It’s that time of year again, when some men notice that they’ve gained a little weight around the middle and women wonder whether they will still fit into that great bikini they found in the end of the summer sale, last year. Although both sexes are by no means the same, when it comes to wait gain and loss, whether physically, mentally or socially, it is rare for either men or women to begin the debate in their own heads, without at least a little denial first. You may tell yourself that you always put a little extra on over winter but equally you always lose it when the warmer weather comes. Although the sad reality is that you have grown in size by 1 or 2% every year since you were about 25. This is fine if you are only 29 but if you are 39, 49 or 59 you may have a quite different mountain to climb by now.

Over ten years ago, for what it’s worth, I co-wrote a couple of bestselling books on healthy eating and nutrition. Although we shared a sound knowledge, unlike many purveyors of special of fad diets, or those self declared health guru’s who are now mostly forgotten, we never once declaring that we had all the answers. Instead, we simply advocated healthy eating, not to push people towards the impossible “Ideal” of the fashion industry’s stick thing ghosts, who still parade through the pages of far too many magazines, we did it to help people maintain a comfortable weight and as a guide to living a healthier lifestyle. Because when it comes to weight loss there are only two truths that matter – firstly it is hard work because nobody has a magic bullet or all the answers and secondly; weight loss is the result of eating less and expending more calories through exercise. It really is as simple as that.

However, if I had to elaborate further on the psychology and science of weight loss I will point to 7 things:

1. Be honest with yourself – stop making excuses.
Most of us tend to under estimate how much we have grown in size, just as many people forget how much they have actually eaten. If you are unsure, or feel your weight gain is not warranted because you live all week on lettuce leaves, I strongly recommend you keep a food diary, an HONEST food diary, where you record every single thing you eat and drink, and especially catching those times you raid the fridge in the middle of the night and conveniently forget. Also, ask someone else’s opinion on your size, perhaps someone you haven’t seen for a while, certainly not your partner, who will almost certainly tell you what you want to hear, especially if you are in an unwritten symbiotic partnership of denial. This is where some couples begin to balloon in tandem, quite happy in the knowledge that neither will point a finger or complain that the other is too fat. If you have one last cream cake I had better have another If this sounds familiar it could be you!

2. People lose more weight through dieting than by exercise alone.
We hear all the time that exercise is the key to weight loss, leave the car and take the bicycle, or that climbing the stairs instead of using the lift will make a difference. Yes it will, but only once you have shed your weight, because by far the most effective way of achieving weight loss is through consuming less food. If you want to achieve a 400 kcal energy cut, yes you could run for about 4 miles, or you could simply avoiding eating that small bag of crisps or Doritos. It really is as simple as that. The problem is that exercise effects our hunger and appetite hormones, which makes you feel noticeably hungrier after exercise, so you are then prone to eat more to compensate.

3. You may have to have to work harder than other people.
Dieting and exercise can begin to fix a metabolism that’s either slowed down or now over stimulates your hunger (more on metabolism below) but the savage reality is that it may never go back to what it was before you gained your weight. So if you’ve been overweight or obese and you lose weight, maintaining that loss probably means you’re going to have to do more than others, possibly forever. Understanding this hard reality may help with the frustration when you discover that you now have to work harder over the longer term than your friend who was never overweight. Yes it isn’t fair, but get over it.

4. Exercise can help towards fixing your metabolism.
While exercise may not be as important for weigh loss as calorie restriction, it is very important in another way: It begins to repair a broken metabolism.
Much of what we know in this area comes from NASA’s bed-rest studies, which found that within a couple of days of non-activity, our metabolism becomes inflexible. Start moving again, and it will start to change, although as I said above if it has been broken for a long time, your metabolism is less likely to just go back to normal. This is why exercise is critical in the hardest part of losing weight, the keeping it off maintenance phase.

5. Don’t waste your time with complicated food combinations.
Some people will tell you that you can magically lose weight if you just stick to the right combination. There are: low-fat, low-carb, low glycemic index, and a lot of diet variations of all of these. However, there is little sound science (other than questionable evidence provided by diet companies pushing expensive plans, pills and food bars etc.) to suggest that there is such a thing as any “right” diet, that will work better with an individual’s specific metabolism be it protein, vegetarian, or whatever. However, almost ALL diets will work if you actually follow them.

6. A calorie is just a calorie!
You can gain weight eating too much healthy food as well as junk food. Of course from the standpoint of health, it is much better to eat more vegetables and much easier to overeat calories from junk food because the quantity needed is usually much less because the quality of calories is a major determinant of the quantity we ingest. However, where the calories come from does matter because it influences satiety. This is partly psychology and partly biology. In fact, the food industry has carved out a whole new area of food science to study the “bliss point,” in which foods are created to increase the amount it takes to feel satiated, and bingo we buy and eat more of their junk. However, opting for more nutritious food should mean you can fill up on far fewer calories. So we need to exchange calorie dense foods for more nutritionally dense foods, which are generally bulkier with more fibre, less energy rich and with a higher quality of protein.

