Providing you’re healthy, it’s no bad thing to be carrying a little excess avoirdupois. Several American surveys have shown that men who were 15-20 lb heavier than their ‘desirable’ weight lived longer, and had 80,000 fewer premature deaths, than their thinner counterparts. Another study of 14,345 men, revealed that regardless of how much weight they gained or lost over an 11 year period, those who maintained or even improved their fitness levels lowered by at least 30 per cent their risk of dying prematurely, or succumbing to a heart attack, compared with those who’d suffered a decline in their physical condition. So for a while ignore the scales and concentrate instead on gaining health rather than losing weight. Walk more. Use the stairs rather than the lifts and escalators. Watch less television. The average American spends five hours a day glued to the idiot’s lantern. Every two hours more they spend in front of the box increases their mortality rate by 13 per cent. Rather than reach for a can of coke from the fridge, get up and make yourself a cup of tea. This carries far few calories and contains small quantities of catechins which lower the amount of cholesterol absorbed in the gut. Also make a point of getting a good night’s sleep, for sleep laboratories studies show that subjects who sleep less than six hours have a tendency to gain weight and develop high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes with a accompanying 48 per cent increased risk of succumbing to a fatal heart attack.

Other popular New Year resolutions are to have more fun, suffer less stress and spend more quality time with family and friends. The pursuit of these three goals will also help you lose weight and improve your fitness ratings. Researchers at a Californian university found that people who laughed for at least half-an-hour a day – by watching comedy films or TV shows – showed a rise of more than a quarter in their levels of ‘good’ cholesterol. This compared favourably with the rise of just three per cent shown by in those who took standard cholesterol medication without the accompanying chuckle therapy. In the same way scientists at the University of Utah have discovered that women in turbulent marriages are significantly more likely to accumulate fat deposits around their midriffs and develop high blood pressure and raised blood sugar levels. So don’t worry excessively about your weight. In the New Year set out to make gains in fitness, rather than losses in weight. But don’t push your luck too far. The Sumo wrestlers take part in a daily programme of strenuous strength training, but because they’re grossly obese their life expectancy is little more than 60 years, which is more than ten years less than the average Japanese male. .

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Humans are suffering the same fate. This is not surprising, for the knee is the largest joint in the body and one of the most complicated, since it has to be strong enough to bear our weight when we’re on the move and sufficient flexible to allow us to twist and turn when we’re playing games. Every step we take subjects the knee to a downward force of three to six times our body weight. This is particularly marked for overweight men, who have five times the risk of developing arthritis of the knee, compared with women whose risk is four times greater. To a slight extent arthritis is genetically determined. Its incidence increases as we age, when the joint has been damaged in an earlier accident, if we’re carrying excess weight and when we’re a man rather than a woman. Since we can’t change our parents, revert to childhood, change our sex or undo the injuries we’ve suffered in the past, the only practical self help treatment for arthritic knees is to lose weight. At present 70,000 knee replacement operations are carried out in England and Wales every year. That figure will mount unless we can overcome the obesity epidemic. Osteoarthritis is a degenerative process which starts in the smooth hyaline cartilage which lines the surface of our joints. In a state of health this slippery, glistening surface generates considerably less friction that a skate gliding over ice. With the onset of arthritic change the surface becomes dull and rough. Despite the scientific evidence to the contrary, many people still believe that this degeneration is the result of everyday wear and tear. In truth, a healthy joint shows an incredible ability to withstand prolonged and heavy use, as arises during the course of playing professional tennis, without showing any signs of wear.

