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Authors: Martin Faulks
Tags: #The Mindful Path To Permanent Weight Loss
The Zen Diet Revolution
Martin Faulks
has been a student of the oriental arts since he was five years old. He trained in Zen Buddhism in Japan, has a black belt in the Korean martial art, Kuk Sool Won, and is proficient in the mystical disciplines of China, including Tai Chi, Meditation, Qi Gong and the legendary form of Yi Jin Jing.
Philippa Faulks
is a writer and researcher of alternative history and religion, with a special interest in ancient Egypt. Philippa originally trained as an aromatherapist and worked extensively within the health-food trade. Her other interests include minimalism and how to live a simple life; you can follow her blog at
http://thissimplelifeishere.blogspot.co.uk/
Also by Martin Faulks
Secrets of Rejuvenation
Butterfly Tai Chi
Becoming a Ninja Warrior
Becoming the Lotus: How to Achieve the Full Lotus Posture
Also by Philippa Faulks
The Masonic Magician
A Handbook for the Freemason’s Wife
Secrets of Meditation
Henna Magic
Modern Mantras
THE
ZEN DIET
REVOLUTION
THE MINDFUL PATH TO PERMANENT WEIGHT LOSS
MARTIN and PHILIPPA FAULKS
WITH DR RICHARD FAULKS
Shihan Michael Pearce at the Bujinkan Honbu
Dojo in Japan, who taught me to think about diet
and exercise in a new way.
Publisher’s note
The information in this book is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice and treatment. If you are pregnant or breastfeeding or have any special dietary requirements or medical conditions, it is recommended that you consult a medical professional before following any of the information or recipes contained in this book. Watkins Publishing, or any other persons who have been involved in working on this publication, cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions, inadvertent or not, that may be found in the recipes or text, nor for any problems that may arise as a result of preparing one of these recipes or following the advice contained in this work.
INTRODUCTION: THE ZEN DIET PRINCIPLES
Trade in the food kick for a health kick
An important word or two on contentment
Are you an ‘emotional eater’? – don’t mistake ‘mood’ for ‘food’
Mindfulness – making every moment count
Auto-suggestion for Zen Dieting
Meditation as a tool for change
Detachment – the art of letting go
Food routine – and how to take advantage of it
Making movement a regular part of your day
4. EXERCISE AND THE ART OF BURNING FAT
Exercise – choose your weapons!
Supplements that can help fat metabolism
A spiritual approach to weight loss
A routine for very rapid weight loss
I
F YOU WERE TO SEE ME ON
the beach, in the street or in the gym, you wouldn’t think I was anyone who thought about food. Nowadays I have very low body fat and carry quite a bit of muscle. People often say things like ‘Well, you’re lucky; you can eat like a horse and never put on weight’. Little do they know the irony of that statement.
Ever since I can remember, I have had a great passion for life and for food. There are few things I don’t like to eat and meal times are a daily pleasure. Now that was fine when I was young but things started to change as I got older. My job included a lot of business meals, and I had developed a terrible habit of eating out as a means of celebration. I exercised every day and I think that made me feel immune to any extra calories. One day, I looked in the mirror and I
was fat. I didn’t need weighing scales or a body-fat monitor to tell me, it was obvious! I was just like most of the other businessmen I know. I had a giant belly and looked terrible. The only difference was that I had a slightly stockier frame from daily weightlifting. I knew the next step was a heart attack. It was something I had seen in many others. Besides, at 30 years old I should be fit and healthy. What kind of an example was I setting to my daughter and to others in the martial arts community? Something had to change.
As a fitness enthusiast and the son of a well-known food scientist I was the ideal person to skim off the pounds, right? Wrong! As soon as I cut my calories, I started to spend every waking moment thinking about food. It was horrible! I fought through it for a month or two and lost some weight. As soon as I stopped the diet, I went back to my old routine and then the weight went back on, which was so frustrating. I started to realize that the problem was more than just a simple change of habits; it was a complete and permanent change, both in my habits and my attitude towards food.
I needed a permanent solution. I started trying all sorts of standardized diets, including ones where I would eat salad for dinner every night. Some of them had great effects on my body composition, but it was so hard to live a normal life and impossible to keep to in the long term. I kept changing my meal plan, searching for a solution that would work forever, but with little success. Anything I tried ultimately was artificial and forced and couldn’t be maintained for any length of time. What I didn’t know,
and what took me a while to realize, was that my thinking was all wrong. Your diet and your weight/health management is a skill. It’s not something that you can cure with a silver bullet; one quick-fix change is not going to be the answer. It is something you need to work at and improve as you go along. Everything takes an ongoing effort: your food choices, your rest and your exercise. It even takes a while for your body to develop the ability to burn fat. That’s right, your fat-burning response, if you have never used it before, actually gets better and better. When I realized that, everything changed. I started applying the disciplines and philosophies I had learned from other areas of my life to my diet and body-weight goals, with amazing results.
