At the same time the modern world makes many of us far more conscious of our appearance in ways that previous generations are unlikely to have experienced to the degree we do now. The celebrity culture that permeates our world holds up people who look “beautiful” (maybe) as aspirational models regardless of the fact they may be psychological train wrecks whose egos need to be continually propped up.The women are often painfully skinny and sculpted by the surgeons knife, even before the tricks of lighting, make up and photoshop are utilised to present an image of so called perfection that the rest of us inherently compare ourselves to. The men that adorn the covers of health and fitness magazines have body-fat percentages that are so low as to be unobtainable by 90% of the population with muscles that have been artificially swollen by steroids and prohormones. These select men and women are used to make the rest of us feel somehow inadequate, a feeling of inadequacy that is manipulated more often than not to sell us something- the something that we believe (usually subconsciously) may make us whole and happy as individuals.

We all want on some level to take care of ourselves and look good, to look and feel our best. It is an error is to look outside ourselves in the first place and  compare ourselves to another- either we will view ourselves as superior, inferior or equal to and a direct competitor of the person we are judging ourselves against. This mindset does us no favors.

You are a unique individual, with a unique genetic code, a complete one-off and this is to be celebrated and enjoyed. We are offering a diet book, a book which we believe will enable you to look and feel your best and do this whilst reinforcing and boosting your health. Weight loss if that is a goal for you, is rarely painless, changes to eating patterns and lifestyle usually need to be made to ensure success, we are not offering a miracle, there is no pill that is going to make you look like the next supermodel, movie star, athlete……………… (enter icon of your choice).

What you can do is become the best version of yourself possible with your genetics and your psychological drive (the goal has to be of greater value to you than the instant hit of gorging yourself continually on the next pack of cookies). Perfection is not a worthy goal as perfection doesn’t exist, you may well, from time to time eat some foods which aren’t in your best interest or have an extra glass of wine or two. We are humans not machines, we are people not photos on the cover of a magazine, we are individuals not superheroes on celluloid. Enjoy the ride and make sure you are the one in the driving seat.

Those who fail in their weight loss resolutions tend to have one of the following issues; they adopt the wrong diet plan, they are duped by the “miracle” weight loss industry, they over rely on exercise, or they approach weight loss with a mindset designed to fail.

With such a vast array of diets to choose from, some would-be dieters minimize their chances of success by simply selecting an ineffective or unrealistic diet. Others may fall prey to the charlatans of the “miracle weight loss industry”, who sell all manner of supplements and “fat-burning” pills, promising quick overnight weight loss and that “fabulous figure”.

It needs to be clear that successful weight loss is 90% about what you eat and only 10% about any exercise you may do. However, during January over-eager individuals populate the gym and pound the streets, desperately trying to fit a years’ worth of exercise into a single month, in order to lose weight.

Very few of those people are still exercising regularly after a month or two, due to physical burnout and lack of results. Sadly, these peoples’ focus is misplaced. You simply cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet. The average person would have to run 35 miles to burn off a single pound of body fat.

In this interview Simon Shawcross gives advice and tips for starting The ONE Diet to ensuring that your New Years resolution to lose weight happens.

JIMMY MOORE, THE MAN WHO CHANGED…                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

It’s rare to find a diet and health “guru” who is so honest and thoughtful in the weight loss industry today.  And yet here is Jimmy Moore the man who transformed himself from a weighty 410 pounds to a much more healthy 230 pounds in the space of a single year and since then has spent eight years helping others to do the same. If there is anyone who can appreciate the nutritional and psychological challenges that we face when losing weight it is Jimmy.

When someone loses that much weight in such a short period of time it tends to attract other people’s attention, and rightly so. In 2011 when so many are suffering from health issues caused by the typical modern diet on the one hand and are left confused by a bewildering variety of “miracle” methods to lose weight on the other, we need individuals who have succeeded to help light the path forward, to show us it can be done.

When looking to lose weight in many ways the odds are stacked against us. We face a continual blitz of sophisticated marketing designed to make us want more of the cheap-to-manufacture, high-profit-margin, refined/ processed foods that are swelling us up and sucking the life out of us at the same time. We face confusing, contradictory and incorrect nutritional guidelines promoted by government “health” agencies and impressively named nutritional organizations, that are little more than a front for (and more often than not often funded by) the mega-food corporations (the companies behind most of the products on our supermarket shelves like Nestle, Kellog and Kraft). These mega-corps also happen to fund much of the nutritional “research” that you will read about in your daily paper/ major internet news outlet.

On a personal level, we also face our own psychological issues about our weight and our ability to lose it, about our personal power to take control of our health. We need to be prepared and equipped with practical tools to change or refine these subconscious beliefs. We also need individuals like Jimmy Moore who have overcome all of these challenges and who act as beacons to remind us of what can be achieved with the right information and the right mindset.

Here is an excerpt from Jimmy Moore’s review of  The ONE Diet:

“…Weight loss is a very difficult and many times incredibly emotional experience for people. It’s not just a matter of eating less and exercising more while mustering up enough willpower to resist the urge to eat. This goes so much deeper than that and THE ONE DIET authors Georges Philips and Simon Shawcross dive head first into this topic to help open the eyes of those who may not realize calories aren’t the whole picture…”

To read the rest of Jimmy’s insightful review go to this amazon.com page.