This I explained in my first book Hands for Healing, written well over forty years ago, in which I described experiments in which the knee joints of dogs have been fixed in a stand, loaded with weights and then moved rapidly backwards and forwards to simulate the effects of weeks of normal use. Even after twenty four hours of this gruelling test the joints have showed no signs of wear. But when the same joints were put in a clamp, placed under compression and prevented from moving, the typical signs of arthritic degeneration quickly appeared. Swedish experiments also revealed that the hyaline cartilage acts like a sponge, which sucks up nourishment from the looped network of blood vessels in the underlying bone only when the joint surfaces are subjected to intermitted compression and release. This was confirmed by post-mortem studies of hip joints, carried out at Oxford University, which showed that the earliest signs of osteoarthritis are always found in the least used parts of the joint. This led me to recommend that anyone wishing to avoid developing arthritis of their hips and knees should ‘take plenty of regular exercise involving the fullest possible use of their joints’ and ‘avoid putting on even a pound of excess weight.’ That remains my advice today, and it’s simpler now than ever before to get down to your healthy weight if you follow the regular tips provided on the selfhelpalliance.co.uk website. Do that, and you’ll increase your chances of escaping the surgeon’s knife, for the famous Framingham study in America has shown that women who lose just 11 pounds of superfluous weight lower their risk of developing arthritis of the knee by a massive 50 per cent.

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At one time it was believed that middle aged spreads arise because muscles have an inherent tendency to turn to fat. That’s total twaddle. If we eat too much, and exercise too little, it’s inevitable that we’ll grow fat. At the same time we’re bound to lose muscle bulk, but these two metabolic changes are contemporaneous, rather than causally linked. All too often our problem is, not that we eat too much, but that we exercise too little. And that has a knock on effect. People say they’re sick and tired of being overweight, when what they really mean is that they’re sick and tired through being overweight. Anyone who’s overweight is likely to be prone to breathlessness, ready fatigue and rheumatic aches and pains. Fat folk fade fast. This means they’re more likely to take it easy, and maybe give themselves a boost by taking some sugary foodstuffs when their spirits droop. Motion pictures of a group of girls playing volley ball during a summer camp showed that those who were overweight were standing still for nearly ninety per cent of the game compared with just over half for those who weren’t carrying a load of excess fat. The truth is, you can’t be fit and fat.

One way of turning this vicious circle into a virtuous circle is to start building up your muscle mass. Shun the escalators, do some form of daily exercise and walk whenever you can. The more muscle you build the trimmer you’ll look, for muscle is far more compact than fat. It will also dispose of some of your surplus calories, for a kilogram of muscle burns up approximately three calories a day, compared with the one calorie required to maintain a similar weight of fat. If in the next few weeks you can increase your muscle mass by just three pounds you’ll burn up about an extra 200 calories a day, which is equivalent to a loss of roughly a pound of fat every 18 days. What’s more, you’ll burn up extra calories every time you boost your activity levels, and this can continue even when you’re watching TV, or lying asleep in bed, for the level of body metabolism remains raised for four to six hours after exercise is taken. All these benefits, and their just a muscle twitch away.

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Food manufacturers take advantage of this inherent passion and make sure that their junk foods are loaded with sugars and fat. One frequently recommended way of losing weight is to stop eating all foods that are advertised on television, since these are invariably heavily laden with sugar. Researchers claim that anyone who limited themselves to eating only foods which were advertised in the media would consume more than 25 times the recommended daily allowance of sugar. By doing so, today’s jam doughnut becomes tomorrow’s middle aged spread. Instead of eating hyper-palatable cookies, candies and cakes we should stick to eating natural foods. These provide a wide range of essential nutrients and are slower to digest, which makes it far easier for the body to decide when it’s had enough.

This was the discovery of William Banting, the nineteenth century undertaker, who made a fortune selling elaborate coffins to the Duke of Wellington and other members of the London gentry. In 1862, at the age of 65, Banting weighed 202lb, which was clearly excessive for a man who was only 5ft. 5inches tall. Over the years he’d tried a wide variety of slimming regimes, ranging from fasting to spa treatments, dieting and strict exercise regimes. All failed. When his health finally plummeted, probably because he’d developed Type 2 diabetes, he consulted Dr William Harvey who was then one of Europe’s most eminent physicians. Harvey put him on a low sugar diet, and a year later he was 46 pounds lighter, and was losing at a rate of roughly a pound a month. He’d lost twelve inches around his waist, was sleeping better, and could go up and down stairs with ease. Such was his miraculous transformation that he wrote Letter on Corpulence (1863), which was the world’s first diet book. In it he said: ‘I can confidently state that the quantity of diet may be safely left to the natural appetite, it is quality only which is essential to abate corpulence.’ Reduce your intake of sugar as much as possible, and you too can gain the same results.

