I Can Make You Fat: Just Follow My Simple Plan

I’m an expert on losing weight. I'm also an expert on gaining it.

I reckon I’ve lost over 300 pounds. Too bad I’ve gained most of it back. I’ve been a yo-yo dieter most of my adult life, so when Paul McKenna turns up on Orato promising to make me thin by watching his TV show, it caught my attention.

Right off the bat, I don’t believe a word of it. It’s not Paul McKenna’s fault. I read his story, went to his web site and what he says makes sense.

As I understand it, what he says is dead simple: 1) eat when you’re hungry, 2) eat what you want, 3) eat consciously and enjoy every mouthful and 4) Stop when you’re full.

If that gets out, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Dr. Atkins, etc. will all lose a serious amount of fiscal weight.

Too bad it won’t work either.

McKenna knows that overeaters are a tough nut to crack. Given our druthers, we’ll eat when we’re hungry…and when we’re not hungry and all those times in between. We’ll eat what we want and yours too. We’ll eat like Jaws, unconsciously and we’ll enjoy every mouthful. And we’ll never stop. We’ll just move on to the next bite.

So McKenna resorts to various tricks to fool our brains. These tricks go by the fancy name Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), which is a quasi-official psychology that has its roots in the work of the sixties anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who was married to Margaret Mead…but I digress.

I was talking about being a fatso.

I’ve fluctuated like a pickup truck on an icy road between 155 and 255 pounds. These days, I’ve figured out how to keep in right in the middle, at around 200, through running marathons, eating rocks and twigs and flagellating myself with pine boughs, but I’d still like to get back to 165, so I’m doing what I always do: I’m “dieting”.

Dieting consists of a program of controlled eating healthful foodstuffs, balanced by a carefully calibrated exercise program, then scarfing giant chocolate eggs stuffed with little chocolate eggs, which are in turn stuffed with yummy creams and syrups.

Oops.

You see why we need Paul McKenna, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on our side.

Back to McKenna’s tricks. He claims he can make me thin if I just watch his TV program, and that sounds easy to do. So I’ve at least watched the video excerpt right here on the site. And his tricks look pretty smart. There’s one in which he shows his audience a big gooey slice of chocolate cake, gets us all drooling (collective Yum! escapes from the audience like the last note of the Hallelujah chorus) and then he switches to a picture of same slice of cake teeming with maggots: everybody goes Eeeeeuuuwwww.)

The idea is you’re supposed to associate chocolate cake with maggots in your mind, or adjust your brain filters so that when you’re confronted with chocolate you go Eeeeeuuuwww (or something similar) and you won’t be tempted to attack said chocolate with your usual shark-like exuberance.

All terrific, but not 15 minutes after I watch the video, someone walks into my office, offers me a giant chocolate easter egg, stuffed with etc. and I down the whole thing mindlessly, maggots and all.

Oops.

Of course, I know about the consequences of unhealthy eating. My blood sugar is on the borderline…I gain 10 pounds and it’s in Type 2 diabetes country. That’s a serious disease, and it’s almost entirely in my control to prevent it. So what am I doing to myself? And why am I doing it?

I like Paul McKenna’s line: “Food is easily available and relatively inexpensive, so right now food is the western world’s drug of choice.” He’s right; I’m medicating myself with giant chocolate Easter eggs. And while I no longer medicate myself with two big fat burgers at lunch time any more, I’m always on the verge of a medical emergency that can only be addressed with a Big Snack Attack or a visit to the Fat City ER.

Maybe I haven’t spent enough time magically inserting maggots into the chocolate of my mind. McKenna claims to be successful 7 out of 10 times, while the diet industry, according to him is successful one in 10 times. As it’s a $35 billion industry, that once again proves the adage that there is one born every minute. A sucker that is. Make mine cherry-flavored.

I like Paul McKenna and his outlook. He seems quite sane. He’s also thin. He reminds me a bit of that other neuro-linguistic programmer, Anthony Robbins, who controlled his weight and his life and made a fortune teaching business guys to walk over hot coals using NLP. McKenna seems a little less…vulpine. But he has the same penetrating eyes. He can see right into the inner fatso.

And I like what he says: the more guilty we feel, the more we think the food police are lurking right over our shoulder, and the less likely we are to take responsibility for our own fattitude. “Every time you eat something you don’t really want, you’re reinforcing the idea that someone other than you and your body knows best about what you need – and whilst (he’s British, cut him some slack, ok?) that’s great news for the advertising industry, it’s a disaster when it comes to losing weight.”

Ok, that’s it for you, tofu.

There’s another guy who has also caught my attention in recent weeks: Michael Pollan, a reporter for the New York Times, who wrote the New York Times bestseller (it’s a small town, really) “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and has written an even more successful followup called “In Defense of Food”. His point is that most of the stuff on America’s supermarket shelves is not food, but artfully processed chemicals, and if we just:

“Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants”… our bodies will thank us in the morning.

So the bottom line here is that it’s easy to lose weight. You don’t have to read grotesque theories about insulin and cellular processes or sell the farm to buy this or that meal plan. You only have to follow four easy rules or say a little mantra to yourself.

The sad thing is that, “whilst” we’re feasting, at some dim level we get it. We just ignore it. And if we really want to medicate away life’s little bumps and bruises (not to mention the big ones), “Stop When You’re Full” or “Eat Food, Not Too Much. Mostly Plants” is NOT what we want to hear.

What we want to hear is “Want fries with that?” or something just as fattening.

And that, in four little words, is My Simple Plan. Just say yes.