When people have a problem then generally they think about the problem. They analyse it and try and find the big solution to the mess they are in. They spend so much time worrying, thinking and planning that they forget to actually take some action and procrastinate. In all my counselling procrastination is the biggest reason people never achieve their goals.

Now with weight management people can be five stone overweight and be trying to find an immediate answer to being a perfect healthy weight. The reality is that a problem stops becoming a problem the minute you take an action and when have reduced your weight by a pound you are no longer five stone overweight and have solved that problem, you are now 4 stone 13 pounds overweight so time to get busy and solve that problem with another pound off...

Little steps make amazing results, try putting your loose change into a sealed bucket for a year and just see how amazing your Christmas presents can look when you open it in December !

Therefore the answer to a problem is to take action, as soon as you are doing something about it your mind naturally looks for solutions and takes a positive view of the situation. Sitting doing nothing may feel like a comfort zone and short term happyness but ultimately if you want the big prize you have to make the first move...

 

It has now been some seven years since I lost 161 pounds in 20 weeks using the Cambridge Diet. Sure the diet kept my healthy along the way with vitamins and minerals, it gave me 450 calories a day and some calcium, it gave me something to drink and a hit of protein...

But it didn't get me slim and it doesn't keep my slim...

People think that somehow the answer to being slim long term is the diet they use, but a diet is purely a tool, it does a job, no different than using a hammer to put a nail in a wall or using a lawn mower to cut your grass.

The problem is that if you use a diet like a lawn mower then you keep cutting the grass only to find the grass regrows and you need to get the lawn mower out again.

People think that if they use a diet like Cambridge that somehow it is a miracle and that they have reclaimed their life and they can then go and bounce over mountains like you are shown in all the marketing adverts.

But the reality is very different, most people regain the weight when doing diets, most people actually put more weight on after dieting than they had before, sure they get a few months of being slim but they are simply renting small clothes while regaining weight. If diets worked then why would there be more diets now than ever and yet more obese people now than ever ? If diets were the answer then everyone would be slim by now and the diet industry would be out of business. I have been told by a senior manager at a diet company that they love and focus on yo yo dieters as the best source of income.

I haven't dieted since March 2006 and the reason for that is I knew that dieting is a very dangerous mind game to play and I had been playing it since I was 13 years old. I now keep slim and trim by going to the gym, eating healthy and smart and by no longer focussing on food and diets as the centre of my life.

Therefore please don't believe the PR and the spin, don't see a diet as some answer to all your problems as I promise you may lose weight and think everything is great and be on the front of a magazine or on the internet but then when you start to regain the weight you will find that nobody wants to know and you will be left confused and desperately trying to diet to stop the weight coming back. I only know a handful of people who lost weight when I did who are still slim, the majority are still jumping on and off diets trying to control their weight while their self-esteem is on the floor.

So please trust me, from someone who really has been there and done that, and now doesn't diet and remains slim...do the headwork first ! then pick any old diet that will do the job...

The miracle is in you, not a packet of soup :-)

I had a good friend E-Mail me yesterday asking me whether or not an E-Mail he received could help him lose weight. It said if he bought some lemon capsules that contained concentrated lemon juice and had them twice a day then he could eat normally and would lose loads of weight.

He wanted to know if it was true ? I told him that although there had been studies on lemon juice that in reality the best way to reduce weight is just to cut down portions sizes, avoid junk food and eat healthy.

His reply was that it was 'boring' to eat healthy and he loved eating junk food and sweets !

So what's it really all about ? The reality is if you want to trim down your weight then when you get to goal weight you will just put it all back on and quickly if you return to eating what you did beforehand. Very few people can actually lose weight and then maintain it as the reality is they never dealt with why they overate in the first place.

That was the problem for me, I used to eat loads of bad foods and I didn't do portion control, then I did the Cambridge Diet for 20 weeks and lost all this weight and suddenly I was left as this guy who was scared stiff to eat again as I didn't want to be big again but I didn't know how to resist food that I loved and when to stop.

People just assume when they lose weight that somehow they have succeeded and to a point they have, but losing weight is dead easy, it is phase 2 which requires some skill and is a phase that the diet industry doesn't want you to be good at as they will go out of business if everybody could maintain their weight.

I had lunch once with a director of a big diet company who told me that their best customers were yoyo dieters as they bought their milkshakes and diet bars and got slim and then would return six months later to do it all again, in reality I was trying to convince him to try and help people maintain but he wasn't interested as that was bad for business.

So do you really love food ? Does it really make you happy ? Or would you rather be slim ?

I don't struggle with my weight anymore and haven't dieted for well over six years because I no longer have the same emotional attachment and need to eat to cheer up.

Therefore before you choose your next diet I would first work out why you got big in the first place.

It's been seven years soon since I decided that I had enough sitting on the sofa and watching my life go past me. It is true that treading water in life isn't an option, trying to play safe and do nothing and just hope everything gets better doesn't work. If you want to really live the life you desire then you have you get up and get out there and make it happen.

