Does stocking up really work?

Why is it that when we want to treat ourselves or binge or find solace in food it's always the same old friends we turn to? Chocolate, biscuits, crisps, ice cream, cheese, pastry, bread and butter, peanuts, pizza... Our lists of forbidden, naughty, fattening, unhealthy foods are endless. We see it every time we run a workshop. We believe that in large part the irresistability of these foods is fuelled by deprivation. The more we tell ourselves that we can't or shouldn't have them, that we have to cut them out of our diet, whatever the reason (whether it's because we think they are fattening or unhealthy or addictive or too expensive...) the more we want them. And even when we can go weeks or even months without them, the moment they are around again, we just can't resist and we find ourselves polishing them off in those overheating moments. So, does stocking up on them undo the years, often decades, of deprivation and all or nothing thinking about these foods? And if so, exactly how does that work? And what about the notion that it's the sugar or the carbs in these foods that keeps us hooked, not the deprivation? What about the idea that they are addictive? These are the questions I'll explore in this post (and that we've written more fully about in our new book Beyond Temptation).

Starting with the last question first; do I believe that sugar is addictive and harmful? I wish I could answer that question with a simple yes or no. I can't. I've been doing lots of research, reading, exploring and experimenting (on myself) on this subject and so far my results and conclusions are inconclusive. But here is what I can say. Let's say that in the spirit of being my own Guru I decide, after all my explorations and experiments, that I do indeed find it impossible to eat sugar in moderation, what would that mean and what would I do? I could choose to treat it as a harmful substance, a drug, and cut it out of my diet completely. Would I also choose to cut out refined flour products and fruit sugar? Mmmm... More research and experimentation necessary. And let's say I decide that all these are harmful and addictive, I could decide to stop eating them, completely. The question is not weather this is right or wrong - it may be right for some and not for others, it may be true for some and not for others. The question for me is can I make this a choice and one that I can stand by and feel comfortable with? One that I can sustain and find ways of managing when I slip up? Sucrose, fructose, carbs, they are everywhere. If I choose to cut them out of my diet, it may well help considerably, if I really believe in what I'm doing, not just dabbling in another fad because I think it might help me lose weight. It's one thing to cut these foods out because I genuinely believe they are bad for my health and well being (including perhaps my weight) and quite another to cut them out in the hope that this strategy with help me get into my bikini this summer or will be the answer to my life-long weight problem.
The key here, I believe, is to be my own Guru. To take the time and give these questions the serious consideration and exploration they deserve. Then I can make a choice based on my own experience and beliefs. Otherwise I know I'll just be jumping on the next bandwagon that comes tearing around the corner when I struggle to say not to an ice-cream this summer. I'll be convincing myself that it's not sugar I need to avoid it's fat or artificial additives or bread or whatever. Don't stop eating sugar because someone tells you it's addictive or because you read it in a book! Read 100 books if necessary, do as much research as you can but most importantly experiment, on yourself. That may well take time, months, even years, and the answer will be one you trust. Indisputable. If you find that cutting sugar or carbs or whatever out of your diet really helps, does whatever it is you want it to do, and you are willing and able to sustain it, why would you not? If you really do find that cutting out these foods puts a stop to your overeating 100%, then you will have solved the problem and that's fantastic. But what if that's not how it goes. The way I see it is this. Let's say I do discover that my desire for my forbidden foods is fuelled by their chemical composition and I decide to cut them out, will that be the solution? Problem solved once and for all? In my experience that's not always how it goes. Wanting to cut them out is one thing, being able to (sustainably) is another. And partly, for me, that's because of the emotional tie I have to these foods and what they represent, along with the fact that they are everywhere and are not universally recognised as a drug (unlike alcohol for example). The fact that eating chocolate is part of how I say "fuck this" to the world when everything gets too much, the way crunching crisps helps me manage my anger and frustration, the fact that time alone doesn't feel the same without a latte and a pastry or the cinema is just not the cinema without a bowl of popcorn are an important part of the picture. The way these foods a universally regarded are treats, fit for special occasions, that we are urged, encouraged and cajoled to 'just have one, just a little bit' means that resistance is pretty much futile. Would anyone goad an alcoholic to "just have little drink, one won't hurt surely?" Even if I know that these foods are not good for me (whatever that might mean for me) that is not always enough to stop me. My willpower, my commitment to taking care of myself, my determination to look after my body are simply not enough and in those moments I crumble and give in! However fervently I believe that cutting out any particular food group is the answer, doing it is another matter entirely. And how we do it, how we approach changing the way we eat and the foods we choose is what makes all the difference. That's where stocking up and learning to manage my overeating come in. Because I am not a machine, I am not made of iron and much as I'd love to, saying that I am cutting a food out of my diet is just never enough to make it work for the long term. Stocking up, really giving myself the message that I am allowed to eat whatever I want, is the only way to give myself back the power to CHOOSE. Only when I am allowed to say YES do I also have the freedom to say NO. No without feeling deprived and hard done by. A no that I mean and feel comfortable with. And the thing about stocking up is that it takes time. A long time in most cases. Years, not even months. I used to find chocolate, bread and butter, all my forbidden foods irresistible. Today they sit in my cupboards and I hardly notice them. And when I do, I know it has nothing to do with the foods and everything to do with my desire to overeat. To eat anything as long as I have something to shove in my mouth and stop myself from being present. Stocking up takes commitment and patience and courage. You don't have to stock up on tons of the food in your home if that's too scary, you can just remind yourself every time you want chocolate or crisps or whatever that it's your choice. You can allow the yes as well as the no. And for a while you may eat and eat and eat them more than you feel comfortable with. Often we feel that we fail at stocking up because we end up eating it all. That's how it goes. That's part of how it works We eat it all once and then again and again. Keep going and keep working on your desire to overeat at the same time and the day will come when you know that the irresistability of the biscuit tin has less to do with the biscuits than with the urge to eat. Because if we don't deal with our overeating and we just cut out the so called offenders, we are very likely to find ourselves overeating whatever we are allowed to eat or turning to other behaviors to zone out, treat ourselves, comfort, soothe etc.

