Paul McKenna is one of my heroes – completely cool in a totally uncool way – his unwavering confidence shining through in the title of his books. I was particularly taken with ‘I can make you thin’, which I bought and devoured (obviously, not literally, otherwise his book would have had the opposite effect).
‘I can make you thin’? I considered my recent trip to buy some new jeans and being saddened by thrashing around in the changing room and catching sight of my rear end in the magic 360 mirror. Paul wasn’t promising ‘I might be able to help you slim down a little bit’ or even ‘I can make you less fat’. Nope, his bold claim was that he would make me slim. Even better, there’s no list of good or bad foods. All food is good. This is my kind of book!
It’s a great read, padded a little, but all-in-all an enjoyable romp. It’s padded because this is basically it: On your hunger scale of one to 10, (where one is ravenous and 10 is Mr Creosote) always eat when you reach a three or four (so never get reaaaaly hungry) and stop eating when you’re at a seven or eight (so don’t stuff your face).
So ‘eat when you’re hungry’ and ‘stop eating before you’re stuffed’. It’s deliciously simple.
But so is food. And as simple as it may seem and as much as I know it makes perfect sense – stop eating just before you’re full – goes against everything I’ve ever been taught. In our house, the general rule is that you stop eating when it hurts and, even then, your pudding pipe will need filling (it’s a separate tube you see, so no matter how much main course you have, you can always fit a pudding in).
If I ever dared leave anything, my mum used to remind me of the ‘starving children in Africa’, as if that fish finger was going to have to be air-freighted to Addis Ababa.
A few months after reading Paul’s book I read a one star Amazon review, written by an angry reader, for whom the book hadn’t worked. She had vented her spleen, good and proper. Another Amazon customer had then replied to her rant asking simply, ‘Did you do what he said?’
And the reply, a rather sheepish, ‘Well, no, not really…’ before listing a whole load of excuses.
‘Eat when you’re hungry’ and ‘stop eating before you’re full’. Common sense that only works if you do it.
Ditto, The Art of Being Brilliant.