Feeling a bit fat at the moment? Wishing you hadn't had quite so many mince pies/chocolate truffles/roast potatoes over Christmas? If so, you are probably thinking of going on a diet . . . again.
Well, don't. At least not until you've read a new anti-diet book by Dr Deanna Jepson called Eat Orgasmically And Still Lose Weight - for she proposes quite a different way of leaving all that seasonal selfloathing behind.
Jepson, a former GP who runs seven private eating disorder clinics in the north of England, is herself quite a tonic. At 57 she is so effervescent that you feel more lively just listening to her talk. And how she talks . . . about food, about sex and about how our appetite for food is like our desire for sex we frustrate it at our peril.
As with most women, her preoccupation with food began as a teenager. In her case it was when her family moved from Singapore to live in England. Stir-fries and rice gave way to cooked breakfasts, sweets and pastries. "Chinese people are usually slim and petite and I never thought that I could get fat, but we turned into a family of fatties," she laughs.
THE young Deanna, three stone overweight, started to diet: "I went through mental hell. I'm an obsessive, over-the-top person - we food lovers are passionate people and I would lose up to half a stone in a few days and then go on an enormous binge. I alternately starved and then ate like a maniac. It was frightening." Her weight yo-yoed wildly while she hated herself for her "failure" to lose weight. She had developed what she now calls a "fat mind", part of the dieting mentality, and saw herself as much bigger than she really was.
It was her mother's common sense that ended her miseries - and which is still at the heart of her philosophy of food. "She said `Stop dieting and let's eat normally as slim people do. They eat whatever they like but they don't eat between meals; and they leave food on their plates when they feel full'." Jepson did what she was told, lost her excess three stone and has stayed more or less at the same weight ever since.
Today, the basis of treatment at her clinics remains stunningly simple: that people get fat not because of their hormones or their metabolism or their genes, but because they eat too much - and then diet. "Dieting causes fatness," she argues. "It is an obsessive compulsive cycle. Dieters like me can follow a diet, but the moment I break it I start eating and just can't stop." She rejects the idea that fat people have weak willpower. "Dieters have very strong will-power, but if you deprive yourself you become too hungry, you lose control, overeat and then start bingeing - because bingeing is the body's solution to dieting." In contrast to dieters who deprive themselves of the food they love, Jepson argues that "naturally slim" people get food satisfaction by eating whatever they want, but compensate for heavy meals by eating less at other times.
And this is where, with unmistakable glee, she starts to talk dirty about food. "It's just like sexual arousal," she giggles. "Your taste buds are ready wanting it. You can't stop until you peak. Food is the lover to your taste buds, and if you're not satisfied you will look for another `lover' and pick at other food. And then you will feel guilty. People who are passionate about food are passionate about sex." Jepson's book has questionnaires to help you work out your food "libido". She encourages her clients to have at least one "food orgasm" a week. It is an ecstatic experience beyond mere food satisfaction in which "both mind and body are satisfied".
She recommends three mental exercises to turn a "fat mind" into a "thin mind" and help you lose weight for good. First, always say to yourself after eating "I enjoyed that" - keeping guilt at bay. Second, if you are not sure you really want to eat, postpone it - to find out if you are just "comfort eating". Third, remind yourself that being hungry, but not too hungry, is OK. Former dieters at her clinics often have to relearn the natural hunger/ satiety rhythms of the body which have been overridden by years of dieting. "Regain that rhythm, enjoy your food without guilt and you can overeat intentionally," she says. "It is practising the art of compensation to stay slim." Which take us back to her mother, who used to say that Chinese people stay slim without dieting, and they do so by not "eating beyond the plate". Jepson now gives all her clients a special plate with a decorative "inner rim". The idea is to eat smaller helpings within this rim to compensate for overeating. Those who want to lose weight simply eat within the rim more often. "There are no `fattening foods' and no `slimming foods'. As long as you think about how much you eat, how often and what you eat is up to you." There is more plain common sense when it comes total body shape. According to Jepson we are all either ectomorphs (long and lean like Kate Moss), or mesomorphs (more robust Sophia Loren types), or curvaceous endomorphs (a la Marilyn Monroe). "We must accept which type we are and make the best of it," she says. "Young girls want to be like Kate Moss, but what the hell for? Men don't like it. It is pointless and dangerous to change your body type. Princess Di was a mesomorph who tried to change her shape into that of an ectomorph through dieting. The price was bulimia." Having seen girls as young as six with anorexia, she now wants revolution, no less. She urges parents to never ban food because "it makes children obsessed; anorexics ban everything for themselves". In 1998 she opens her first clinic in the south of England and she wants to teach her system to others. "I want the end of dieting. This is the new food philosophy for the new millennium."
Eat Orgasmically And Still Lose Weight, by Dr Deanna Jepson, is published in the UK by Thorsons.