 Ultimately I wonder if the thing that really keeps us stuck is the desire to find a solution. Our desperate need for an answer. If only we knew what to do, what would work, then we could do it and everything would be ok. What I am discovering is that the more I do this work the more I realise that there are no answers or definitive solutions, that managing my desire to overeat means being willing to accept the reality that there are no solutions or answers. As the years go by  I am increasingly willing to accept that I will always know far less than I don't know.  The more years I spend researching and exploring, the fewer answers I have. And that leaves me with the only thing I can work with: me. Myself. And that's what all the addictions and compulsions are about for me, keeping myself from really paying attention to and responding to myself. Because most of the time I'd rather distract myself from the discomfort of being me.

So whether we choose to stock up or cut out, the key is to do it with compassion, curiosity and gentleness knowing that nothing will be fixed or sorted, knowing that every choice, whatever it is, takes commitment and effort and willingness to pay attention to me. Day after day. One tiny step at a time. And with support.

Is Beyond Chocolate Intuitive Eating?

It can be convenient and tempting to define and categorise Beyond Chocolate as intuitive eating and, in reality, I have often struggled with the term itself and with the idea of labelling what we do as intuitive eating. I think the term is too simplistic and doesn't acknowledge the complexities and complications that many of us experience with our relationship with food. The idea that the answer is to rely on our intuition (whatever that means you to) and that we need to respond to our intuitive desire to eat and stop eating and all will be well, seems far to simplistic to me.

I have no beef or problem at all with the Intuitive Eating movement, it's just that it's not for me and it's not Beyond Chocolate. Yes, Beyond Chocolate is about listening to our bodies AND it is also about noticing how our minds sabotage our bodies' signals and cues, how years of dieting muddles our intuition to such a huge degree that recognising and responding to our hunger is far, far more complex that it sounds. Eat when you are hungry - at first glance this could be interpreted as intuitive eating and yet, truly exploring this principle means that it is so much more than that. How do you know when you are hungry? Really, how do you know? If you simply rely on your body's physical signals, you may confuse anxiety for hunger, you might confuse thirst for hunger, you might think you are hungry all the time... or very little, then what? If you don't pay attention to your thoughts, you might find that you tell yourself you are hungry when in fact, what you are responding to and confusing for hunger are age old habits and beliefs about when you should eat and when you shouldn't. Sometimes the sensations and thoughts that accompany anxiety or tiredness can get muddled and we interpret them as hunger... It's not as straightforward as the concept of intuitive eating would suggest. Tuning-in and really getting to know what drives your eating is something that takes time and curiosity and a lot of practice. How come some days I feel hungry and some days I don't? How does the kind of food I eat impact how hungry I feel? How do I untangle my beliefs and my emotions from my eating? Not just from what we think of as overeating but from the every day, ordinary eating we do to keep ourselves alive. My intuition is a fickle and subtle creature and I have had to do one hell of a lot of tuning-in to answer all those questions. For example, for a long time I thought I was hungry when I felt that familiar pulling sensation in my belly and then, when I observed more closely, I realised that I live with a low level of anxiety which sometimes feels more intense and can feel a lot like my hunger. It's very helpful to recognise the difference. Thinking that we have to eat intuitively is also a royal pain in the ****! If I can only eat when I'm hungry then quite frankly my life is unmanageable. If I live by that concept as a rule, a rigid ideal, the perfect solution, then when do I get to eat cake? And what happens if my job or my daily activities mean that following my unpredictable stomach hunger makes meals impossible to plan or predict?

Beyond Chocolate is not about complicating things and making our lives revolve around food. It's fine to plan. It's fine to choose to eat breakfast before I leave the house, hungry or not, because it fits into my day. It's fine to have a piece of cake with my tea just because it tastes gorgeous. That is not intuitive eating. That's being my own guru. That is taking all the Beyond Chocolate principles and fitting them into my life rather than fitting myself into any kind of system or programme. Even one that calls itself intuitive eating.

Above all else Beyond Chocolate is about tuning-in and being your own Guru. The more you tune-in, the more you find out about yourself and your eating, the more choice you have and making those choices is how we step into being our own Guru. Yes, we can always go back to a programme or a diet or a system that suggests we eat at certain times or that we cut out certain foods or that we listen to our bodies and respond to our intuitive needs (whatever the plausible reasons for these suggestions) and at the end of the day we will be squeezing ourselves into someone else's idea of what works. The challenge of Beyond Chocolate is to find out what works for you, not what system works but what feels good and manageable and ticks all the boxes you want to tick.

When we can put weight loss on hold for long enough to tune-in and really discover what our eating is all about and to experiment with different ways of meeting all our needs, for food and for nourishment of all kinds, then we can truly taste the freedom of a way of eating which works on every level. And that's the key: TO PUT WEIGHT LOSS ON HOLD. It's not what many of us want to hear and the truth of it stares me in the face every single day. The more we focus on weight loss, the more we go round in circles. Losing it, yes, and then putting it back on, endlessly. If you are here, reading about Beyond Chocolate, then the diets have failed you at least once. Focusing on weight loss is 100% guaranteed to see you yo-yoing for ever. After 12 years of working with women on their relationship with food and 14 years of working on my own, it's the one thing I can state with absolute certainty and confidence. It can take years to really become our own Gurus, god knows I'm still walking that path... and it is the most satisfying, empowering, enjoyable, moving and liberating path I have ever walked. Weight loss will come, if that's what we want. It's just the the way there doesn't look like we thought it would and it takes far, far longer than most of us would like and far longer than the diets promise.

