology for being so dismissive and intolerant. Sorry Mum!

Lighten the Load

Do you have any idea just how many women overeat? Not just a little bit every now and then but the kind of overeating that we feel ashamed of, that we hide from our friends, colleagues and family. The kind of overeating that we would be mortified if anyone found out about. The overeating that we think is disgusting, out of control, crazy… So many women do it. The most damaging thing about it is the guilt and the shame that we carry around with us like a heavy rucksack on our backs. What makes overeating so painful, so agonising, is the way we torture ourselves about it. And it’s the secrecy that perpetuates the shame and the pain.

Have you ever talked about your overeating? Or is it a secret? Have you ever talked about you overeating with your mates, your mum, your sister or your partner? Do you mention it at all? Maybe you make light of it, pass it off as an inconsequence, allude to it without going into detail about how you really feel, or maybe you avoid talking about it altogether. Do you talk about what it’s really like to be desperate to lose weight or how you feel about your body? Mostly we stay silent, we hide, we keep the secret. We don’t talk about overeating. The idea of telling anyone is horrifying.

In fact, if we are willing to talk about it, we can lighten the load. By being honest, with others and with ourselves, by not hiding and guarding our overeating as a secret, we make it more ordinary and less dramatic. Barely a decade ago no one would have admitted to feeling depressed. Today there's so much less shame about it than there used to be and so much more understanding and compassion. How would it be to tell someone about your overeating? Someone you trust. You don't have to tell them everything. It doesn't have to be a big confession, it's about taking one small step towards telling it as it really is rather than colluding with womankind about how pathetic we are, how all we need is a bit more willpower, an ounce more self control. When we can talk about it, about what it's really like, even just a little bit, we start to dispel the taboo and we feel lighter, freer and better about ourselves. And in talking and breaking the silence, we give others permission to do the same.

You don't have to carry the guilt, shame, embarrassment (whatever it's like for you) around with you all the time. Join us for the Beyond Temptation Workshop on 3rd March and lighten the load. Meet like minded women, have an eye opening, enlightening, memorable day - one which will show you how to transform you life with food so that you feel normal and in control around food.

Why everything you have tried in the past hasn't worked and why Beyond Temptation will

Virtually every conventional approach deals with overeating in one of two ways.

THE JUST STOP IT APPROACH
The dieting industry’s favourite answer to overeating is simply to tell you to STOP IT! You know it’s bad for you. You know it’s why you’re overweight, you’ll feel better if you don’t... so just stop it. Summon every ounce of willpower or determination or whatever it takes to resist the urge and control yourself. If you want to lose weight badly enough, then you’ll do it, right?

THE OVEREAT, BUT ONLY ON FREE FOODS APPROACH
Some programmes incorporate overeating as part of their solution. The alternative to eating too many chocolate bars is to overeat as much as you like as long as you choose foods that they say are not fattening. They suggest you turn to low calorie, low fat, low carb foods (or whatever isn’t on their forbidden list) or fill yourself up with low calorie drinks. Binge on carrot sticks or celery, stuff yourself with ‘free’ soup, cram in as much cucumber or spinach as you like, nibble on rice cakes all day if it helps or pick at lettuce leaves and sunflower seeds in an attempt to satiate the insatiable. Some of these programmes positively encourage overeating with days when you can ‘eat as much as you like’ as long as you stick to certain foods. They go as far as to exhort you to ‘pile your plate’ with as much as you want.

None of them address the question of why we overeat and how we can stop. Not just for the few weeks or months but for good. Relying on willpower or simply replacing overeating chocolate with overeating carrots is not the answer. The sad reality is that the diets pave the way to overeating. Whatever diet we choose, we spend so much time depriving ourselves of the food we really want that as soon as we give up dieting, we’re eating for Britain... overeating all those off limits goodies, taking the brakes off... until the next diet.

THE BEYOND TEMPTATION APPROACH
In our first book, Beyond Chocolate, we wrote about own experience as two women who had struggled with our weight for years. We shared our personal stories and described how we transformed our relationship with food and our bodies. It’s six years since we wrote Beyond Chocolate and we haven’t stopped exploring and experimenting for a minute. We certainly have not stood still, happy in the knowledge that we’d cracked it! The 10 principles are the basis of a healthy and balanced relationship with food. As we say in the book, we didn’t invent them (well, the ‘Be your own guru’ principle is unique to Beyond Chocolate) we simply took age-old, common sense ideas and made them accessible. And since then we’ve been looking at overeating in depth, we’ve questioned and investigated. We’ve watched all our wonderful participants grappling and experimenting and out of their work and ours has emerged a process, a way of engaging with the part of us that is driven to overeat, the part of us that turns to food for comfort, or sweetness or distraction or just because it’s there, the part of us that falls into the trap over and over again, despite our very best intentions, despite everything we know. We have created a process which is not only unique and effective but which teaches us so much about ourselves and our overeating that we believe it enriches every part if our lives.

We have been diving into the subject of overeating day after day, we have put it under the microscope and observed it, we’ve worked with it and we’ve carried out experiments (on ourselves!). We know more about overeating than we could ever have imagined was possible to know. And we’ve poured all of that knowledge and understanding into our new book and our new Beyond Temptation Workshop.

The aim of both the book and the workshop is to guide you to stop overeating and discover how to live your life without turning to food, any food, as a treat, a salve or an escape. The way to stop is to identify the reasons you overeat and then deal with them, with a set of practical, effective tools.

Join us on March 3rd, we'll be taking you on an overeating tour and by the end of it you will have all the information, insights, experience and tools you need to have a relationship with food which feels balanced, healthy and free. See you there!

