how to really, permanently, lose weight!!

I am a reformed alcoholic. I am a reformed chain smoker. I am an ex-fat person. I am also not selling anything. My only wish now is to help people by passing on my knowledge; I guess this sounds too good to be true. When you have really nearly died a few times, money takes on a sort of reduced role in your thinking. Make no mistake about it, we are all going to die, even you will die one day. When you are young this seems a long long way away, I'm fifty now, and it sure seems a little closer to hand than it did.

You may think I have superhuman will-power to quit drinking and smoking (and gambling and all other excesses). To a certain extent that is true; I have a great deal of will power, but I also have a method, a way of thinking, which helps.

For some reason, and it may have been a good  one at time, you have what is pretty well an addiction. You love something more than you love yourself at present time.

Think "myself or my health."

In this "New Labour" "Tony Blair" type world, certainly in Britain, everything is explainable in terms of something else more convenient. It doesn't detract from plain fact that Emporer really hasn't got any clothes on at all. In short, it's not stretching truth, it's really a very big lie(s).

This is what you are currently doing to yourself, you are living out a lie in order to placate yourself, in order to make what you are doing palatable. What you are really doing is killing yourself a lot quicker, and a lot more painfully than is really necessary; and by and large no-one gives a damn whether you do or you don't; they are too busy with themselves to really and truly bother about you. By and large this is correct. The few people that possibly do care either havn't a clue how to help, or are simply hampered by realisation that it is only YOU who can cure it.

There are really no excuses: If you are drinking too much you are a pain of a drunk. If you are smoking too much you are a pain of a smoker. If you are gambling too much you are a liability, just as you are if you are on drugs. You probably nodded to all these, and felt agreement, so why don't you realise that in current Western society, being fat is not in vogue, and in many cases actually anti-social and a nuisance to other people. You are putting a strain on your heart, a strain on your lungs, a strain on your joints, and a strain on people around you,; to say nothing of strain on Health Professionals. Why? Because you are too self-indulgant to stop for a minute enjoying yourselves to see if you are bothering other people. There is no magic formula to weight loss. You take in less than you burn up in daily life.

To break that down further, you take in less than your daily ROUTINE. For in order to do this you will need to change your whole way of life, permanently. Make no mistake, if you are really and truly HAPPY when you are fat, then fine, go ahead and be fat, but acknowledge that most things you really enjoy kill you quickly, and painfully, and most things done to excess bring attendant guilt. Stop reading now if you don't want to lose weight or else you are wasting someone else's bandwidth who has what it takes when you have not got moral fibre.

What it takes is a modicum of will-power combined with a hell of a lot of common sense. I have had a lot of addictions, I am an excessive natured person. I find first step in losing any of them is to look at them as a phase I have grown out of. I have matured to such an extent I no longer need their crutch to carry me onwards.

Much as we look at kids and feel, "that's wrong, but they'll grow out of it in time". And they usually do, don't they, because they see that long-term they are better off without doing what they are doing. Why don't we tell them at time? Because we know they'll tend to do opposite!

Thus it is with ourselves.