Beyond Chocolate and Intuitive Eating are not, never were and never will be the same thing. Putting the two in bed together muddles and confuses things. Beyond Chocolate is nothing other than the clever marketing name of our company and the philosophy at the heart of our organisation is YOU. You, unique, intelligent, knowledgeable, curious, powerful and free. YOU and whatever matters to you. And because as humans we achieve things so much more quickly and easily with support, that's what Beyond Chocolate is here to provide and enable. So, I invite you to tune-in, be  curious, to ask far more questions than you think you need to, to question anything that you think of as your intuition and find out it more about it and to be open to the unexpected, the uncomfortable and the unfamiliar... Prepare to turn your intuition on its head and discover what really makes you tick, and eat!

One of those days

Do you ever have one of those days when you wonder what it’s all about, what you work so hard for?

I sat down with the intention of writing a blog post about tuning-in and then, when I tuned-in myself, I realised that I was feeling miserable and frustrated, that I was tensing my shoulders, breathing shallowly, tightening my lips together, sitting very still and heavy and that my gremlin was in moan mode. “What’s the point, this is all too much, nothing is working the way I want it to, I've got to keep going, I can’t stop, I can do it, of course I can, but it’s all crap and I feel miserable, Oh, what's the point anyway...” (or something along those lines). Not the best state for creativity and writing something interesting for you all to read.

So I have a choice. I can choose not to write. Or, I can choose to stuff down the misery and write something upbeat and passionate (all the while pretending I don't feel sad). Or I can write from this place, from where I am right now. I can allow myself to be vulnerable. I can write about the frustration of being a mum and working and wanting to do it all so well. How can there possibly be time to do it all? To make time to prepare home cooked meals, clean the house, give lifts here and there and everywhere, accompany one to the dental hospital and the other to a fencing competition on the weekend, run a psychotherapy practice, finish my psychotherapy training and write countless essays, manage Beyond Chocolate and all that goes with running a small buisness, be an attentive, loving partner, spend time with my girl friends, oh and do volunteer work for WIP, write books, socialise… and have time to breathe. It’s not possible. It's surely just not humanly possible. That’s what I have come to realise when I write it all down. It’s just not possible to do all those things well and stay sane. And yet I do it, somehow. I don't do them all as well and as fully as I'd like and I do them. All. I love every one of those things I do and yet right now I’m looking at the list and thinking “What can I stop doing, ‘cause something’s got to give?”. In the past I would have eaten now, to give myself a break, a moment to sit down, I would have eaten to stuff down my hopelessness and my sadness. These days I write blog posts instead - this doesn't feel like work, it's an opportunity to ask myself what I’m thinking about and get it all out. I can sit here at the computer and take a few deep breaths. I can tune-in to my gremlin and respond with a knowing nod, a kindly “I know”. There’s no point pretending it’s all OK because it isn’t - and worrying, berating myself or pushing and steeling myself won’t make it any better either.

What do I really want right now? A moment to put my feet up, a moment to have a bit of a cry maybe or just allow myself to feel glum and miserable and hopeless. So I’ll stop here, make myself a cup of Earl Grey tea and sit in my misery chair for 10 minutes. I’ll set the alarm on my phone and I’ll let myself moan and complain and worry for the whole 10 minutes or until I’ve had enough. I always feel better when I've allowed myself to do that.

Not a very uplifting post! But honest. If you find yourself having one of those days, tune-in, notice what you are feeling and name it, pay attention to what you’re thinking, what is your gremlin saying? Notice what you are doing with your body and ask yourself what you need and want and then, maybe, give yourself 10 minutes in your misery/anger/worry chair - or whatever it is for you in that moment.

Oh, and Happy Easter!

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!

How to Survive the Christmas Party Season

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.

The internet is full of helpful last minute advice to beleaguered party-goers on how to survive the Festive Season with all those parties that all involve all that food and drink ... I’ve added my Beyond Chocolate inspired thoughts on this well-meaning but misguided advice. As for the parties and food and drink – bring them on!

So when they suggest...

1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Give something you would like to receive, possibly a fruit basket or some low fat muffins. The favour just may be returned.

Chocolate Fairy Gretel says: Tell you what, if someone gave me low fat muffins they’d end up wearing them ... yes, it might be lovely to give someone a basket of fruit or cake, but not if it’s with the intention of ‘saving’ them from eating ‘bad things’ or in the hope that they will reciprocate with ‘good’ things ... bah!

2. Take a vegetable or fruit plate to a party. Be the designated driver. Save your friends and your waistline at the same time.

Chocolate Fairy Gretel says: Ok, veg or fruit plate sounds nice, but unless you only eat your own food at parties, this isn’t going to stop over-indulgence. Avoidance tactics don’t stop over-indulgence; it just pops up somewhere else – like when you get home and no-one’s watching. How much better it is to see what’s available and make a choice based on what you like and what you feel like eating
3. Don't let family or friends pressure you into overindulging. When they say 'You have nothing to worry about — you're fine as you are' reply: 'The reason I'm fine is because I've worked hard to lose the weight, and I'm not going to blow it now'.

Chocolate Fairy Gretel says: Why not just say, ‘Thank you’, Tune In and make your own decision about whether or eat or not?

4. Be assertive. Refuse food and drinks if you don't want them.

Chocolate Fairy Gretel says: This is more BC – if you’re not hungry or thirsty and don’t want to eat –refuse politely. Saying a polite 'no thanks' with a smile, repeated, broken record style, usually works. They will give up eventually!

5. At a buffet, limit the number of choices on your plate. Enjoy a few smart selections instead of giving in to overzealous sampling.

Chocolate Fairy Gretel says: You know what? I like sampling. That way I get to taste foods I may not have had before. It doesn’t mean I then scarf down the whole lot, but experimenting with tastes, textures and new foods is one of life’s pleasures.