This book is the result of many years of my studying the art of weight management, diet and exercise. Everything you read in this book is something we have tried and tested and proved to work. The science is sound due to the kind help of my father, world-renowned food scientist Richard Faulks. In your hands you hold the key to total control over your body weight, your looks and your health. You need only turn the key in the lock to open the doorway to the new you.
This approach isn’t just for people like me – it is for everyone. Philippa’s story is somewhat different. For many years she was really quite ‘skinny’ and desperate to put on weight. On the following pages she explains her Zen Diet story.
I was always being asked stupid questions about my weight and food habits, and was continually under suspicion of being anorexic, which wasn’t helped by the fact that I had suffered from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and incredibly low energy levels since I was a teenager. I certainly tried to eat healthily and was strictly vegetarian for about seven years until I decided I needed more protein than could be obtained from a vegetarian diet. This was due to a basic intolerance of the main protein source of soya, beans and pulses that chronically aggravated my IBS. Many of my vegetarian friends were horrified when I converted back to eating meat and fish, insisting that I could get just as much protein from eating soya and could put on weight adequately with a veggie diet, and so on. However, I then watched what they were eating, and far from getting most of their protein from the ‘healthier’ options of beans, nuts and soya, they were, in fact, almost always supplementing their protein (and I now know, their calorific requirements) with large quantities of cheese, milk and cream!
So, back on a meat-enriched diet I still didn’t put on much weight (although my general mood got better) until I reached the fabled (and dreaded) age of 35. Now, I have a feeling a lot of ladies will know exactly what I experienced – I swear that, overnight from the age of 34 to the morning of my 35th birthday, my bottom expanded and some inner biological deployment of fat occurred. Since then I have had an ever-increasing battle with firmly deposited bulge.
One thing that had been a problem from my teens was my intolerance for exercise – much as I enjoyed my foray into jazz/ballet dance that I did in my youth, and later some Pilates classes, I found it incredibly hard to keep up any exercise for extended periods. I would often feel exhausted quickly and had reoccurring ‘flu-like’ bouts after exercising for any length of time. I shrugged this off as yet another annoying part of whatever it was that made me so tired all the time; after all, my doctors kept telling me nothing was actually
wrong
with me. Until that is, I saw a different GP and she asked if I had ever been referred to a chronic fatigue clinic. I was not even aware that there was one, but I duly filled in a huge questionnaire, and after six months I saw a consultant who informed me that I have chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), otherwise known as ME.
This changed a lot, not just because I now had a diagnosis of sorts, but crucially, as of yet, there is no cure for this condition. That really worried me – did I have a lifetime of draining fatigue and all the associated aches, pains and misery still ahead of me? Admittedly, I had already been living with this for the best part of my adult life, and, luckily for me, it had not rendered me completely bed-ridden as it does a lot of people, but it had had a huge negative impact on my life and lifestyle. But now that I knew the nature of the beast, I became determined to try and buck the trend; I was determined to beat it. I did some research and a lot of it was not encouraging; to put it briefly, CFS/ME is believed to be a breakdown at cellular level, causing a whole host of problems, the most obvious being crippling fatigue, and
it seriously involves changing the way you live to be able to function better and hopefully make a reasonable, if not full, recovery.
This is where the Zen Diet became a perfect solution for me – small but permanent changes. Because I couldn’t exercise the weight off the way others could, without aggravating my CFS, I had to alter the way I ate, drank and moved on a daily basis. With the combination of diet, lifestyle and mental changes, I can now affirm that I have made huge leaps in my energy levels, and the stubborn fat has almost melted away.
We firmly believe that during the writing of this book not only have we both changed our way of life to incorporate the ‘small but permanent changes’, but we truly think we have stumbled over many ways to help improve the life of those with an incredibly debilitating condition. This book is not specifically aimed at those with CFS/ME, but it has all the ingredients for making changes that could significantly make a difference to those who have the condition. That is, I hope, an added bonus to the amazing way that the Zen Diet approach can be tailored for all kinds of conditions and for all kinds of people.