I was very good at sitting around moaning about my weight, my life and the fact everything was so tough for me, it took me to realise that I am the director of my own film to actually start sorting it out.

Now every day, every week, every year I push myself into new things so that I am growing, learning and developing as an individual.

Last week I went on the Chase on ITV1 to see if I could beat the Chaser, now why did I do it ? Because it pushed me out of my normal life and out of my comfort zone. Now I have a full time job, I have a house to look after and kids to feed, I have washing and ironing to do and all the other 'boring' things that you have to do in life. But sometimes I need to break free, I need to have some excitement and fear in my life so that then I am happy to go to work and be 'normal' knowing that occasionally I will climb a mountain, go on the TV, do a naked photo shoot or run a marathon.

Life is very much for living but I promise you that unless you decide to get up there and change what you need to change to live it then life will pass without you, and everyone deserves to live the life they desire.

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results - that basically sums up my diet lifestyle from the age of 13 to 33.

I started my first diet when I was 13, I lost 3 pounds in two weeks and put it back on within a month. Now the general rule of thumb in life is once bitten, twice shy but in the dieting community it is more like hundreds of times bitten, give it another whirl.

And the reason is obvious ! We all know diets don't really work long term, we can argue all we like but if you look at the statistics then the amount of people long term maintaining weight after finishing a diet is very low. But what else can you do ? If you are overweight and want/need to lose weight then what other answers are there ? You can't do anything but diet surely ? But then you know diets don't really work long term so you do a diet, lose some weight, then put it back on while planning the next diet and get stuck in a lifestyle of dieting which over the years just cracks your self-esteem and leaves you helpless and wondering what the answers are to not dieting but not being big !

I went to a weight conference a few years back where Dr Tony Leeds who was chairman of the Royal Society of Medicine's Forum on Food and Health has done a lot of research and basically stated that regardless of whether you lose weight through calorie counting, weight watchers, slimming world, lighterlife. rosemary conley, cambridge diet, eating fish every other day or only eating foods beginning with the letter P then the regain of weight rates were almost identical.

And that's because of course that when you are putting weight on you aren't dieting ! Therefore you can't blame the diet for you putting weight back on, the reason you put weight back on is that you are then eating too many calories for your bodies needs.

SO ! Why therefore are you choosing to eat too many calories ? It could be of course you don't understand the amount of calories you need and the amount of calories in food, therefore go research your needs. The labelling on food nowadays is astonishingly detailed so really no excuse for accidentally eating 3000 calories a day when you only need 2000.

For me though the reason I regained weight everytime I finished a diet was because I was unhappy, bored, needed comfort, wanted to celebrate, wanted to commisserae etc etc. Therefore I was never really physically hungry, I was psychologically hungry and I didn't want to feel deprived and therefore if I wanted something I would have it, and anyway I could always diet in the future to deal with it and 'one more dorito' really won't make much difference when you are 28 stone anyway.

But it does ! It's very hard to explain to people that being slim is a two stage process, the first one is to pick a diet, pick a diet that works for you and your lifestyle, it might be it takes you 5 months to lose weight or 5 years but pick a diet you enjoy and laugh about while also getting the results you want.

But then don't forget stage two ! Stage two is maintaining your weight, that means don't plan to have a huge blow out once you finish your diet, plan to maintain and of course if you have any emotional issues that you use food to mask then deal with that at the same time. If food isn't the problem then dieting isn't the solution !

Most people are very good at thinking about being slim, they plan to be slim, they work out how much they would need to lose to get to goal weight, they will research and get excited about every new diet on the market,  they count calories, count points, get a pedometer, they will plan it down to such a degree that surely success is guaranteed.

They plan to always start and stick to their new miracle diet from next week / next month / next year.

But instead of thinking about reducing your weight then what are your actions saying ? If you really want to reduce your weight and then eat a big take away then just because you think and plan that on the Monday you will start a diet then I would question your motivation. To many people talk about being slim but actually you do need to do the 'hard work' for a while to actually get there as you can ready every book on diets and do whatever research you like but at some point you have to swallow hard and do it !

If you really wanted to be slim, and I mean REALLY WANTED it so much that you would crawl over glass naked then it wouldn't bother you to avoid the take away and just get busy on cutting down.

I know I pretended for twenty years to be reducing my weight and basically living the yoyo diet lifestyle but it becomes very very tiring and is a battle that I wasn't winning as I got bigger and bigger.

The key thought to this diet madness is not in which diet you choose, it's not in what day you start or whether you eat more carbs than protein or don't eat after 6:42pm.

It's motivation !! It comes down to how much you really want to be slim and whether you'll let nothing and nobody stand in your way of having what you really want and deserve.

We live in a culture now of have now and pay later. If you drive past an electrical shop you will see them offering huge TV's that you don't need to starting paying for until next year, sofa shops doing finance that the sofa will be worn out before you actually own it and you can get a credit card from Tesco now and pay nothing for the first six months of having it.