6. Keep your hands full of anything but food. Take along photos, a branch of mistletoe, a camera or anything else that will keep your hands occupied.

Chocolate Fairy Gretel says: Oh, this isn’t going to look odd at all, is it?! Again, avoidance tactics are doomed to failure. It’s far better to make an active choice rather than spend the whole party pretending that food doesn’t exist and then eat the contents of your kitchen when you get home!

7. Plan a guilt-free event — organise a dance party and serve a hearty buffet of veggies and low-fat dips.

Chocolate Fairy Gretel says: What a shame it is that pleasure is so wrapped up with guilt in our culture. Why can’t we throw any sort of party we like and enjoy it?
8. Deliver cards in person to your neighbours and/or friends. Do it on foot and get a little exercise while you boost your community spirit.

Chocolate Fairy Gretel says: I approve of exercise by stealth. Hand-delivering Christmas cards if your recipients live locally is an excellent way of getting some fresh air and a bit of free exercise)

9. Give party leftovers and gifts of cakes, biscuits and chocolates to the local food shelter. You'll remove rich foods from your grasp and provide a treat to those in need.

Chocolate Fairy Gretel says: This sounds like one of those very good ideas dreamed up by someone who lives in a big city where there are homeless shelters. I wouldn’t know where to take excess party food in the small rural town where I live and, by the end of a party, most left-over party food is good only for compost or throwing away in my experience. And I don’t want rich foods removed from my grasp, thank you very much! I want to choose whether I eat them or not.

10. Keep your mind off food and your heart in the right place by volunteering. Charity organisations, toy drives and other endeavours can use all the help they can get.

Chocolate Fairy Gretel says: ?? I don’t think I have ever heard this before. Volunteering in order to avoid eating? Whatever next?! Volunteer because you want to help out, not because you’re avoiding eating, for goodness sake!

11. If you slip a little off track, don't dwell on it. That doesn't solve anything and can ruin your holiday fun. Just learn from the mistake, make sure to weigh in as usual and most of all, keep your sense of humour and good cheer.

Chocolate Fairy Gretel says: Firstly, I don’t have a ‘track’ to slip off. I don’t ‘dwell’ on my eating – I may reflect and learn from how, when, where I ate. I certainly don’t consider it a ‘mistake’. It happened and maybe I don’t want to do it like that again, but it wasn’t a ‘mistake’. I don’t ‘weigh in’. I can imagine worse things, certainly, but ‘weighing in’ comes pretty close to a worst thing. I hope I will always have a sense of humour and good cheer, neither of which is dependent on me torturing myself over food at this time of year.

Merry Festive Season whatever you are doing and Enjoy!

The Pause

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’ve just come back from a week’s retreat at a women’s Buddhist centre on the Welsh border. The retreat was focussed on meditation and the development of ‘metta’ for ourselves and for other people. For anyone familiar with all this – just tune out now and tune back in a bit later. For anyone not familiar with this, I’ll explain briefly. Metta is roughly translated as ‘loving kindness’ and the idea of the Metta Bhavana meditation is to practice feeling this towards ourselves and towards other people. That’s a simplistic explanation, but it will do for now.

The point I’m working towards is that much of the discussion on the retreat could equally have taken place on a Beyond Chocolate workshop. I was astonished by the similarities in what I was hearing. For anyone who is a strong adherent of any other religious practice – don’t worry – I’m not out to make converts to Buddhism and I’m sure that Beyond Chocolate fits equally well into your religious beliefs or no religious beliefs at all – this is just my personal experience of a Buddhist retreat.

As all the participants were women, that was one immediate similarity. One immediate difference was that they weren’t there primarily because they were struggling with their relationship with food and their bodies – in fact it was lovely to bake a large rich chocolate cake for a group of women who WEREN’T dieting! However, some of the advice being given to women struggling to achieve a feeling of ‘metta’ towards themselves was very similar to the advice Beyond Chocolate offers to women struggling with their own self-esteem and their own eating and bodies.

In fact, without ‘metta’ for ourselves, without viewing ourselves with ‘loving kindness’ it can be difficult to make changes to the way we feel about ourselves and our relationship with food. Viewing ourselves with loving kindness AND curiosity can help us to being to work through any problems we are having with food and our own bodies.

One of the tenets of Buddhism is that life equals suffering. We can’t help suffering because we are alive. If that sounds rather bleak, it’s not meant to be – it’s actually true. Some of it is self-inflicted; some is inflicted on us by others. It’s our reaction to that suffering that was being discussed on the retreat. What can happen when we encounter suffering is that we either block the feelings or we ignore them. But the feelings are still there, they haven’t gone away and they will re-surface. When they do, we deal with them in many different ways, but the one that caught my attention was dealing with the pain by using food to squash it down.
And one of the ways we can short-circuit that process was remarkably similar to one of the methods we can use with Beyond Chocolate. We pause. In between the suffering and our reaction to it is a brief space which we can use to pause and decide how we want to manage or deal with this suffering. With Beyond Chocolate we have a moment between the urge to eat when we know we’re not hungry and we can use that moment to decide whether to deal with what’s urging us to eat by eating or by deciding not to.

Either way, we have the power to short-circuit suffering by using this very powerful pause and by making a decision, rather than being driven by our feelings into doing something that won’t help us in the long run.

What do you WANT to eat?

The ‘Eat whatever you want’ principle has to be the sexiest, most appealing of the Beyond Chocolate principles. The shocked and excited silence that accompanies Audrey’s demonstration of the stocking up process on a workshop is invariably followed by either horror or jubilation from Beyond Chocolaters. And it’s usually the first principle that everyone rushes out to put into action. After years of deprivation and being good, it’s understandable. The idea that we can now eat these foods freely is amazing and terrifying in equal measure. We spend so many years counting calories, telling ourselves that we can’t have this, mustn’t have that, should only eat such and such in moderation, on special occasions, if we’ve been good… Now that we can eat whatever we want, legitimately, we can’t wait to get started.

