The 500 Eating Plan: A Self Help Guide to Weight Loss in the 21St Century

By Robert Langford

There are thousands of diet books published and yet the statistics tell us that we are all getting fatter. The conclusion can only be that diets do not work or this would not be the case.

The 500 Eating Plan is not a diet but more a radical rethink that looks at weight management in the 21st century. It accepts that we eat the foods we do through choice, and so phony contrived diets that require us to eat differently are unsustainable, as perversely, we all return to our foods of choice even though they are the foods that made us overweight in the first place.

Just wanting to be slimmer is not enough. You need a Plan not a diet. A Plan that allows you to eat the foods you like and yet still lose weight. Trials have proven that the 500 Eating Plan does just that.

This unique self help guide will enable you to understand the simple science of becoming overweight and also how to reverse it. It will empower you to successfully take control of your weight, once and for all. Welcome to the 500 Eating Plan and to a slimmer healthier you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491885307

Robert Langford

Robert lives and works in the UK. He has spent some 40 years working in food, nutrition and health. With 20 years working in the food industry, he now feels like the poacher turned gamekeeper as he challenges the food industry’s ambivalence to the consequences of their profit driven focus regardless of the health outcomes for customers. For the last 20 years he has worked in health, managing clinical and health improvement services in the NHS and delivering evidence-based Public Health programmes and information for the Health Development Agency and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). He is a visiting lecturer at Stafford University Faculty of Health Sciences. Currently he leads on delivering adult weight management services for residents in Telford and Wrekin, Shropshire for the NHS, where over 60% of the adult population are overweight or obese. Robert submitted evidence on obesity to the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee for their Behaviour Change Report (July 2011) and also to the NICE Public Health Programme Guidance, Obesity: working with local communities (Nov. 2012). In addition, evaluation evidence for the weight management programmes he currently leads have been published in the Health Services Journal (Sept. 2012).

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© 2013 Robert Langford. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/23/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-8531-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-8530-7 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 Why diets don’t work

Chapter 2 So how did so many of us get so fat?

Chapter 3 So how much should I eat and how heavy should I be?

Chapter 4 Motivation or, is now the right time for me?

Chapter 5 The 500 Eating Plan explained

Chapter 6 Challenging Snacking

Chapter 7 Food labels, a simple guide to healthier shopping

Chapter 8 Buying and Spending

Chapter 9 Guide to eating out, fast food and takeaways

Chapter 10 Mindful eating

Chapter 11 Case studies from the 500 Eating Plan trials

Acknowledgements

There are a number of people I would like to thank for their contributions either directly or indirectly in producing this guide:

Louise Tanner-Stokes, for her calculations of client calorie need, for monitoring client calories throughout the trial and for her invaluable dietetic advice. Caroline Lacey for her informative work on emotional and mindful eating and for editing and proof reading this guide. Victoria Baugh and Michelle Busby for their early research on how supermarkets work. All of the above and also Aba Aquah, Lisa Bellamy, Manpal Bhogal, Kate Boddison, Pat Brick, Emma Cowen, Selina Crosby, Jo Devaney, Jackie Donkin, Deborah Houston, Lisa Jones, Ruth Kirkal, Amy Mills, Vicky Myers, Pip Swallow, Michelle Turner and Judith Tranter with whom I have worked closely over recent years, for their tireless work in helping clients to lose weight and tolerating my often eccentric outbursts.

Dr Helen Pittson, whose opinions I always value, for her comments on the draft guide and Stuart Bryan and Eileen Kucharski for previewing the guide.

The volunteers for the 500 Eating Plan trials who proved that the idea of the 500 Eating Plan could become a weight loss reality.

Claire Langford, without whom I would never have started.

Foreword

Whilst I live and work in the UK and what is written is therefore mostly UK centric, the principles of the 500 Eating Plan can be applied anywhere. Whether you live in Asia or Australia, the Americas or mainland Europe, even in parts of Africa, or on any of the various sized rocks that litter the oceans in between these continents, you will lose weight if you follow the 500 Eating Plan. This simple truth will become evident as you read this self help guide.

