Losing Weight the Chew-Chew Way

My copy of Fletcherism What It Is or How I became Young At Sixty  (1913) by Horace Fletcher arrived today.  Like many other people I had believed that Fletcherism which became known as “The Chew-Chew Diet” involved eating what I wanted three times a day and chewing each mouthful thirty-two times. This myth has not been dispelled by the recent series from Channel 4, The Diets That Time Forgot.   Wrong. The principles of the Chew-Chew Diet are about taking responsibility for what you put in your mouth and therefore taking responsibility for your own health.

Fletcherism or The Chew-Chew Diet is not about excessive mastication.

“The very essence of the method of performing the personal responsibility is avoiding excess of anything; excessive or laboured chewing among the rest.  There is little if any harm in keeping food in the mouth as long as possible, and I believe that it is impossible to have too much saliva mixed with it when it is swallowed, because when it is properly tasted and insalivated it is almost impossible to hold it back from the food gate in the back of the mouth.  There is always suction there ready to draw welcome nourishment in when it is ready.”  p52-53

Some of Fletcher’s ideas strike me as a little bizarre, for example his obsession with ‘digestive-ash’ as he calls faeces and his advocating of a very low protein intake.  Whilst many of us in the western world of the 21st century consume far too much protein,  the recommended level being about 15% of our daily calorific intake being made up of protein (for the average woman on 2000 kCals per day this is about 300 kCals or 75g of protein), Fletcher’s suggestion of 5-7g (20-28 kCals) strikes me as dangerously low.

However, Fletcher emphasises that this is of less importance than that food should be enjoyed and should the follower of Fletcherism wish to choose meat to eat, then the taste and flavour of the meat should be enjoyed and savoured, provided that the principles and rules of Fletcherism are followed.

So having read the book, I take what I understand to be the Rules and Principles of Fletcherism and I begin my journey Losing Weight the Chew-Chew Way.

Ok so here it goes. Why have I started this Web-Log.

I am very very fat and being very very fat makes me feel useless and ugly which makes me unhappy and unhealthy.  This is not good for the people I love and who love me.

I know it’s becoming a bit of a poor-me-wailing-breast-beating-cliche but I also believe that most of the rest of the world sees obese people as stupid, lazy, weak willed and as socially inferior.  The only bit of that I agree with is the bit about a weak will. Sadly, some people do not restrict making their nasty comments to me, but take perverse pleasure in telling my children what they think of fat people, especially their mum.  I am sad that my children are made to feel unhappy about something that is not their fault and I can change.  That makes me feel ashamed.  

So why haven’t I got on with it and lost the excess blubber? 

I’ve already admitted I’m weak willed.  I can’t stick to a restrictive diet. I hate dieting.  I am no good at it.  I like food.  However, life is never simple and the reasons I have failed in the past are complex.  I’m not a psychologist and I am aware I have bored my friends silly with my excuses so I’m not going to make any.  However, I am prepared to admit becoming obsessed with counting things and keeping a forrest full of records about what I have counted. As soon as I start counting things I spend my whole day thinking about what I can and can’t eat and when I’m not thinking about it I’m trying to calculate how many : calories, grammes of carbs/fat/saturated fats/weightwatcher copyright points/ green and red units/blah blah blah I have consumed or will consume or would like to consume and can’t. BORING!

I have not always been fat.  I started putting on serious weight about 10 years ago.  Before that, for most of my adult life I was at the heavier side of a normal weight range for my height with a BMI of between 24 and 25.  That’s not supermodel thin, and like most women I wanted to look like the girls in magazine pictures, but it’s healthy. The only time in my life I have really successfully lost weight was when I ate what I wanted but managed to moderate the quantity.  How did I do that?   I used to decide that I had eaten enough for that day and eat no more.  If I started to think about food I simply used to tell myself that I wasn’t going to eat anything and to think about something else.  That was it.  I didn’t get hungry, I didn’t crave food that I couldn’t have, I didn’t make myself unhappy by depriving myself of pleasure and punishing myself with huge plate of food that bored me or I didn’t like.  I dropped my excess post pregnancy weight in weeks and weighed in at my healthiest weight ever.  I was happy with my body, I felt liked and respected and my self-esteem was at its best.  As a result, the people around me especially my children were happy. 

I’m not going to go into what went wrong, it just did.  My children are older now and I believe in sitting down for good home cooked meals with them in the evening.  It’s an important oasis of calm and collectiveness in our busy lives. That makes it difficult for me to decide that I have eaten enough for one day and not think about food again.  As the chief cook and bottle-washer in our home, I have to cook.  I rarely use ready meals, although I have to concede that they have improved beyond recognition in the past few years and I have started to buy a select few when I know that time is going to be tight, but that’s another subject.

I like the Idea of the Chew-Chew diet.  It’s not an idea new to me.  I remember my Grandad, a doctor born in1902 and therefore a true Edwardian, telling me about it.  As far as I am aware he never carried an excess pound in his life.  When I saw the Channel Four program called  Diets That Time Forgot that used the principles that Horace Fletcher advocated, it brought back so many memories that I was truly inspired. 

I have managed to find a copy of Horace Fletcher’s book Fletcherism What It Is on the Internet, so I have ordered it, but for the time being I am going to chew thirty-two times and eat three sensible meals each day.