The ‘Eat whatever you want principle’ is also the most misunderstood of all the principles. It can so easily become a license to binge. In focusing on this principle we sometimes forget the others and ‘Eat whatever you want’ becomes ‘Eat all your forbidden foods as much as you like to the exclusion of all other foods for ever’.

In some ways that’s part of the process, it’s helpful maybe even necessary, for a time, to stop counting, to stop measuring, to eat freely and with enjoyment. It’s vital to ditch the guilt and the anxiety about what we can and can’t eat. And the best way to do that is to stock up, to keep having the foods we think we shouldn’t have, as much as we want them.

The aim of this is to normalise not only the foods but the process of making choices about what we want to eat. Because the eat whatever you want prnciple is about making choices.

Once we have debunked the diet myths. Once we can step away from the notion that the answer to weight loss is to cut out fattening foods (whatever they are) and stick to the slimming ones. When we have untangled web of ‘unhealthy/fattening’ foods and we just see foods as ordinary, knowing we really will allow ourselves to eat whatever we want. Once the draw towards chocolate or crisps or whatever your forbidden foods are, is no longer magnetic, because after months or maybe years of having them as much as you like you finally believe that you will always have them if you want them…(and this really does take months, years even, not just weeks, there are no short cuts with this one!) then the real work starts.

That’s when we are really free to ask ourselves “If I can eat whatever I want, what do I really WANT to eat?

It’s the want part of ‘Eat whatever you want' which is the most important, not the whatever!

A truly healthy diet, whatever that means to you, comes from being willing to ask questions and be curious about our choices:

Are there foods that I can’t seem to stop eating, even though I know I can have them whatever I want?

What is it about these foods that makes me want to keep eating them?

How does eating this food leave me feeling (physically)?

What’s the impact on my body of eating this food?

How nourishing is it?

How satisfying is it?

How sustaining is it?

How much do I really like it?

How healthy is it? How do I know it’s healthy? Who said, and how do they know?

We can’t ask those questions with an open mind until we have no more rules or preconceived beliefs and views about food. And that’s the point of eating whatever you want; to be free of the old diet baggage when it comes to making food choices.

Ultimately it’s about tuning-in and being our own gurus. It’s about being willing to take responsibility for making choices and using our own experience, intelligence and discernment to make those choices. And it’s about feeling so non-plussed about sweets or chocolate or crisps or whatever, because you know that you always have a choice to have them, that you are finally free to say NO to them as well. A real no, without any sense of deprivation.

These days when I choose what to eat I base that choice of several factors:

• Do I like it?
• Will it nourish me?
• Will it sustain me?
• Will I feel good, physically, after I’ve eaten it?

Any food I choose always ticks the first box, I stopped eating foods I don’t like a long, lone time ago. Sometimes I choose to eat foods that ONLY tick the first one. Mostly though the foods I choose tick all 4. Because after years and years of eating whatever I want, food no longer has any power over me. Chocolate is just chocolate. Cake just cake. Peanuts, crisps, mash, butter, bread... all of it is just food. Some of it I like, some of it I love the taste of. And I know I can have any of them I want. Anytime. And the more unequivocally I know that, the more balanced my choices become. In fact by staying curious and genuinely puzzled about what constitutes a diet that feels good to me, that feels healthy, I make choices based on all four of those factors more often than not. So, I do eat chocolate and cake, bread and butter, crisps, peanuts and the rest... but far, far less than I used to and far, far less than I thought I'd want to. Not only because I don’t often feel like eating them but because after years of letting myself have them, and when I ask myself all the questions above, I realise that, 95% of the time, they are not want I really want. And that feels like true freedom to me.

Eating in a non-Beyond Chocolate way?

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. 


In my week away at a recent retreat I encountered a situation that might reasonably be described as a Beyond Chocolater’s worst nightmare (apart from waking up to find ourselves in a diet club meeting, of course!!). 


The food on the retreat was all provided. It was vegan. There were 3 set meals a day at set times. There were no snacks in between apart from fruit, plain digestive or rich tea biscuits. There was no choice on the menu; one dish was prepared for each meal. Meals were dished out and served to the tables on a volunteer rota basis.


All of which sounds very ‘un-Beyond Chocolate’, but actually, it wasn’t.


I guess I have been working with Beyond Chocolate now for long enough to be able to be flexible with how I manage the principles. At least flexible enough to cope with the conditions described above, and I found it was perfectly possible to continue working with the Beyond Chocolate principles during that week.


I was very tuned-in during that week. Spending a week in meditation, in communal activities and in silence, having time to myself and time spent working in groups – I was very focused on myself, how I was feeling (emotionally and physically), what I was thinking etc.
Although I didn’t have any obvious choice about the food I was eating, I did have a choice whether to eat it or not. I found I was naturally hungry at the meal-times (particularly as I wasn’t interested in the snacks on offer in between meals), and that I could exercise choice by eating the bits of the meals I liked and leaving anything I didn’t. I could also eat to satisfaction and leave any food which was extra to that.


Some meals we took in silence and that really gave me an opportunity to really focus on the food I was eating, rather than absent-mindedly forking food in to my mouth in between conversations. All meals were taken at tables, all food was on plates. I never found myself wandering around mindlessly snacking as I sometimes do at home.


I was able to take walks through the beautiful countryside during my ‘time off’ from meditation or helping with communal living tasks. Being on a meditation retreat is probably one of the best things I could do to Support Myself. It gave me a week away from home and work, away from the pressures of modern life (no mobile, no computer, no novels, no ipod, no tv, no newspapers), and a chance to really focus on myself.


Above all, I enjoyed the week. I certainly plan to go again when I can next year. Finally, I have been able to take from the retreat what suits me and what I would like to work with and leave the rest – I am my own Guru!