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Today obesity is commonplace, which means it’s becoming the ‘norm’ rather than an unusual aberration. Nowadays we more likely stand out from the crowd if we’re fit than when we’re fat. A recent Canadian study of well over three thousand children showed that those who see people in their environment who are overweight or obese tend to ‘develop inaccurate perceptions of what constitutes appropriate weight status.’
Surveys show that kids with an obese brother or sister have a 37 per cent increased risk of following their example and putting on excess weight. We can’t choose our kith and kin, but we should take great care when selecting our friends, for they too have an significant impact on our behaviour. Researchers at the University of Canada have discovered that subjects have a 57 per cent increased risk of becoming obese if one of more of their close friends is corpulent. Media celebrities have a similar impact, and can benefit their loyal fans by demonstrating that it is infinitely better to maintain a healthy weight rather than be pudgy or skeletally thin. Julie Wooldridge, a young Essex woman, was in many ways a mirror image of Princess Diana. People in the street would do a double-take when they saw her face, then realize that she wasn’t their idol when they looked down at her 14 stone body. ‘Every photo of HRH was like looking in a mirror at the figure I could become’, she told reporters. Given this incentive she lost 63 pounds, dropped four dress sizes and won an international slimming competition.

The UK government has been using advertising and restrictive legislation to tackle the obesity plague, but it would be far more effective if politicians led by example. We’re influenced less by their messages, than by the behaviour of the messengers. For instance, Nigel Lawson, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, set the British people a splendid example when he modified his life style, ate less meat and stepped up his intake of fruit and vegetables. On this regime he lost five stone in twelve months, a loss he has maintained ever since. The same applies to Mick Cornett, the Mayor of Oklahoma City, who set his people a splendid example when he shed 40 pounds and set up a website – www.thiscityisgoingonadiet.com – to show them how it could be done. Since then, forty thousand Oklahomans have joined the campaign and shed a total of more than half a million pounds.

It’s easy for politicians to put on weight, because they lead lives which are stressful but largely sedentary. This is why there was for many years a custom in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire for mayors to be weighed before and after they took up office. This was to show they hadn’t grown fat at the public expense. It’s unlikely that mayors and cabinet ministers today would submit themselves to such a test, but there must surely be some who would follow Mayor Cornett’s example, and lead by example rather than by exhortation. That would enhance the nation’s health, decrease the financial burden on the NHS, and boost the UK economy, for studies show that roly-poly employees have twelve times the levels of sickness absenteeism as their slimmer, fitter counterparts. Are there any volunteers among our elected leaders who will play this role?

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Even the grossly overweight can benefit from these pre-Xmas weight control measures. One American lady weighed well over twenty stone. Ashamed of her condition, when she caught sight of herself in a shop window, she decided to pay a return visit to her favourite health resort. She started her stay with a private session with the hydro’s psychotherapist, who studied her life style and immediate saw that she needed to be more active. ‘What’s your favourite form of exercise?’ he asked. This was not what she expected, because she’d come to the resort to be pampered as she had been in the past, not to work out in the gym. For a while she couldn’t think of a single thing she enjoyed which was even remotely energetic. The only activity which gave her pleasure, she finally confessed, was shopping. Seizing on this small gleam of hope, the shrink invited her to do a deal. To help her lose weight, he got her to promise to walk once round the perimeter of her shopping centre before she went inside and made a purchase. By following this simple instruction she shed three-and-a-half stones in five months. This may seem hard to credit, but the loss is easily explained for she usually visited the centre four times a week, and the trip round the perimeter of the block was a mile and a half long. Maybe that’s an idea the major food stores should foster in 2012, by building a pedestrian circuit around their car parks.

