Stop Bingeing!: Stay in Control of Your Eating - Tapa blanda

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Lee Janogly has been an exercise teacher and diet counsellor for thirty years. She began exercising as a means of getting into shape after childbirth and trained as a jazz dancer with choreographer Arlene Phillips before going on to teach Jazz dance in Covent Garden, London.

After qualifying as an exercise teacher, Lee opened her own fitness studio in North London and employed 20 teachers to assist her in teaching all forms of movement, from Aerobics to Yoga. She also started writing on a freelance basis and had a series of articles published in She magazine.

After each class, Lee held informal discussions about dieting, which became known as 'The Fat Club'. Realising that exercise and healthy eating go hand-in-hand, she began to study nutrition seriously in order to separate fact from fad. Soon she was conducting small slimming groups and working out programmes to suit each client's individual lifestyle.

Lee continued to write about health and fitness for newspapers and magazines and for three years wrote a regular column for Slimming Magazine before completing her first book, Stop Bingeing!

It was during these sessions (some of which are featured in Stop Bingeing! as case studies) that Lee discovered a worryingly common addiction among women and, more rarely, men of all ages and walks of life - that of stuffing vast quantities of food into one's mouth as a respite from stress, anxiety or boredom. She realised that diet books are useless for the binger as, when the urge to binge strikes, the diet goes out the window. Unable to stop eating, the binger ends up miserable, demoralised and still fat.

Janogly says: "I was puzzled. Why, after struggling with a diet for months and months and losing all the surplus weight, would anyone gradually regain it all, and often more? No-one would deliberately set out to do that. Yet only four women out of every hundred manage to keep the weight off once they have lost it. All diets, however bizarre, work while you stick to them. So what keeps going wrong?

"The answer finally came to me - out of the blue - while watching an interview with the singer, Cher. Asked how she kept her fabulous figure, she answered, "I would rather be slim than eat chocolate brownies". I thought, "That's it! You can't be slim and eat fattening food. You have to choose which is more important to you - being slim or eating junk food.

"Most diets advise slimmers to eat a little of their favourite food every day, so as not to feel 'deprived'. Whatever you call it - a 'treat', a '500 calorie extra', a 'sin' - it works for only a few people. For bingers, this high-fat and/or sugary 'treat' can be the start of a massive binge which undoes all their dieting efforts and plunges them into misery.

"The answer is to cut out that one culinary culprit which 'triggers off' the binge. You will not feel deprived because this sets you free to eat everything else! If you want to be slim, you have to stop eating the food that makes you fat. If you want to stop bingeing, you have to stop eating the food that makes you binge."

This common sense theory is at the heart of Lee's six-step programme which teaches bingers how to stop this destructive habit and stay in control of their eating. By the end of the book they will know what to eat, when to eat it and be armed with sound strategies to deal with any cravings that may arise.