PS if you’re wondering about the vegan bit – I thought I would miss cheese and butter, but I didn’t. I am now experimenting with meals that aren’t as dependent on dairy produce as previously – I’m enjoying the challenge and the food is good too!

Slave to food or slave to viewer ratings?

I don’t watch a lot of live television apart from films, cookery shows and classic British comedy and yesterday I was reminded of one of the reasons why I avoid it. I was pootling about in the kitchen and J was cruising with the remote when he called out to me that there was something I might be interested in. That something was called “Clare: Slave to Food” and it was about to air on Living TV. The trailer was showing a curvy, pretty blond woman eating a piece of cake while the voice over said in dramatic tones: “Join us as we follow former Steps star Claire Richards as she attempts to uncover the real reason why she has such an unhealthy attitude to food and the effect her yo-yo dieting is having on her body.” I settled down to watch it, very curious to see how they would deal with the subject, very Beyond Chocolate, right?

Wrong.

What followed was an hour of frankly depressing trash television. Claire was mostly shamed into making “changes” (I use inverted commas because I am skeptical of just how many changes she made and just how long lasting they will be) with the “help” of an extreme therapist (whatever that is) who looked like a former boy band star himself - sunglasses and all. 

Over the next 60 minutes, he underlined just how unhealthy her diet was by going through her kitchen cupboards and eating dog food because, supposedly, it was the healthiest thing there. He then made her walk up to strangers in the road, pretending to recognise them in an attempt to boost her self esteem. The idea was that if she made herself ridiculous she’d feel better about not being perfect. After that, she was taken to a child obesity camp and made to play rugby with the inmates (my word) and then had to sit on a stage and give them a pep talk. She met up with girl band producer to be told that she would never be selected for a band at the size she was and finally, most cringe inducing of all, she was forced to sing and dance to an old Steps hit in a ridiculous weighted, ‘fat’ costume of the type they put on Total Wipeout contestants.

To be fair, Claire did seem to have some “ah-ha!” moments and reported feeling much better about herself at the end of the show. The again, wouldn’t she have to?

We have been approached several times over the last 10 years by producers who are keen to take Beyond Chocolate to the small screen. We have spent many hours talking with them about how to make our approach “exciting to the viewer” and what type of “visual reveal” would work at the end of each episode and none of these projects have ever come to anything. Can you guess why?

The sad truth is that Beyond Chocolate is based on compassion and kindness and small - very small - long lasting changes. There’s no shock factor in the way we support women to radically change their relationship with food. We don’t eat dog food, we don’t shame them in public (or in private!) and we don’t “push” them to make extreme changes. 

So, Claire, if you ever want to truly taste the freedom, to know what it’s like to feel comfortable around food and in your body for good, to find a community of women who will support you with encouragement and respect, we will be here waiting. 

How to write a book, start a business or change the world in 30 days

Guest blogger John Williams is the author of the best-selling book "Screw Work, Let's Play (How to do what you love & get paid for it)", described by The Sunday Times as "A compelling 10-step escape from corporate life that could spell a rash of resignation letters".

Fired up by the Beyond Chocolate experience, you might now be thinking of other areas of your life you want to make changes to: Perhaps it's time to think about a career change, or to start a business, or launch a campaign, or write a book or blog you've often thought of?
So you've got an idea... but… it’s BIG. Too big.

It requires you to resign from your job. Or it needs a lot of money. Or a whole team of people. Or premises. Or it simply requires more time and energy than you have at the moment.
So what do you do?

Has your answer ’til now been to put your idea back in a drawer and get on with your life? If that’s the case, then it’s time to start doing something different. There are far too many people who have good ideas fading away somewhere at the back of their minds (while someone else has the same idea and goes and makes a success of it).

There’s nothing wrong with having big ideas – a big business, a best-selling book, a national movement, or simply making a full-time living from something you love. It’s a useful skill to be able to take an idea and envision exactly how huge it could become. But… you also need be to able to do the opposite and chunk it down into manageable projects, starting with one you can begin right now.

You can go ‘big bang’ on your idea; go hell for leather and enlist all the people you need, write a business plan and go looking for funding. Or resign from your job and bank everything on your first book being a best-seller. If you’re comfortable with the risk involved, it may be right for you.

For the rest of us, the thought of biting it all off in one chunk is overwhelming. And that’s not helpful if it means we end up doing nothing.

You don’t have to give up on your grand vision of a big business, national fame, or the most common desire – finding a way of making a full time income from something you love doing. You can start small, test it out, improve it, then grow it and scale it towards your original vision.

It requires you to be willing to think creatively. It means being willing to play it out one step at a time – even if you don’t know exactly where it will take you and you can’t yet see how it can make you a full-time income. You’d be surprised how many successful ideas and businesses started out like this! (It’s a lot of fun too)

Here’s how to do it:

Design a 30 day ‘Play Project’ that immerses you in making your idea happen (or at least some part of it).

Since you’re not trying to create your whole vision yet but just a part of it, choose the project to be centred on the bit that’s most exciting to you. If you want to be a public speaker, go and speak, don’t spend the first 30 days building a website for your future speaking career.
Make sure the project produces something you can share – some tangible result, not just 30 days of sitting and googling!

Set a deadline in 30 days’ time to share your result with others – show it to your friends, put it on your blog, tweet or facebook it. Share photos, recordings, videos on youtube. Write about the experience on a blog.

Start doing it – do a little every day if you’re fitting it around your current work, don’t wait for hours of free time to magically open up in your diary

When you complete it, look at how you could build on it to take it further. If it didn’t work out the way you’d hoped, adjust your approach to give you more of the results you want and launch your next Play Project. Each one can build on the results of the last and at the end of every one, you’ll have something real to show for it – the kind of stuff that opens doors to even bigger opportunities.

What will you do?

What do you want to do?