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Sugar now provides about a sixth of the total calorie intake in Western countries. This is a particular hazard for Britons, who are Europe’s heaviest sweet eaters. The people in the south of Europe have always shown a lesser risk of obesity and heart disease than those residing in the north, which has always been attributed to their consumption of a ‘Mediterranean diet’ rich in vegetables, fruit and wine. This overlooks the fact that they eat fewer sweets, and less sugar laden junk foods. Surveys reveal that compared with the British, the French eat 39 per cent fewer sweets and the Italians 60 per cent less. For us, today’s jam doughnut is tomorrow’s middle aged spread. Most of the heavily advertised foods on television are laden with salt, fats and sugar, which is how their sales are boosted. Researchers reckon that if people only ate food which was advertised on TV they would consume 25 times more than the recommended daily allowance of sugar. One simple way of keeping slim, and improving one’s general health, is to avoid eating any foods which are heavily featured in media advertisements. The other is to reduce one’s overall intake of sugar. This brings us back to William Banting, who over the years had tried a variety of ways of reducing his bulk, including fasting, spa treatments, diets and exercise regimes. Relief only came when he visited his doctor, the eminent Dr William Harvey, who advised him to adopt the low sugar diet he recommended for his diabetic patients. On this regime his fat disappeared at a rate of about one pound a month. He was so delighted than he published his experience in what became the first world’s first recorded diet book, Letter on Corpulence (1863). In it he tells how by reducing his sugar intake he lost over twelve inches around his waist, slept better, moved more freely and could go up and down stairs with ease. These benefits can be achieved by any chubby person who reduces their sugar intake.

© www.selfhelpalliance.co.uk

Sugar now provides about a sixth of the total calorie intake in Western countries. This is a particular hazard for Britons, who are Europe’s heaviest sweet eaters. The people in the south of Europe have always shown a lesser risk of obesity and heart disease than those residing in the north, which has always been attributed to their consumption of a ‘Mediterranean diet’ rich in vegetables, fruit and wine. This overlooks the fact that they eat fewer sweets, and less sugar laden junk foods. Surveys reveal that compared with the British, the French eat 39 per cent fewer sweets and the Italians 60 per cent less. For us, today’s jam doughnut is tomorrow’s middle aged spread. Most of the heavily advertised foods on television are laden with salt, fats and sugar, which is how their sales are boosted. Researchers reckon that if people only ate food which was advertised on TV they would consume 25 times more than the recommended daily allowance of sugar. One simple way of keeping slim, and improving one’s general health, is to avoid eating any foods which are heavily featured in media advertisements. The other is to reduce one’s overall intake of sugar. This brings us back to William Banting, who over the years had tried a variety of ways of reducing his bulk, including fasting, spa treatments, diets and exercise regimes. Relief only came when he visited his doctor, the eminent Dr William Harvey, who advised him to adopt the low sugar diet he recommended for his diabetic patients. On this regime his fat disappeared at a rate of about one pound a month. He was so delighted than he published his experience in what became the first world’s first recorded diet book, Letter on Corpulence (1863). In it he tells how by reducing his sugar intake he lost over twelve inches around his waist, slept better, moved more freely and could go up and down stairs with ease. These benefits can be achieved by any chubby person who reduces their sugar intake.

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A similar effect can be obtained by drinking water before meals, and at odd times during the day. In a trial carried out in Germany, it was found that when primary schools installed drinking fountains and encouraged their use, their children were 31 per cent less likely to become overweight than those at similar schools who didn’t provide the calorie-free liquid refreshment. The same applies to adults, as was shown when American nutritionists at the Virginia State University carried out an experiment with a small group of middle aged people and found that they consumed 75-90 fewer calories a day when they drank two cups of water immediately before eating a meal. As a result they found that over a three month period, dieters who drank water before meals, three times per day, lost about five pounds more than dieters who didn’t. That, no doubt, is why some of the famous, quick-loss diet programmes advocate drinking as much as three litres of water a day.

