- 85% Of people comfort eat
due to a negative body image.
Is an obsession with scales
and mirrors keeping you fat?
I'm going to show you how to stop that.
So why would scales and
mirrors make us fat?
Why would magazines and
television programs make us fat?
Well, a lot of studies have
shown that in countries
where they have no television,
in tribes where they didn't have mirrors
and they certainly didn't have scales.
They had no instance of dieting.
Didn't know what anorexia was,
they didn't know what bulimia was.
In fact, I was in Zimbabwe some years ago
and my guide took me to one side
and asked me in a very puzzled way,
"Is it really true that people
in your country have food
"and they willingly starve themselves?"
I said, "Yes."
He looked even more confused.
He said, "Is it true that
women in your country eat food
"then make themselves sick?"
And I felt very ashamed to say, "Yes."
And he said, "Why?"
He could not understand how somebody
could have a plate of food and
starve themselves from eating
or eat it and bring it all up.
Because in that country they
didn't have enough food.
So you see if we went back in time
and we spoke to our great grandparents,
they didn't understand this
preoccupation with thin,
with scales, with getting weighed,
with looking in the
mirror, with measuring,
they have no idea what the thigh gap was
or a bikini bridge, and
that wasn't even attractive.
They didn't have the A4 challenge
where your waist had to be the
size of an A4 piece of paper.
So what magazines do, what the media does
is it gives us an unrealistic
view of the world.
It's what I call being
overexposed to fake,
false images of perfection.
We see someone who's thin and think,
'I need to look like that,' we
see people who've had a baby,
and a week later they've got a six pack
and their bodies are
perfect and it's not real.
It's Photoshopped and it's
fake, but we begin to see that,
'that's what I should look like.
'The only way I can look
like that is to eat less,
'and the only way I know it's
working is to get on the scales
'or look in the mirror,
and I allow the scales
'and the mirror to tell me if
I'm succeeding or failing,'
and I really do believe
the scales make you fat
and that you shouldn't get on a scale,
and sure you can look in a mirror,
but you shouldn't judge
yourself by the numbers
on the scales or even the
numbers in your clothing,
because it doesn't matter.
It's not important.
What's important is to recognize
that you came onto the planet as a baby.
When you're in the womb,
it was like being in the Hilton Hotel,
you got room service 24 hours a day,
and you didn't overeat.
You took whatever you needed and stopped.
Babies take what they want and stop.
When they've had enough, it's
very hard to force-feed a baby
because they bring it all up.
Toddlers would rather play
than eat and they leave food.
Every birthday party I
had for my small daughter,
kids would run and go, "oh, cake, cake,
"birthday cake," and
they'd clamber for a slice,
I'd hand it all out.
They'd take three bites and they'd go
and play and at every birthday party,
I'd go round at the end
with a black rubbish sack,
and I'd tip in paper
plates of half a sandwich,
some potato chips and cookies,
the cake because they
didn't finish anything
because they didn't have this belief,
'It's bad to leave food.
'It's naughty to leave this.
'I shouldn't eat this,
this food is naughty,
'so let me binge on it.'
So what happened is you were
born with a perfectly normal,
healthy relationship with food.
You took what you needed.
You left it, you didn't think,
'oh, my God, I ate an extra cookie,
'I'm going to have to run
around the playground,
'punish myself, deprive
myself, punish my body.'
You didn't do that.
You weren't at war with yourself
and you weren't at war with food.
You learned to do that when
people said, "this is a reward,
"this is a treat.
"This is something yummy for being good,"
or, "you can't have that treat
because you haven't been good,"
or, "you've had a bad
day, here's ice cream,
"you did well in your
exams, here's a McDonald's.
"Let me take you out for a treat
"and give you chocolate and candy."
All of this is learned behavior.
The very good news is you can unlearn it.
Many years ago, there was a study
that showed you that when television
was piped into Fiji, within four years,
there was an epidemic of dieting.