Here are some example play projects to help make it happen.

Do you want to write a book? Write the outline and one chapter. Or… start writing about your topic on a blog. If you want to be a novelist, you might start with a short story. Send it to some friendly readers.

Do you want to be a public speaker? Go to Toastmasters, learn some of the basics and set a deadline to give your first talk of 5-10 minutes at one of the meetings.

Do you have a business idea? Start blogging about the area or the problem you want to help with. Interview people, experiment with possible solutions. If you’re selling your own services, aim to get your first piece of work within 30 days, even if it’s at a reduced fee for a friend or colleague.

Do you want to be a de-clutter consultant or a personal stylist or interior designer? Go and volunteer to do it for a friend first – either for free or for a reduced fee.
If you want to be a standup comic… don’t just go to see standup shows, do a course where you stand up and perform!

If you want to launch a national campaign or change the world, create a Facebook group for your cause and then create an event that people can take part in to build a buzz.

Scary stuff eh? Yes it can be, so make sure you have some support. Ask some supportive friends to help, or join up with others making ideas happen. Or join up with us...
From idea to reality in 30 days

Stop waiting; make your idea happen.

On the 1st October, 200 people will be joining our 30 Day Challenge to do something they love with our support and guidance. Join us!

Learn more about the 30 Day Challenge

Be Your Own Guru

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.

Expert: Wouldn't it be great if you could eat all your favourite foods and still lose weight?

Me: Yes! Yes, it would!

Expert: Well now you can, with our guide to 'having your cake and eating it'!

Me: Actually, if you’ll forgive me a pedantic moment – anyone can have cake and eat it, that’s easy. Eating cake and having it too is much more difficult ... but yes, I’d like to eat cake and lose weight, please tell me how.

Expert: If you thought the best way to lose weight was to cut out eating chocolate, crisps and chips think again.

Me: Ok, keep talking, I’m interested.

Expert: Research shows that banning foods from your diet can be disastrous as it simply makes them even more irresistible than ever.

Me: Really? You surprise me (not). I think all dieters are very well aware of the deprivation-causes-bingeing scenario. But, go on ...

Expert: Not only that but when you do give in to a nibble of your favourite nosh you're far more likely to feel you've failed which can result in eating even more of it than you'd planned to.

Me: Oh, absolutely. Particularly last thing at night, or when out with friends, or during a ‘weekend off’, or because I just can't stop myself, or because it's there or needs finishing up, or when someone offers it to me and I don't want to offend them ...

Expert: This is why eating your favourite foods is not only desirable for long term weight loss, it's absolutely essential provided of course, you don't overdo the calories.

Me: I knew there’d be a catch ... You see, Mr or Ms Expert, I don't want to count calories. I don't want to substitute lower fat alternatives for my favourite foods, as you suggest in the rest of your article. I want to eat my cake and still have cake and I want to lose weight. I don't want much, really.

Expert: Ok, how about this? Many people think white bread is a 'no no' but in the UK it is fortified with calcium so it can help towards maintaining healthy bones and teeth. Just make sure you get your fibre and whole grains elsewhere such as in breakfast cereals, rice and oats.

Me: That sounds good, I like white bread and I'm quite happy to eat breakfast cereal, rice and oats (although not all at once!). The problem is Mr or Ms Expert, you can only offer dodges around the idea of 'Eat What You Want', you are too scared to come right out and say it. You are still hung up on the idea of calories in and calories out. I want to get away from all that.

Diet Experts abound on the internet and the messages are all the same - DIET! One way or the other, regardless of what they appear to be saying, their bottom line is always GO ON A DIET - NOW!

Beyond Chocolate encourages us to become Our Own Guru. To leave the experts where they are - to take their words with a pinch of salt, or not at all, and to realise that the only true expert on each of us is ourselves.

The bikini and me

I’ve just come back from a week in Italy with my daughter. Every day was pretty much the same. We’d get up, put on our bikinis and something light and short and head for the pool.

As I lay on my sun lounger doing a spot of people watching (one of my favourite activities) I was struck by just how much skin there was on show. How tiny the bikinis were and how even the older women were wearing bikinis as opposed to one piece swim suits.

I noticed the different body shapes, skin colours, skin tones and textures… it was all very interesting. And wonderful.

And then I wondered: when my great grandmother was my age, I imagine that the scene would have been very different. There probably wouldn’t have been a pool to go to but had we been at the beach the women's bodies would have been almost completely covered up. Wearing something like this maybe?

I wonder how women felt about their bodies on the beach in those days? I know that women at the turn of the century wanted to be plump. Slender equaled poor or unhealthy. There was no glamour in being tanned and bony - like so many of these Italian women I was surrounded by. Hip bones jutting out, flat (and in some cases taut) stomachs. In those days round was considered attractive. As I’ve written before, I don’t believe in any ideal when it comes to women’s bodies. Curvy is no more womanly than straight. Thin, slim, plump, round, very round, lumpy, smooth… Beauty is not about our size or shape. Fashion maybe but not true beauty. There’s much more to it than the physical body. But that’s for another blog post. Here my curiosity is about how I feel walking around virtually naked in a public place and how different my experience would have been had I been born a Victorian. As I lay there by the pool in Italy last week I imagined wearing something like this (without the fetching bonnet!)


And I quite liked the idea. Despite the fact that I like the way I look and regularly do look in the mirror at my naked body with appreciation and gratitude. I realised I’d feel much, much more comfortable at the poolside with more on. Paradoxically, I prefer my naked body to my bikini-clad one. It’s something about the shape of the bikini which doesn’t quite work with the shape of my body. It fits well enough and I like the style and colour but I really think my body looks lovelier without it. And as I'm not into nudism or topless sunbathing, I don't have much choice.

I’m not a prude. I’m not body-shy at all; I’ll change openly in a women only changing room and don’t feel the need to cover up or be quick. Yet when pondering the question of bikinis there was no doubt in my mind I’d go back to the 1900’s in a flash.

