Book Excerpt |

How To Eat Loads and Stay Slim – opening chapter

May 28, 2012 by Peter | 5 Comments

Last week I formally announced the impending publication of my next book, How To Eat Loads and Stay Slim, co-written with author Della Galton. This week, for those of you who haven’t figured out that the book has already got it’s own website, I thought I’d share with you the opening chapter.

To Begin With…

Peter Says…

When I was a much younger man, ‘size’ wasn’t a word that I ever had to worry about. ‘Height’ on the other hand…

It was (and still is) extremely hard to get trousers that didn’t flap about somewhere above my ankles, or sleeves that don’t stop several inches before my wrists. But I never had to breathe in to button a pair of jeans, and I never put on a shirt only to find that the buttons and button holes were no longer on speaking terms. Even in my twenties, when I was mostly living on a diet of pizza and beer, where people have a ‘bottom’ I had a ‘place where my legs met’. Girls would tell me how lucky I was. Guys would question my ability to lift a bag of sugar. I’d just shrug, convinced that I’d never lose my ability to hide behind lamp-posts or squeeze between railings.

How wrong I was.

I met my wife-to-be in my mid-thirties. The fact that I met Kate at all was something of a minor miracle, but her arrival in my life coincided with another miraculous event: I’d started to put on weight. In a matter of months I somehow went from ten stone eight (148 pounds) to thirteen stone (182 pounds). People started to tell me how ‘well’ I looked. Occasionally I was described as ‘cuddly’. And as Kate and I curled up in front of the TV to munch our way through a family sized bar of Dairy Milk, she’d rub what she fondly referred to as the ‘Buddha Belly’. It was almost enough to put me off my chocolate.

Almost – but not quite.

As the months passed my weight crept ever upwards. My chins (plural) got ever bigger. Eventually I no longer felt comfortable being naked in front of my fiancé. That was the turning point. Not the naked part – the fact that my girlfriend was now my fiancé. And on hearing the happy news one of my colleagues asked me when I was starting my diet.

“Diet!?” I asked with a mixture of indignation and confusion. What had diets got to do with marriage?

“Of course diet,” she said. “You’re never as slim as the day you get married!”

This was news to me, and something of a shock. And although the logical, adult part of my brain was quick to dismiss this as utter nonsense, another part – the part that has always been ready to believe anything negative or damaging – had adopted this as a Universal Truth; I had only a few months to lose those pounds that I still thought of as ‘extra’ – or they would be mine forever.

You’ve been there I’m sure. It’s probably the reason why you picked up this book in the first place. Maybe you’re at that point now. In which case you probably know a couple of other things too, namely that diets and exercise are miserable, soul destroying ways of losing weight, and if you stop either one for a millisecond then those grams that you worked so hard to shed come straight back the moment you so much as look at anything vaguely tasty.

There are few things in life as cruel as how the human body manages its weight.

At least that’s how it feels.

And so, after a couple of years of running in my lunch hour, and returning to my desk hot, frustrated, and not the slightest bit slimmer than the day before (or the week before, or any of the preceding months), I finally threw my heart-rate monitor in the bin and went in search of a pain-free, exercise-free, scientific way to restore my trim figure. This book – or at least my half of it – is the result.

Welcome to How To Eat Loads and Stay Slim.

If you’re fed up with diets – this book might be for you. If you’ve started to wonder whether you’ll ever be able to lose weight, stay slim AND enjoy your food – this book is probably for you. But if you’re open minded, happy to make small changes to your lifestyle, and prepared to put in a little effort – or at least could be, if you had a good enough reason – then this book is most definitely for you.

Now then, allow me to introduce you to my co-author…

Della Says…

Like Peter, I am lucky enough to be tall (5’ 10”) and until I was thirty five, which, incidentally, is also the age I was when I got married – must be something in this “marry and get fat” theory – I was pretty slender without putting too much effort into it. Mind you, I had always been very active. I loved to go swimming and running and having four dogs certainly helped to keep my weight down.

Then suddenly I had a husband who was a foodie, which meant he liked eating out, and he liked to have wine with our meals and he liked me to experiment with cooking good food. Not that I objected to any of this! But slowly the weight inched on. I went from being the skinny size twelve I’d always been to a size sixteen. This does not sound too bad, it didn’t look too bad either because I’m tall, but I hated my extra weight with a vengeance.

I began to dress to cover up lumps and bumps. Big loose tops and black trousers became my uniform. I gave up swimming because I didn’t want my cellulite thighs on display on the walk from changing room to pool. I avoided hugging friends I hadn’t seen for a while so they couldn’t feel how much weight I’d put on. (How sad is that!) I gave up clothes shopping because it was too depressing. Nothing looked good any more.

Choosing an outfit for a night out from my existing wardrobe was also hideously depressing and would entail trying on my entire wardrobe – by this time I had three sizes in there, size 12 (dream on!), size 14 (possibly on a good day) and 16 (comfortably unflattering) – and trying to decide what made me look the thinnest.

I’d always felt a little self-conscious about being tall, but being tall and overweight made it worse. I felt as though I was turning into some huge lumbering hippo.

My mother and my sister also struggled with their weight. My mother had given up worrying about it long ago, my sister, like me, had yo-yoed along on a fat-thin rollercoaster.

In my quest for permanent weight loss I tried the following:

slimming pills;
herbal remedies;
crash diets;
small portions;
not eating in the evenings;
not eating certain foods;
various celebrity diets;
some decidedly cranky diets;
slimming groups;
excessive exercise – and I mean running marathons (I don’t do things by halves).

Nothing worked permanently.

But some things worked for a while.