Jimmy’s story is inspirational and he provides a wealth of excellent information so take a moment to benefit from the fantastic resources he provides here.

Have just read this article by Rob Lyons over at City A.M. and we wanted to tease the best out of it.

ROB writes:

BIG Food is widely regarded as the polar opposite of good food. Big food companies, we are told by campaigners and celebrity chefs, produce poor quality, waistline-busting, environment-wrecking, small-farmer-bankrupting products. The supermarkets allegedly destroy communities to sell rubbish to zombified shoppers. Industrial agriculture gives us nutrient-lite, flavourless, chemical-soaked food produced in a shockingly wasteful manner. Fast-food restaurants produce bland, homogenised, artery-clogging, street-littering meals.

These ideas get repeated so often that even among people who are generally in favour of the free market and big business they have a certain purchase. But I think this litany of misery bears little relationship to reality.

WE say:

The majority of “food” sold by Big Food companies is usually the polar opposite of good food (see: the cereal aisle, the shelf dedicated to pasta, the chips and snacks aisle, the confectionary aisle, the bakery section, the soda aisle, GM produce, and the frozen and chilled ready meal selections). At a conservative estimate, 70% of a typical supermarket’s floor space is dedicated to ”poor quality, waistline-busting… products.”

Many shoppers have been zombified by the bite of 24-7 advertising, appealing packaging and a general lack of good quality information about nutrition. Of course it is ultimately up to us as individuals to educate ourselves and decide how we eat and where we spend our food pounds or dollars. Just as the big corporations have an inalienable right to produce and market poor quality “foods”, consumers have the absolute right to ignore their products.

ROB writes:

If we rolled back 100 years, we would see a very different picture. Around 11 per cent of the UK workforce was in agriculture. Machinery was limited, artificial fertilisers were non-existent, pesticides were primitive. Everything was organic back then. It was also a lot more expensive and a lot less efficient in its use of both land and labour. Food was locally produced for the most part, too. Such developments as modern refrigeration, rapid transport and sophisticated logistics were still a long way off.

When the food arrived in town, it had to be bought by housewives going into one shop at a time – the butcher, the baker and the greengrocer – an almost daily chore. Food couldn’t be stored all that well at home, so it needed to be cooked pretty much immediately, although poorer households’ cooking facilities often amounted to an overworked frying pan on a feeble stove. Many people lived on a dull diet of bread and potatoes which wiped out a sizeable chunk of their incomes.

If a committee had sat down back then to work out some kind of idealised food system for the future, what would they have envisaged? First and foremost, they would have wanted a plentiful supply of food that wasn’t constantly at the mercy of the next bad harvest. They would have wanted that food to be nutritious and substantially cheaper, so that families could spend their money on more interesting things instead. That said, wouldn’t it be great if new foods could be brought in from around the world, to get away from the same old meat-and-three-veg?

WE say:

With the exception of GM crops and perhaps an over-reliance on pesticides and chemical fertilizers we agree that many of the advancements at an agricultural, distribution and storage level have benefited humankind tremendously. From a health and weight loss perspective bread is best ditched from everyone’s diet, however meat, three veg and potatoes are a pretty good starting point for a healthy diet for many people (the ability to purchase more exotic produce is certainly a bonus of the modern age).

Not having to shop everyday is a plus for many, although it is also great to see the free market and growing demand enabling niche businesses to thrive again with specialist butchers and fruit and veg vendors catering to those who care and have the income to purchase better quality products.

ROB writes:

Without central planning, we got the lot. Food shortages in the UK are unheard of. Where food took up around 30 per cent of household incomes even in the mid-1930s, in recent years it has fallen to around 10 per cent. Food-related deficiency disease is also a thing of the past. Government surveys find that the average family gets plenty of protein, energy, vitamins and minerals. In fact, if there is any cause for concern, it is about people eating too much, not too little.

WE say:

Government surveys are not a good place to learn anything of value particularly in the sphere of nutrition (or any other subject, come to think of it). As for food related deficiency disease being a thing of the past that is questionable and ties in to the point that a major cause for concern is that people are eating too much.

We now live in the fattest era of humanity with the likelihood of that situation continuing to worsen. The modern “fuel” most of us live off is causing metabolic derangement, obesity, diabetes and heart disease at unprecedented levels. The modern food related deficiency disease may well be obesity.

Although modern agriculture has provided us with some good whole foods at cheaper prices and greater convenience (e.g. meat, fish, eggs, animal fats, vegetables and fruits), modern Big Food Corporations have focused primarily on supplying and putting their marketing dollar behind cheap to manufacture, nutrient poor, often highly processed and refined fake “foods and ingredients” (primarily based on and made from: gluten cereal grains in all their forms, vegetable oils, hydrogenated fats, sugars and chemically altered sweeteners). From a profit making point of view this makes absolute sense, take the cheapest ingredients with the longest possible shelf life and greatest price mark up potential, put them in lurid packaging and advertise, advertise, advertise.