The culture in this country of work hard and get the benefits has now reversed to get the benefits and then eventually do the hard work or actually don't do the hard work and just get the benefits. But of course if you don't eventually pay for the TV you get in trouble, and Tesco will also come after you if you just hide the bills eventually and pretend it never happened. And it is the same with weight, how many times have you eaten too many calories and thought that you would do something about it on your next diet, or that you won't eat the following day to make up for it, you are borrowing calories from the future.

The problem is of course that the following day you are hungry and nibble, and the next time you diet you feel so bad about your weight and find the diet so tough that you don't stick to it and fall off and console yourself with eating. So what's the answer ? The answer is you must value the bigger picture, now when you think about being slim in the future is it really that exciting for you ? What is the real benefits of being slim for you ? Yeah sure it sounds great but actually if you had to choose between being slim in a year of carefully eating or having a nice big take away and bottle of wine on Saturday night then which is more appealing ?

Because you may think that one little nibble now won't really make that much of a difference but actually it will, I didn't eat for five months and just drank milkshakes to lose 11 and a half stone and I never ate once, I was never even tempted to eat because I wanted to get on the plane to America being slim and fit and it was far more interesting and fun to do that than go out with my mates and get drunk and eat a curry. So what is your bigger picture ? What is it really about ? If you don't know the real benefits of being slim and what it is going to mean to you then I would argue you may not get there.

 

So today is the end of January, it's a month since all those New Years resolution were made.

 

So how did yours go ?

Do you remember what you resolutions were and are they still being adhered to ?

I set a New Year's resolution of cutting back on caffeine as I drink a lot of coffee because I have a coffee machine near my desk and got into a routine of grabbing a coffee when I went to a meeting.

The more meetings I had the more coffee I drank but I noticed last year that on Saturday's I was getting headaches from the lack of caffeine so decided in January to cut back on the coffee instead.

So anyway job done ! Didn't have any caffeine in January and didn't miss it at all, instead of not having coffee and depriving myself I simply cut to decaf tea and coffee and haven't missed the caffeine at all.

I get asked a lot about how I sometimes am so determined and how do you find the 'willpower' to do things like lose weight, stop smoking, stop gambling etc.

The answer is I don't need willpower to do any of it because I am happy to do it ! And that's the key with weight and dieting, as soon as you are happy to not overeat anymore then you will be slim for years without having to diet and try.

If you dread dieting then you'll never be slim long term, as soon as you love dieting as it means you get slim and healthy then you'll get the results you want.

The secret is there is no secret...

I haven't dieted now for over 6 years in anyway, shape or form. I don't eat diet bars or shakes or soups or count points or anything like that, I just eat like a slim person and don't need food anymore to cheer myself up, celebrate, commiserate or get myself over a bad day at work.

Break the emotional link you have with food and the results are astonishing.

Well it has now been six years since I decided that I needed to trim some weight off and be slim forever. The last six years have been a real roller coaster for me, I have split with my wife, moved house, got a completely new career, climbed a mountain, won a gameshow, done a naked photo shoot and generally had loads of good times and bad times.

But here I am six years on still at goal weight, the reason is that I no longer use food to celebrate the good times and I no longer use food to help me when times get tough.

I remember reading an article that said statistically it is impossible for someone who loses large amounts of weight to keep it off long term, but that's the point ! I don't keep it off as I got rid of it back in 2005, now I am just normal slim Mike !

I spent last night chatting to someone who was telling me how much they love food and love being on the sofa eating etc etc. But then they were doing a diet for a few months to trim the weight off and then they hoped to maintain.

But I have never met any maintaner who didn't change their mental relationship with food, sure you can try any old fad diet on the market, you can do Lighterlife, Cambridge, Weightwatchers or Slimming World and while you do those diets properly you will trim down but it's what you do afterwards that really counts.

And no diet really educates you in how to think differently about food and how to value your health and self esteem above eating too many calories. Most diets want you to go on their maintenance programs which basically means it is still about the food, I haven't dieted or thought about dieting since I finished back then and will never do another diet as the more I dieted the bigger I got !

So here is to the next six years ! Am sure it will be a bumpy ride but I shall be doing it with the same positivity I used for the past six years.

I was chatting with someone last night about healthy eating, they were asking whether I ever allowed myself now to eat chocolate and cakes. It made me smile as apart from when I was dieting strictly back in 2005 I have eaten chocolate and cakes almost every day.

A few months ago though I found a great site called Graze.Com

They do healthy snacks delivered to your door every week, they are only a couple of pounds and are a great snack in the cupboard for when you are watching a film or just something to tide you over to you main meal.

You get everything from olives, to chilli peanuts to oriental rice crackers and I have yet to get a pack I didn't think were yummy ! They also do coeliac version and a super healthy version if you really don't like your peanuts coated in chocolate...

If you use code VTXNT4N then you get a week for nothing and the next two weeks half price so I recommend strongly you give them a go ! The snacks are really yummy and a lot fresher than supermarket preserved rubbish.