The Eat What You Fancy Diet

The central plank of Sophie's thinking is that you can eat any damn thing you like, be it chocolate, crisps, chips or cheese ? in fact, that it's good for you to eat what you want, because 'forbidden foods' develop a powerful allure. This disappears when food is freely available, reasons Sophie.... The trick, however, that lets you achieve your natural, correct body weight is to eat only because you are hungry, and stop when you are full. Harder than it sounds, of course, and this is where the Beyond Chocolate tactics come in. [...]

As well as eating too quickly, there are other barriers to eating just enough, no more, no less. We discovered that we all had a horror of wasting food, and would finish a dish rather than throw it in the bin. This wasn't confined to those among us who remembered post-war rationing; we had all been brought up to believe waste is wrong. Sophie is pragmatic about chucking away leftovers. 'If you eat food when you don't want it, it's just as much wasted as if you throw it in the bin,' she pointed out. 'Why treat your body like a dustbin?'