And suddenly these new
illnesses called anorexia
and bulimia appeared out of nowhere.
Exactly the same things
happened in Turkish villages
where girls ate normally,
were perfectly happy with their bodies,
and didn't know anything else
except the shape they were
and they weren't comparing,
and then they too got television piped in
and they were watching things
like Friends and Baywatch,
and now we have Love Island,
and we look at people
who just look perfect.
They're wearing bikinis.
They have tiny waists,
flat stomach, perfect skin,
and they appear to eat normally,
and we think, 'well, why
don't I look like that?
'There's something wrong with me,'
and then we start to punish our bodies.
We go to war with ourselves.
We make food the enemy.
'I'm at war now, I don't like my body.
'I'm going to force it to
change, make it change,
'punish it, starve it,
deprive it, take it to the gym
'because I want to be
tiny,' and it is not normal.
It's not natural.
It's not healthy, and you
don't have to be like that.
You know, funny enough,
having been a therapist
for over 30 years, when
I ask men what they love
about their wives, they say this,
"what I find really
sexy is a bit of flesh,
"that's just on top of the stocking.
"I love the way her waist goes in and out.
"I love the curve of her stomach."
One of my clients said,
"when I saw my wife,
"she was walking down the street
"and her thighs were rubbing together.
"It was the sexiest thing
I'd ever seen in my life.
"I knew I was going to marry that girl."
He hadn't even seen her from the front
but these thighs rubbing together,
he found very, very erotic.
Another of my clients said, "you know,
"getting into bed with my
wife is like getting into bed
"with a bag of antlers.
"She's now skin and bone,
it's so unattractive.
"I'm having to put a towel
on her when we have sex
"because her hip bones grate,"
and so that was interesting
that men don't find
angular women attractive.
They like curves.
They like the curve that goes here
and they like the curve of the waist,
and they like thighs.
They don't really love a thigh gap.
They don't, they're not
interested in a bikini bridge
or your waist fitting
into an A4 challenge.
It's a myth that you are sold.
You're sold this myth that thin is better.
That skinny is better and so
many models that I meet say,
"I had to starve myself,
"starve myself to be on that
Victoria Secret catwalk,
"starved myself to be on
the cover of a magazine.
"I had to dehydrate myself before a shoot
"by not even drinking water,
"and when I stopped modeling
and I allowed myself to eat,
"it was such a relief
'cause I felt so judged
"and people would look at me
"and I had to be the role model for many,
"many teenage girls who admired me,
"had no idea I was living
on appetite suppressants."
One of my clients said,
"I used to drink 15 cans
"of Diet Coke a day, I didn't eat.
"I thought I looked amazing,
"until my brother said, 'you
look ill, you look terrible.
"'That is not attractive.'
"I still didn't get it and
now all these years later,
"I can't get pregnant.
"My ovaries never fully
developed because I didn't eat,
"and the price I've paid for that thinness
"is infertility, and now," she
said, "I'd have stretch marks
"from my neck to my ankles
if I could just have a baby,
"I wouldn't care if I was fat,
"I have paid the highest
price you can imagine.
"'Cause I'm infertile
because I starved my body,"
and that is so sad.
So painful.
So terrible.
I see so many women in
their 40s and 50s now
who are getting things like osteoporosis
and all kinds of other
illnesses, because they went back
to starving themselves in their
teens to look like a model
in a magazine who actually
didn't even look like that.
Those pictures are
airbrushed and Photoshopped
and they don't look like
that at all, and if they do,
they're a freak of nature.
It's not normal.
So remember, you were not born
this way, fighting your body,
judging yourself, comparing yourself.
In fact, you were born quite the opposite
and you can get back
a healthy, loving
relationship with your body,
and with yourself, you can get
over all of that conditioning
that comes from the media,
click the link below,
look at my Perfect Weight Forever, and
learn how to love your body.
Love yourself, and when
you love your body,
you know what happens?
It loves you right back, and
that's a wonderful thing.