Robert Langford

Introduction

The idea for this book came, as many of my deeper thoughts do, at 4 in the morning as I tried unsuccessfully to sleep. Pondering work and thinking of clients I had seen the previous day and those that I would be seeing later that day, simplicity came over me. Losing weight should not be complicated as you just need to eat less. However, somehow it is. From years of counselling clients who are overweight or obese and wish to be lighter and healthier the solution may be simple but that definitely does not make it easy.

There are many things I find myself saying again and again to clients, but there are two particular repetitive weight loss directives that led me to my early morning light bulb moment.

Number one is the ‘eat 5 a day’ fruit and vegetable message promoted by the Department of Health in the UK and regurgitated by health professionals including myself. For those clients who live on fast food, takeaway and ready meal diets, trying to help them to eat their ‘5 a day’ is tortuous. If it feels like that for me, how does it feel to them? If a client has no experience of eating vegetables—usually summarised as ‘I don’t like vegetables’—pursuing this behaviour change has little mileage. It also has even less chance of helping them to reduce their weight. However, simply getting them to eat less of what they currently eat will help them to lose weight and has a greater chance of compliance. In colloquial speak, if you are eating a lot of ‘crap’ just eating less ‘crap’ will result in weight loss. There is a need to recognise this reality if both client and counsellor are to achieve their objectives.

However, being overweight is not just the prerogative of the fast food junkies. Huge numbers of people who eat a supposedly ‘healthy diet’ are also overweight or obese. If you eat more calories than you need, regardless of the source of those calories, you will gain weight and if you continue to do it your weight will continue to rise. The only way to lose weight is to eat less regardless of the foods you like to eat. There are no quick fixes and no magic pills; eating less is the only way to lose weight.

As a health professional, it is difficult to advocate just eating less and to not take note of what it is that is being eaten, but as a realist I do have to accept that this could be the best option for many. Diets that are high in fat, sugar and salt and this includes most fast food, takeaways, ready meals, etc, are not good in the long term. However, eating less of these foods does reduce the fat, sugar and salt intake and this combined with weight loss must improve long term health outcomes. The health advantages of being a healthy weight far outweigh the health disadvantages of being overweight and even more so if you are obese.

Number two is the need to remove the complications that diet plans concoct around weight loss. This is a totally unnecessary construct fostered by the diet industry to establish their niche. I say to clients continuously, ‘just eat three small meals a day’ and at 4 AM the embryo of the 500 Eating Plan was born.

If we simply ate a meal of 500 calories three times a day of the foods we normally eat we would lose weight.

Later that day I met and discussed with a colleague, a dietician, the concept and whether she would like to be involved in the project. To my delight she said ‘yes’ and so the real work began.

So how does the 500 Eating Plan work?

An average healthy weight adult female needs around 2000kcals a day to maintain their weight. To lose one pound a week she would need to under eat by 500kcals a day as one pound of fat contains 3500kcals (500kcals a day multiplied by 7 days in a week = 3500kcals).

For a healthy weight male daily calories are about 2500kcals but the principles of everything else still applies with the exception that one meal a day can be 700kcals to recognise the additional calorie requirements.

As these apply to someone of a healthy weight, if you are overweight you will need more calories to maintain your weight. The more overweight you are the more calories you need so, if you follow the 500 Eating Plan, the heavier you are the greater your weekly weight loss will be.

What the 500 Eating Plan gives you in this self help guide is the knowledge and understanding to look at what you eat now, the foods you like to eat, and how to make them into three meals a day each of which are 500kcals with the one 700kcal meal for men. This enables you to eat the foods that you prefer whether you are cooking from scratch, buying ready meals, having fast food from McDonald’s or any of the other fast food outlets, Chinese or Indian (eating out or ordering in), steakhouses or pies and pasties. All you need to do is not eat more than 500kcals in any one meal and in this guide I will help you to do just that.

If you want to eat the foods you like and still lose weight then this is the Plan for you. The 500 Eating Plan is not a diet but more a radical rethink on food management that syncs with you and the realities of modern living in the 21st century.

In the following chapters I look at all of the above in more detail but also