The answer to being slim, I finally realised, was to stick to a variety of tried and tested principles. My tried and tested principles which had worked for me. To my immense relief and pleasure, these principles did not include banishing any food from my life. They required planning, but they weren’t time consuming (I have no spare time in my life), and they weren’t costly. (I spend all my spare money on dogs).
But they do work. Hurrah! Finally, I am the same weight now as I was when I was twenty and I know how to stay there. And it is much, much more enjoyable. I also feel healthier, which is a big bonus. I also don’t worry if I want to go on holiday and I put on a few pounds because I know it won’t be difficult to shift them again.

If this sounds like it might suit you – then read on – and hopefully some of the principles we talk about in this book might change the way you view staying slim too.

How to Eat Loads and Stay Slim,
will be available later this year
as a paperback (ISBN 978-0-9568856-2-3),
as an e-book, and in audio.

To be notified of the release date subscribe to this blog, the How To Eat Loads and Stay Slim website,
LIKE the How To Eat Loads and Stay Slim facebook page, or follow us on twitter @eatlotsstayslim.
Or all of the above.
Phew!

How To Do Everything and Be Happy – opening chapter

April 2, 2010 by Peter | 0 comments

The opening Chapter from ‘How To Do Everything and Be Happy’…

Once upon a time I got sold a dream: I would grow up big and strong, marry a blonde (my mother was convinced of this), have children, and live happily ever after in a big house, whilst I held down a job as an astronaut. Or a train driver. Or a fireman. And this wasn’t a ‘maybe’ – something to aspire to – this was my God given right. This is what was going to happen. All I had to do was wait.

Not that I was very good at waiting. I’m still not very good at waiting! I wanted this idyllic life now. I didn’t want to wait until next week or some other distant point in the future. I must have told my parents this because they would smile and tell me not to be in such a rush. “Peter,” they would say, “schooldays are the best days of your life.”

Obviously they were mistaken. They had to be. When my parents’ eyes glazed over and they talked fondly of ‘schooldays’ they must have been recalling the days of their own distant childhood, days sitting around camp fires outside the school mud hut, marking bits of slate with chalk whilst village elders told stories of dragons. Their schooldays were clearly a far cry from the mixture of humiliation, bullying and boredom that I endured. They had to be. Because if they weren’t, for schooldays to be the ‘best’ days they would logically have to be followed by ‘something worse.’

Then I got older, and things got worse.

Actually, that’s not quite true. They didn’t get any worse – not really – but they certainly didn’t get much better, and they definitely got more complex.

‘Work’ turned out to be very similar to ‘school’ – different bullies, same rules, just as boring. And whereas I was given money in return for surrendering five days out of seven – more money than I’d ever dreamed possible – now there was a slew of people queuing up to take it away from me.

And then there were relationships. Just when I’d got classroom note passing down to a fine art, the game changed completely, and note passing wasn’t going to cut it.
I could go on, but suffice it to say, the initial ‘dream’ seemed less and less likely. It was clear that I was never going to be an astronaut. Or a train driver. Or a fireman. It also seemed unlikely that I would ever live in a big house. Big houses needed big money. I was on small to medium money. Two bedroom flat money.

Finally, on my thirty second birthday, I realised there was a distinct possibility that I might never ever find ‘the blonde’.
This was a serious blow. Without the blonde I might never be married, I might never have children – and whilst I could probably cope without being married or having kids, or my blonde actually being a blonde, I couldn’t imagine being single for the rest of my days. That was unacceptable. Something had to be done.

So, for the first time in my life, I started to plan – to make lists, and take control of my own destiny. Many of the techniques in this book are nothing more than the skills I had to develop to avoid a life of bachelorhood. But it worked. Eventually I found the blonde. Took me a few more years, considerable effort on my part, and a somewhat unorthodox approach to dating, but I found her.

And we did marry.

And when she died in my arms three years later I was heartbroken.

People rarely ask me how Kate died. It’s just not the sort of question they feel comfortable asking. Most assume she must have had cancer – that we’d have had some warning. We didn’t.

I was off to our place in Croatia for a few days to finish my novel. Kate drove me to the airport and as she dropped me off she gave me the world’s biggest hug, bit back a few tears, thumped me in the arm, and told me she loved me – and that I’d better call her when I got to the other end.

I walked towards the main airport building, turned to give her one last wave. Something wasn’t right. I could see our car, but not her.

The next few hours are a bit of a blur. I remember dropping my bags and running back to our vehicle. Taking her in my arms. The lady police officer trying to revive her. I remember the paramedics, the ambulance helicopter, being rushed to the hospital in the back of a police car. And I remember that god awful waiting room, the stoney faces of the doctors as they told me there was nothing they could do, that my wife was gone, and that they’d be switching off the life support machine.

Several hours later I drove our car back to an empty house.

I’ve learnt since that deaths like this – a sub-arachnoid haemorrhage, according to the certificate – are surprisingly common. Kate had a weak part in her brain – probably since birth – it could have happened at any moment. It was almost inevitable.

I’ve learnt too that after the shock comes the guilt. Every cross word, every nasty thought, every lie – they all come back to haunt you. And amongst the demons that were queuing up to torment me was the realisation that I wasn’t happy, and maybe, I never had been.

There had been happy moments, of course. Quite a lot of moments. Most of them in the previous three years, and most of them down to Kate, but they were moments none the less. I wanted to be happy all the time. Not just occasionally. Not just for a moment. And for the second time in my life I decided to tackle a problem in the only way I knew how: by making plans, and lists, and taking control of my own destiny.

Welcome to ‘How To Do Everything and Be Happy!’ If you’re dissatisfied with your life, this book may be for you. If you want to do something – anything – to increase the amount of happiness you feel, this book is probably for you. And if you know how to use a pencil, if you own a diary, if you can make a list, if you’re moderately organised, or could be if you had a good enough reason to be, then this book is definitely for you.

Now then, let me tell you about this dream that I have for you…