Counting Calories doesn't work, being a Chocolate Fairy does

I love being a Chocolate Fairy. Not just because it’s the best job title in the world but because it’s the job I always wanted. I know some of you may think it’s a bit twee (some of you have told me the name puts you off) and that somehow it trivialises what we do or makes it less professional but to me it’s fun and above all it’s honest. I call myself a Chocolate Fairy (and we call all the women we train Chocolate Fairies) and not counsellors or coaches or leader or anything like that because my real qualification for doing this work, for running workshops, retreats and ecourses and for writing books is that I am a woman who spent years, decades, struggling with my relationship with food and my body. I tried everything and nothing I tried ever worked. I started more diets than I can remember, I invented my own, I cut things out of my diet, I tried exercising and being good, I counted calories and points and despite my best intentions and my utter desperation, more often than not I didn’t lose weight and when I did I never managed to sustain it for very long. My real qualification for doing this work is that after years of dieting I finally realised that it was the dieting that was making me fatter and fatter and so I STOPPED and found another way. With the help of some trail blazing women (Roth, Orbach, Hirshmann & Munter) and their inspiring books I stopped turning to the diet companies, the media, the celebrities and the so-called experts for the solutions and I started to be my own Guru. Once we realised that it was the diets that were failing us, not the other way round (have you read Audrey's post: Weight Watchers admits that diets doesn't work?) Audrey and I created Beyond Chocolate as much to support ourselves as anything else. Being a Chocolate Fairy was the perfect way to keep making amazing, transformational changes in my own relationship with food, empowering myself know and trust my body in a way that I had never experienced before. Being a Chocolate Fairy means that I stay motivated and inspired and above all aware. Being a Chocolate Fairy places my relationship with food (and ultimately my relationship with myself) at the heart of my life, and that has been such a precious way of continuing to explore and experiment over the past eleven years.

Being a Chocolate Fairy is about being there to support other women, not as an expert who knows better or as a teacher who imparts information but as a compassionate, kind, encouraging ally. It is the most precious privilege to run a workshop and meet the brave, honest women who come, hopeful, cautious, desperate. Sometimes they tell us, this is their last attempt, if this doesn’t work they can’t imagine where to turn or what to do and what they discover is that Beyond Chocolate offers them a real way forward. One that definitely requires effort and commitment, that generally takes time (despite being Fairies, we don’t do magic) and that is so worth the wait and the patience.

The world needs more Chocolate Fairies. Women need allies. We need women who understand, who will offer support and ideas, who know how to listen, who have a deep and well stocked tool bag and who understand what it’s like to have a tool bag and not know how to use it! Women need kindness and compassion and care. And that’s the job of a Chocolate Fairy. Wouldn’t you just love to be one?

Is Weight Watchers a diet?

Weight Watchers are very keen to distance themselves from diets. As Audrey in wrote last week’s post, they are keen for women (and sadly more and more men ) to see what they offer as a lifestyle choice, as a healthy way of living for good. They are inviting us to play Weight Watchers these days. Yes, play, they suggest, as if counting points, controlling portions and limiting food choices or running around the block to make up for transgressions from the rules (have you heard the ad on the radio?) is just a bit of fun really. In my experience there is nothing fun about being overweight and miserable about it. There is nothing fun about feeling out of control around food, not knowing how to resist the temptation of chocolate and cake and the endless foods that appear on the diet's forbidden food lists. Struggling with eating and body size is not a game, it saps energy and destroys lives.

• Weight Watchers is a diet because it has a clear set of rules and guidelines which anyone on the plan has to follow.
• Weight Watchers is a diet because it defines for you the foods that are ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
• Weight Watchers is a diet because 99% (if not 100%) of the focus is on weight loss, not on developing a healthy relationship with food and your body.
• Weight Watchers is a diet because you are either on it and doing it, or off it and not doing it.
  
• Weight Watchers is a diet because food is translated into points that you have to count and measure.
• Weight Watchers is a diet because it measures success by the number on the scales.

Whatever they say, however then market it, Weight Watchers is a diet. There are no two ways about it. And diets don't work. In fact diets are pretty much guaranteed to make you fatter in the long term than when you started. How many of us started off wanting to lose half a stone and find ourselves with far more than that to lose a few years down the line? We yo-yo up and down time and time again, gaining a few extra pounds each time. We have to keep going back to places like Weight Watchers and do the diet again and again, and every time we go back we are a few pounds heavier than we started.

Beyond Chocolate is not a diet. Weight loss is not the primary goal. Our aims are to empower women to know and trust their bodies, to feel relaxed and in control around food. To feel good about the way they eat and the way they look (whatever their size). And there is always a danger that if you have been dieting for many years and you’re new to Beyond Chocolate, you will make this into a diet too.

It’s tempting to turn the principles into rules or guidelines. Either unconsciously, out of habit or because we feel lost without a sense of structure, without someone telling us what to do. Taking responsibility for ourselves can be challenging.

It’s easy to fall into the all or nothing, doing it/not doing it, diet mentality. After so many years of dieting, being our own Gurus does not come easy to many of us.

So, here are some suggestions for avoiding the diet trap:

If you like structure and you know it works for you, create one of your own. There’s nothing wrong with having a plan or a framework if you know that it supports you.

Give yourself a weight loss holiday - how long would you be willing to experiment with Beyond Chocolate without thinking about whether or not you’re losing weight? Put your bathroom scales away, out of sight, just for a while.

Choose one principle at a time to focus on.

Take action.

Be willing to make mistakes. If you do all the principles properly, all the time, you will learn nothing and nothing will change.

Support yourself along the way with like minded people (the Beyond Chocolate Forum is a great place for that).

Wherever you start be gentle with yourself, cultivate a spirit of curiosity and kindness, take yourself gently by the hand and take action.