Queen Elizabeth II has had to keep a careful eye on her weight throughout her long reign. She comes from a family with a genetic predisposition to become obese. Queen Victoria, her great-great-grandmother was gross. Although she was only five foot tall, a pair of her silk bloomers which came up for auction in 2009, showed that her waist measurement was 50 inches. Her confidant, friend and advisor Lord Melbourne told her that she should only eat when she was hungry. ‘In that case I shall be eating all day’, the roly-poly monarch replied. Edward VII, the present queen’s great grandfather, was also grossly overweight. His waist measurement at the time of his coronation was 48 inches, and spread even further once he ascended the throne and embarked on an orgy of eating and womanising. It was he who introduced the male custom of leaving the lower button of a suit jacket undone, in his case because his girth didn’t permit it to be fastened. Her own mother faced a similar problem. As the court photographer Cecil Beaton recorded in his confidential diary, when he came to photograph the ‘Queen Mum’ in 1965 he found her ‘fatter and dumpier than ever’. He made the suggestion that she should fold her hands across her lap, as a tactful way of concealing the royal paunch, then realised that she no longer had a lap.

Queen Elizabeth II, as part of her royal duties, has to attend endless ceremonial banquets. At these she drinks plenty of her favourite Malvern Spa mineral waters, eats a main course rich in vegetables, and merely toys with the rich sweet courses which chefs delight in preparing for her delectation. If these measures don’t control her girth, she takes a two-day fast, during which she drinks only barley water. This she does for two week’s, during which time she normally loses up to eight pounds. The royal remedy for weight control is therefore a strong measure of self discipline, washed down with lots of water.

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Researchers at the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore have found the same tendency in humans. They carried out interviews, and pre-medical examinations, on a small group of obese men and women who were about to undergo an intestinal bypass. The patients – thirteen men and ten women – were questioned about their sex lives, body image, libidinal drives and sexual functioning. The results revealed that there was little or no decline in their sexual appetite. The women had no trouble getting an orgasm, and the men’s sexual drive and performance remained unchanged, apart from two who declared that they had occasional potency problems. But what plagued the entire group was the sheer mechanical difficulties they faced. Because of their bulk, they found it difficult to find a position in which they could enjoy easy sexual union. As several explained, their paunches ‘got in the way’. Lack of stamina and shortness of breath were other frequent problem. The major finding, however, was that however amorous they felt they were all reluctant to take of their clothes and reveal their unsightly bodies All 23 were recorded as having ‘markedly negative feelings’ about their body and admitted that they were ashamed of their appearance.

The remedy is clear. Everyone ought to be able to enjoy an active sex life. If obesity makes this difficult, enough surplus fat should be shed to permit comfortable coupling. This should be done by making gradual life style changes, rather than by crash dieting. The body’s fat tissues provide a store for sex hormones, which is why a general reduction in adipose tissue frequently leads to a decline in sexual function. This explains why anorexic girls, and sometimes excessively skinny ballerinas, tend to suffer a fall in oestrogen levels, missed periods and reduced fertility. With regard to sexual performance, it’s undoubtedly better for a woman to be overweight than underweight. This was shown by researchers at the Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago, who tested a group of women using scales which measured their sexual readiness and erotic excitability. Using these yardsticks they found that mildly overweight women outscored their skinny counterparts by a factor of almost two to one. So don’t try to soup up your sex life by crash dieting, one trial having shown that women often stop masturbating and having sexual fantasies when they reduce their energy intake to 1,700 calories a day – which is 500 more than that provided by the Beverly Hills Diet.
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