Aversion Therapy

Tim Ferriss' book 4 Hour Body is very good but if you don't have the money to buy it, you can get most of it on his blog.

He has followed a slow-carb way of eating which helped him lose body fat. It works like this: sugar is a carbohydrate. Your body loves it as a fuel in the form of glucose because it is easily made from several sources, such as fruit, wheat and other grains, potatoes. But the thing is that sugar triggers the production of insulin. The role of insulin is to run around your blood stream and mop up the excess calories floating around and store them in fat cells for later use. This would be good if we had to eat like a cave-man, bounty in summer and scarcity in the winter. However, circumstances have changed, that is where the modern idea of diets came in. In our current state of plenty, we are permanently stuck in the frame of eating plenty in the summer but we don't have the scarcity of winter any more which is why we are getting fat. So, as Ferris and others have discovered, if I cut my carb intake so that I only eat foods that are slowly converted to glucose, I won't trigger insulin production so heavily and I don't have all those cal's stored in my porky belly

In an effort to cut my carbs, I did quite well last year, I lost a stone in a month. But for some reason I stopped. I put the weight back on but not more than I lost fortunately. Now I have been weighting myself daily again to monitor my weight while also trying to cut down my quick-carb intake. One of the things I find most difficult with this is that grains are everywhere. What shall I have for breakfast? How about some jam on toast or a bacon sarnie? Lunch? Lets have a ham sandwich or some lasagne or a ciabatta bread with lettuce, cherry tomatoes drizzled with olive oil and topped with some Parma ham. Go to the pub and have a vodka (wheat) or a whisky (barley) and have a kebab on the way home. Wake in the morning, have a hangover breakfast, bacon, sausage (contains rusk = wheat), egg, beans, tomatoes, toast (wheat? well what a surprise!).

So, taking the bull by the horns, I decided to try some aversion therapy thing with bread. The idea was that if I ate bread with horrible tasting things on it, I wouldn't want to eat it so much. So, into the cupboard I went. Tore off a bit of my slice and put hot chilli powder on it. Hmm that's spicy. Next, nutmeg... nasty! Salt... difficult to swallow. Bicarb of soda... nearly threw up but made myself swallow. Next, I put some of all of it on the last piece with the addition of vinegar and cinnamon. Again nearly gagged. Oh, and I made myself properly chew it all too, not just swallow it as soon as possible. In the week and a half since I did this, I have only eaten bread twice. Both times, it didn't sit well in my stomach, Ergo, I think it worked but I may have to do it again soon just to reinforce the associations.

Next, I think I'll try something along the lines of Tim Ferriss in his post Real Mind Control: The 21-Day No-Complaint Experiment.

Have you ever tried any kind of aversion tactics to break any habits?