The Mindset Diet

By Brett Fitzpatrick

If complex diet plans and fitness regimens have never worked for you, and you are constantly losing the mental battle to steer clear of junk food, then the Mindset Diet may be for you.

This is not a crash diet plan or a rigorous exercise regimen, it is an attitude, a whole new mindset. This book is packed with insights and tips to help you manage your weight and stay away from patterns of eating that promote weight gain.

It focuses on the size of the portions we consume, and learning how to beat cravings. This is a back to basics approach, where you count your calories every day, but it shows you how to build sinful temptations into this regimen.

A combination of old-school calorie counting and the latest insights into the psychology of appetite are combined to give you the best possible chance of losing weight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brett Fitzpatrick
• Release date: Mar 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386303374

Brett Fitzpatrick

I am an author living and working in Venice. I love the flexibility that epublishing gives me to live where I want and get my books to people all over the world. I like to read sci-fi and fantasy, and allow my imagination to create the amazing visuals that the writer describes. I'm a child of the 70s and so Star Wars type space opera will always find a warm welcome in my reading stack. I grew up in the UK and this has given my sci-fi a very British taste. It is more Doctor Who than Battlestar Galactica. It also means that my political consciousness was forged in the battles of 80s British political life, like a few other, more famous, British sci-fi writers. For example, I try to make sure every book passes the Bechdel test. The greatest joy of writing for me is to be able to dive into a world of the imagination and come back up to the surface with something to show for it. I love feedback, even of the "This book sucks!" type. If somebody is interested enough to want to influence my work, I am interested enough to want to include their feedback.

Book preview

Chapter 1 – Dieting is a Mind Thing

THE MINDSET DIET ISN’T about changing the food that you eat, it is about changing how you think about the food that you eat. And this change in mindset is laser focused directly and exclusively on weight loss. There is nothing in this book about maintaining a balanced diet, promoting a regular digestive system, getting clearer skin, or boosting your energy level. This book does not mention cholesterol, fat, sugar or salt, even though we all know that they lack nutritional value, this book is about getting your brain on side, and harnessing it to successfully lose weight. The problem with your diet probably isn’t the food. The problem is how you relate to it, and how you manage it. The problem is all in your mind.

The Mindset Diet is not a quick fix diet either. It has been proven time and again that quick-fix diets are counterproductive in the long run. Even if the quick fix diet works, the habits that led the dieter to put on weight have not been addressed, and the poor dieter is soon putting all the weight back on. This diet is about changing the way you eat, forever. If you are reading this book then the chances are that you are eating either a few too many, or way too many calories, every day. That’s all it takes, just a few too many calories every day will lead to a gradual build up in weight. This book shows you how to stop doing just that. This is a permanent change. You will not ever go back to eating even a tiny few too many calories each day.

The diet itself is simple, and this is a purposeful choice. A lot of diets are too fussy and restrictive to be incorporated into daily life easily, and this makes them difficult to stick to on any kind of long-term basis. The Mindset Diet is beautifully simple, it is just calorie counting, nothing more complicated than that. There are no shakes, no soups, no pills, no tinctures, and especially no recipes to follow. There is no food combining, no detoxifying juice cleanses, no intermittent fasting, no paleo, no keto, no carb cutting, no raw foods, no weight-loss teas, no cabbage soup, and no grapefruit. These type of complex ‘fad’ diets have not been shown to be any more effective than diets that maintain a typical mix of foods. There is no point making things more complicated than they already are. All you need to know about your food, in order to lose weight, is how many calories there are in it. Everything else is interesting, but not essential. Almost all of what this diet talks about is what is in your mind, not what is in your food.

This diet is about the brain. For people who are trying to lose weight, their own brain is the thing most hindering them. You need to understand the hard-wired instincts and habits that are leading to weight gain and, more importantly, you need to learn strategies to counteract these behaviors. That is what this book is all about.

The Mindset Diet doesn't preach, or make you feel bad. There is nothing to feel bad about, quite the contrary. If you are overweight, you are, in fact, absolutely and completely normal. In our modern world it is completely normal and usual for a human to become overweight by following their normal eating patterns. We live in a time of plenty with no famines, and so the reserve of fat that our bodies doesn’t get burnt off in lean times naturally builds up and just keeps building. It never gets used, because we are never forced to go hungry by a huge natural disaster such as the rains failing.

There is no such thing as ‘over eating,’ because eating so much that you put on weight is our natural state, and is perfectly normal. This diet is not about making you feel bad about this natural type of eating. It is also perfectly normal to choose high-energy foods such as chocolate and pizza. There is a reason our taste buds tell us that this is the sort of food that tastes best. People who say you are ‘overeating’ and ‘choosing the wrong food’ are, A: judgmental, and B: they fundamentally misunderstand the way the human mind selects food.

Another thing to be careful of is the idea that food can be inherently ‘healthy,’ that one food is better for you than some other food. This is true on only a very superficial level. If you are obese, it is the amount of calories you are eating that is important, not the balance of vitamins and minerals in any particular meal or snack. You can, in fact, be very rigorous about making healthy choices and still gain weight. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do. For example, rice cakes have almost the same number of calories in them as chocolate bars. Rice cakes are much ‘healthier’ of course, but simply switching to them will not lead to weight loss, and this rice-cake ‘healthiness’ is pretty academic if you are obese, with all the negative health impacts that implies. It gets worse; switching to orange juice instead of diet coke will actually result in more calories being ingested. Pour yourself three glasses of orange juice and you might as well have eaten a chocolate bar. Although, to keep nutritionists happy, it has to be pointed out that the orange juice is a ‘healthier’ option.

Healthy food choices are all well and good, and should be encouraged, but they are not what this diet is about. Healthy eating is a whole other subject and should be treated as such. If you want to know the difference between carbohydrates and gluten and all that stuff, buy a textbook written by a dietitian. This diet book is not written by a dietitian because most dietitians and nutritionists wouldn’t know a chocolate craving if it bit them on the ass. Get thin first, it is the most important thing you can do for your health. Get thin any way you can, because getting thin is a very difficult mental task.

Then, and only then, learn