Our mantra needs to become ‘I can have it if I really want it, but is it worth the calories?’ For most people who struggle with their weight the default mantra is ‘I can’t have it – so I will!’  But to shift mantras, first we need to be mindful enough to be aware that our unconscious is in play. Mindful awareness comes from learning to pause just before we eat something to wonder what is going on in our minds. So often we think we are making a conscious decision when we simply are not – when an unconscious mantra is in play.

I read a fascinating study published in Nature Neuroscience* that showed that our conscious mind becomes aware of a decision that we have already taken at an unconscious level up to 10 seconds later! This means that when we think we are taking a conscious decision we are often just rationalising a decision that we took using processes we have little awareness of. The challenge is to pause before we put food in our mouth and ask the question, ‘Which mantra is at play here?’

*CS Soon et al. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain.  Nature Neuroscience 11:5;543-5, 2008.

Our children’s book has been a little while coming and while it will be a little longer before it is in stores (you can order your advance copy by clicking here) what we are really excited about is the song! Two really talented people – singer Jenny Wilson and musician Sean Peter – have just sent us their first cut of the Taste with your face song. One of the big issues for adults is that we ‘forget’ how to eat mindfully and savour our food – this is what the song is all about. While kids are much better at being present in the moment than us adults, we need to make sure that we don’t let them lose this wonderful skill. Mind you, while kids are better than adults at being present-centred, they also need help to keep focussed! Click here to have a listen:  The Taste with your face song. Please do us a favour and give us your feedback by clicking on ‘Comments’ below. If your computer has problems playing it then you can right click on it and first save it to your computer (e.g. to Desktop) and then play it from there.

Recently Lulu wrote to me saying:

I have just finished reading Weight Loss for Food Lovers. I found that overall the methods that the book outlines have made an enormous impact on the way that i feel about and perceive my eating habits. Now that i have finished the book however, i feel that i am still lost in terms of knowing what foods i can eat freely and which ones i need to be careful with. Although the table at the end of the book gives a guide to eating based on Glycemic load, it does not incorporate the consideration of fats.

Please help!

Lulu is quite right, my book does not provide dietary details – it’s the book you read before you go on a medically sound weight loss plan – I recommend two in my book The Low GI Diet and the CSIRO Diet, or visit a recommended dietitian – here is a link to the one’s I have trained: approved dietitians. My book’s focus is on how deprivation of the foods we love will ultimately cause us to crash any weight loss plan. The only reason that I do talk about GL is to help people make sense of carbohydrates, which are now contributing to obesity much more than fat intake is. Most people know which are the healthier fats and lower fat foods, but they’re much more confused about carbs and GL is a great tool for making sense of this.

In my book I do go into some detail about how and when to eat the more fattening foods you love – both snacks and meals – around these times we need to eat in a healthy way. If you would like a brief (one page) overview of what I advise my patients to eat the rest of the time, click here.

I recently read a well-balanced article on this contentious subject in the Los Angeles Times (December 21) by Amina Khan. In the first case of its kind, in June 2009 a South Carolina mother, Jerri Gray lost custody of her son, Alexander, after being charged with criminal neglect. At the age of 14 he weighed 555 pounds (252kg). Ms Gray is facing 15 years on two felony counts. Other parents have been told to demonstrate progress in helping their children to lose weight or risk losing them.

Should parents be held responsible for their child’s obesity? The proponents of advertising junk food to children argue that what children eat should not be controlled by regulation, by a ‘national nanny’, it should be up to parents to ultimately decide what their children eat.  But can they? Can parents compete with the one billion dollars spent each year on the estimated 30,000 advertisements their children will see and be influenced by? Can parents compete with cheap junk food being available at every turn? It’s a  simple idea to blame and charge parents – but ‘simple’ is the only word I can find to explain the attraction of charging parents with abuse – pity that obesity is an incredibly complex pyschophysiological condition.

To my mind, we can’t blame parents until we first give them the resources they need to do the job properly and then they fail to use them. Government need to help them by treating the marketing of foods to children in exactly they same way as they treat the marketing of cigarettes and alcohol to children – for exactly the same reasons! Excess food, like excess alcohol, is dangerous to the health of our precious children. Secondly, parents need help in how to create healthy eating habits in their children – while our work is obviously all about this – we are at the beginning of a very long haul.

Let’s remember exactly why it is that we don’t advertise cigarettes and alcohol to children and why we don’t rely just on parents to discourage kids from smoking and drinking …

I’m really pleased that my wife, Penny, who did so much to make my first book a success, has agreed to co-author these children’s books with me. My wife and I have had a lot of fun (mostly) finalising the first book in our Food Loving Kids series. It has just gone off to the printer in the UK for a pre-Christmas release over there. It will be out in Australia in March 2010 (to find out the latest on this just subscibe to this site as I will be posting updates as we get closer to the release date.)

The first book, Taste with your face: Adventures in healthy eating, is all about teaching children to savour their food. Tasting with your face, rather than just your mouth, is about using your eyes and nose as well. In this way we come fully into the now to get maximum tasting pleasure – remember, we eat more because we taste less. By tasting more, it becomes so much easier to eat less.

I say ‘mostly’ had a lot of fun, because when I’m writing I normally only have myself to argue with. I could ask an opinion of someone and if I didn’t like what I heard, I could go away and do it my way. Not so now …

Today, driving to work, I had this troubling insight come to me. … I’ve realised Penny has this extremely annoying habit - she significantly improves any work I do!

The attached pdf image is not really going to make much alone. I post this for people to use as an aid de memoir after we have worked through this at some length in therapy. In essence, it outlines the two paths that couples can go down.  The top row (The Conflict) is inevitable for all couples and results in some degree of separation and, thereby, safety – which is why some people will actually pick a fight with their partner – and results in the relationship taking steps backwards. The second row (The Management) is what many people avoid, but is necessary to growing a relationship and increasing intimacy as couples slowly work through what causes their conflict – this is how conflict becomes the pathway to greater intimacy: Conflict Management Handout.