These ingredients and foods drive obesity through their high calorie density, addictive properties and by the fact that they do not provide the micronutrients the human body requires, stimulating further appetite as the body desperately seeks the nutrients it needs never getting them and continually siphoning off the excess calories into the only place it can- body fat. These “foods” make the perfect business if your focus is profit without ethics, Big Food has adopted the crack dealer business model with great success.

The way to de-zombify ourselves is to take responsibility. We ultimately have the choice as to what we eat, let’s take the benefits of readily available whole foods and leave Big Food’s junk on the shelf.

Some people stay together long after the love (care) has faded. Could it be that one of the reasons that couples stay together is that they feed together. In other words the common interest is food. It is not that they do not care for each other, rather that they care more about what the relationship facilitates.

Often we see people stuck in front of the television with a table of snacks and other bits feasting. They compare flavors and converse about their favourite brands. The game is all about food. They spend hours concocting new flavours by mixing some synthetic ice cream with a bar of gooey caramel and compare whose is best.

Their life revolves around food and drink. They conspiring to keep the supply of food and support each other’s addiction through oral gratification. Let be clear, we all need gratification of some sort or another.

The danger is that we substitute love with food. It is not that we do care about the person we are with, far from it. In fact our concern is that the person we are with continues to be in the relationship because if they were to leave, it would not be easy to find a replacement “food buddy”.

Little attention is given to size and physical condition. The focus seems to be around what is in the fridge. Ingredients are referred to only in respect to flavor.  Quantity and taste is the order of the day.

It is difficult to get out of this cycle. One person cannot stop because of the implications to the other. You would not expect your drinking buddy with whom you go to the local bar and have a regular drink to say “I stopped drinking but its OK if we go out and you get drunk on my own”.

Unless both parties decide to change their lifestyle together the chances of success are going to be limited. It does need to be a combined effort with a huge payback (reward) when accomplished.

It is also worth mentioning that the subject matter in this case, over indulging, is not easy to broach. There can be a sense of betrayal if one party brings up the issue. Letting go is almost experienced as falling out of love. Perhaps even that the other has found another love.

Georges Philips.

Read more of Georges’ psychological insights and change your life with The ONE Diet and sister publication Change Directions.

Accomplices, let’s take down our first target in the cereal world.

As we rarely have cause to walk the cereal aisle at the supermarket, this mark had evaded our attention for awhile. It took this article in the London Evening Standard to draw our attention to his activities.

Choco Puffs focuses his attention on children in the United Kingdom, although we understand there are similar cereals at large in the US and the rest of the world including the infamous Honey Smacks and Golden Crisp.

Let’s return for now to Choco Puffs as he is firmly in our sights- here is his rap sheet:

Puffed Wheat- GUILTY, Sugar- GUILTY, Glucose Syrup- GUILTY, Sweetened Condensed Milk- GUILTY, Cocoa Powder, Vegetable Oil- GUILTY, Salt, Flavourings- GUILTY, Niacin, Iron, Riboflavin(B2), Thiamin (B1)

GUILTY ON SIX COUNTS SO FAR

Nurtitional Info

Excess sugars- Guilty

Lack of protein- Guilty

Lack of healthy fats- Guilty

Guilty on nine counts. The room is ready, he’s going down.

-your primary goal is to lose weight and attain the best body shape and size you can

-you care about your current and future wellbeing and want to be as healthy as possible in your  food, exercise and lifestyle choices

-you want to learn more about how important the subconscious mind is in relation to the above goals and how to alter damaging subconscious beliefs and patterns of behavior

-you are interested in how big food corporations and governments have manipulated society away from real food, and how it is up to you, to individuals everywhere, to begin a process of change.

In nutritional terms The ONE Diet may best be described as a way of eating that most suits the human metabolism. It is about nourishing ourselves with foods that our bodies (and minds) can function optimally on. Perhaps of even greater importance is the fact that The ONE Diet encourages the avoidance of certain “foods” and ingredients that are the primary nutritional causes of excess weight gain and the derailment of health.

Paleo, Primal and Ancestral are diet concepts that have become to some degree associated with a movement toward eating real, natural foods and avoiding many refined, processed  and antinutrient dense foods. In this sense The ONE Diet fits with these concepts.

The ONE Diet gained its name not because all ancestral diets around the world in centuries past were perfect, or all the same (in terms of which specific foods they consisted of or even macronutrient ratios), all across the globe, which obviously they were not. The book was partly given its name because the underlying principles of a diet for good health and weight loss can be distilled into one from looking at the many variances of dietary patterns throughout humankind’s evolution and history.

Of equal importance to The ONE Diet as its dietary information, is its focus on the psychology of weight loss and eating. Subconscious beliefs and patterns of behavior dictate much of how we experience our day to day lives, and even the course of our entire lives. Establishing command of our weight and health requires that we firstly become aware of our behaviors and beliefs that surround eating and food and then learn to alter any negative beliefs we uncover.

Ultimately The ONE Diet is a combination of psychology and physiology, of mind and body, a powerful fusion of both elements distilled into one cohesive and effective approach to weight loss and health.

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”- Francis Bacon