7. It’s all in the brain.
When it finally comes down to it, it is not the body or even the metabolism that makes you overweight or obese – it is actually your brain. Poor decisions make you gain weight and better ones make you lose it. it is that simple. However, the big problem is that over time, poor decisions change the way the brain responds to the two key elements of eating, hunger and satiation. Years of any kind of behaviour, not just eating, will create patterns which alter our neural tracks. Despite this the brain can, to some extent, repair and rewire itself once a new, better pattern of behaviour emerges. This will take many months or even years. But don’t despair it will happen, because if you THINK healthier, you will eventually LOOK healthier and lighter but only if – YOU STICK WITH IT!

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Vladimir Putin continues his dangerous game of over playing his hand, just like so many Russian leaders have done before him. It all reminds me of the countless uncomfortable days, weeks and months I spent in a former life, preparing for such things during military exercises. These exercises or Tacivals (Tactical Evaluations) would always open with a comparable fictitious scenario to the one the Russian leader is currently choreographing on the Ukrainian border and would invariably follow a similar thread of actions that would go something like this: After massing on someone’s border there would be a few brief skirmishes with conventional weapons and then perhaps a few biological or chemical weapons such as nerve gas thrown in; but it always, ALWAYS ended in total nuclear annihilation for both sides.

In those Cold War days, although the threat was always perceived as coming from the Warsaw Pact, (a collection of eastern European countries like Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, who had all had Communism imposed upon them by the Behemoth Soviet Union), we always described the enemy as Russians. This was mainly because everyone knew the power presided within Moscow and because historically Russia, even before the Bolshevik revolution, had traditionally existed by being an expansive country with imperial ambitions, who rulers had rarely bothered themselves with negotiations or talk, believing instead that the might of an army was all you ever needed when it came to settling a dispute. This would often lead to the aggressive annexing of anyone else’s territory that they took a shine to, just like in Crimea a few weeks ago.

Looking back on those exercises, they always seemed quite surreal, especially as towards the end we were usually quite calmly fed the latest Geiger counter readings over the Tannoy system, readings that signified that no life could exist outside of our bunkers for the foreseeable future. Bizarrely we often looked forward to this phase of the game, because it did not heralded our slow and lingering deaths due to radiation poisoning, as would have been our fate in real life. More over it meant the end of the exercise was close at hand and with it a chance to rip off our NBC (Nuclear, Biological and Chemical) suits and our hated respirators, which had invariably filled with liquid snot and water from our long, sweaty hours of having to breathe through them.

I expect in the past few years the scripts for these loathsome exercises have gradually changed from a more defined enemy with stockpiles of thousands of nuclear warheads, to those with more emphasis on such things as dirty bombs and International terrorism? These are still bad scenarios of course but nothing compared to the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) that was seen as almost inevitable if war ever broke out between Nato and the Warsaw Pact.

So let’s just step back from Putin’s current nonsense, which is essentially for the benefit of his dodgy neighbours and a domestic audience, fed on a constantly stream of lies and counter lies from their now severely restricted Russian media machine. He may well hanker over the power he believes the re-animation of the corpse of the Soviet Union may one day bring him, through a Eurasian Economic Union pact with his similarly corrupt and despotic neighbours like Belarus and Kazakhstan, who will probably still sign up despite Ukraine’s recent rejection of it. But even he would surely gag at the prospect of a total thermonuclear war, because when everyone’s fingers move to the trigger, accidents can and do happen.

So let’s find a way out of this mess for his massively inflated ego. I am not suggesting he should be appeased like that other famous land grabber Adolf Hitler, or even that any new sanctions are lifted any time soon. All I am saying is that if history has taught us nothing else, it is that with all dictators the very last thing they want to do in the teeth of a crisis is to lose face. The world somehow managed to avoid this with Khrushchev in October 1962, when a fairly hollow, last minute gesture by Nato, to pull some redundant missiles out of Turkey, allowed the Soviet leader to save face and step back from the brink to which he had carelessly dragged the entire world during the Cuban Missile Crisis. If that had not happened then far from being a blue and slightly overcrowded planet today our world would look a lot more like our dead and dusty moon; albeit with a lot more burnt out junk lying around for future alien archaeologists to sift through as they try to fathom out just how most life, not just human life and the dinosaurs, had been erased from planet Earth.

John Kerry, William Hague or anyone else who has any say in this latest game, please get on your planes and if necessary fly to Moscow and meet with Sergey Lavrov (who I am told, when he is not having to regurgitate Putin’s riddles and ‘tough guy’ sound-bites, is quite a reasonable person), who will readily agree to getting down to the serious business of sorting out this unnecessary mess. So please just do it, but this time sort it out once and for all, before some idiot does something seven billion of us may have no real time to regret!

And Finally – I couldn’t resist this Joke, which actually came to me via one of my Russian Twitter friends…

A dog is stopped at a Ukranian Check-point and asked why it wants to enter Russia.
“There is no food in Ukraine but I’ve been promised there is lots to eat in Russia.” he replies.
A week later the dog returns and is asked by the same guards why he now wants to come back to Ukraine. So the dog smiles and tells them:
“They lied to me. There’s no food in Russia either but at least in Ukraine I am still allowed to bark.”

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