I’m not advocating the return of the swim-dress (my terminology; I’m sure that’s not what they were called) nor am I urging us all to go out and buy burkinis. It’s simply that for me, the bikini is not an item of clothing (is there really enough fabric to warrant that definition?) I feel terribly comfortable in.

And so, I mused, it’s no wonder so many women hate the summer. It’s no wonder the idea of going to the pool or the beach is the stuff of nightmares, panic inducing for any woman over a size 12. Women - and it must be the vast majority of us - who could never in a million years (or after any number of diets and fitness regimes, however hard we tried) look like this:


From what I could see, quite a few of the Milanese women at this particular pool were trying very hard indeed to do just that and despite my careful, and discreet, observation, I could not find one of them that quite managed it. Thankfully, I would add.

Today a part of me wishes I could wind back the clock (only where swimwear is concerned you understand). I’ve recently begun experimenting with dress-making - Maybe I'll make myself a funky swim-dress. Bad idea? I'd just look too odd? Maybe I'd set a new trend! Or, maybe not.

STOP THE WAR ON FAT!

I can get myself pretty worked up about the government’s attitude to the so called ‘Obesity Crisis” as you know from previous posts. And I like to think that I make a good case! I really do believe that they are missing the point by putting the focus on weight loss. Heavens! Even the tabloids were reporting that which we have known for years this week - that it’s healthier to be consistently overweight that to yo-yo up and down.

And whatever stand the government takes, whatever pointless propaganda it doles out, the power to make real changes lies squarely in our hands. We are the ones who need to stop waging a war against FAT! Us, those of us who are consumed daily with the desire to lose weight. First and foremost, we are the ones who beat ourselves up for not being thin enough, for being too fat. We are the ones who hate our bodies, who hold ourselves back from doing a whole host of things because we tell ourselves we are too big. We can complain and rant all we like about the obesity crisis (OK, maybe you don’t rant and complain, but I do!!!) and it may or may not make a difference but I can tell you what will make a difference, right now.

Here are my 7 steps to ending the WAR ON FAT! (Otherwise known as the OWN YOUR BODY principle)

1. DARE to feel good enough at the size we are right now
2. LIVE our lives without waiting until we are the ‘right size’
3. ACKNOWLEDGE that an ideal body size and/or shape is a social construct and bears no relation to what makes a person worthy, kind, intelligent or lovable.
4. CULTIVATE COMPASSION & CURIOSITY. Stop the self-hatred by acknowledging that the way we look may well reflect the way we eat, and that we eat the way we do for good reasons. The fact that we use food for comfort, as a slave, a way of zoning out, as a treat or whatever... doesn’t make us stupid, weak, bad or pathetic. We know that there’s work to be done to get to a balanced and healthy relationship with food and we’re doing the work. In the meantime, criticism and blame (whether from our own gremlins or from others!) don’t help. Compassion and curiosity do!
5. SPEAK UP about what it’s like to be fat in our society and what it’s really about. Let’s stop taking the blame and the judgments lying down. Let’s stop secretly agreeing with them that we are terrible people for being FAT and let’s stand up for ourselves!
6. DEMAND better quality, REAL food and do your own research so that you can create your own definition of a healthy diet. My take: many of the foods sold in the supermarket today are not food. They are over-processed pretend foods which are neither nourishing nor satisfying and many of them have the gall to call themselves diet foods and purport to help us lose weight or keep us healthy.
7. GET OUT THERE whatever your size. Move your body in ways that feel good and that you enjoy, because we are not designed to be sedentary and physical activity is good for us - about that there can be very little doubt! That doesn’t mean we have to exercise relentlessly. It can be gentle and fun and it doesn't have to be for hours at a time. Whatever our size or shape we can find a way to move that feels good - almost every one of us can walk around the block for 15 minutes.

ALL OF THIS ADDS UP TO:

BEING YOUR OWN GURU

I spent years looking for the magic wand that would make me slim. I desperately wanted to find a solution. I wanted someone to tell me what to do and I wanted someone else to blame went I couldn't do it. I didn't want to acknowledge that it was how I felt about being fat and the things I believed about myself because of my fat, that were really to blame!

I do want the government to change tack, I want them to see sense and offer real help and support, I want them to acknowledge that FAT is not the problem... and today I know that the only way to change anything is to be the change myself (I’m sure that’s from a quote I read somewhere!). I know that the only way to change the way people view fat in our society is to be honest with myself about my own prejudices and judgements about FAT, to own those judgements and then be willing to challenge them and change them.

It’s daring and risky to say out loud that I am OK with just the way I am right now, whatever my size, the way I look today.

We don’t have to LOVE our fat, we don't have to tell ourselves we are beautiful as we are (though there's no reason not to!), to believe that we are as good, as worthy and as lovable as the slim person sitting next to us. We don’t have to ACCEPT the FAT. Beyond Chocolate is not a FAT & HAPPY camp, that is missing the point. What we are inviting you to do is OWN your body now, the one you have, treat it with kindness and respect and be willing to accept that having FAT is not a sin, it doesn’t say anything more about you other than the fact that like almost everyone else in the world you are not perfect, and that eating is sometimes your way of coping with the challenges you face on a daily basis. Having FAT is not inherently unhealthy, it is not universally ugly and it is not and doesn't have to be BAD. When you find ways of managing the strains and stresses of life without food, your body may well get smaller but you don't have to wait for that to feel good about yourself!

Let’s not keep quiet. We don’t have to do this by ourselves, we have nothing to be ashamed of! Let’s talk to our friends, family and colleagues and stop colluding with the government and the media with our silence. Forward a link to this blog to one person you know today or LIKE it on your Facebook page. That’s how change begins. We stop fighting ourselves, that's how we stop the war!