part0008

So, you’ve just bought a book called Mad Diet which means I can probably make a few reasonably accurate assumptions about you. Most likely you saw the word ‘diet’ and a frisson of hope flashed across your mind. Maybe this one is going to be the one that makes the difference. Whether you’re carrying a few extra pounds or are really struggling with some serious weight issues you probably don’t like what you see in the mirror any more. Most of us know what that feels like – at least anyone who’s ever bought a diet book does! The clothes shopping for a new suit or summer dress for an upcoming wedding – those awful four-way mirrors under spotlights that allow you to see the unwelcome expanding contours in all their high beam, widescreen glory. Chances are you’ve got a dozen or more diet books in your house (probably stuffed under the bed or boxed ready for the next charity shop donation run). Come on, admit it – you’ve tried everything from the cabbage soup diet (windy side effects made this one particularly challenging if you worked in close proximity to other people) to the grapefruit diet, the Atkins diet to the South Beach diet and beyond. It’s likely that a few of these approaches even worked for a while, but they also probably made you miserable so eventually you ‘fell off the wagon’ and put the weight back on. Usually, with a little bit extra just to remind you that you’d failed. And this endless cycle certainly doesn’t help your state of mind. Hence the ‘mad’ part of the title – perhaps you, like millions of women around the world, are struggling with mental health issues. ‘Mental health issues’ is a pretty ‘heavy’ term but actually mental health can range from irritability and trouble sleeping, to anxiety or full-blown panic attacks, through to diagnosable challenges such as depression and bipolar disorder.

So if you’re fat, mad or both – don’t go anywhere, turn off your phone and bolt the door – this book is for you. But, before we begin I want to make a few things crystal clear – I’ve been called both – ‘fat’ and ‘mad’. I don’t look like a supermodel, I enjoy my fizzy plonk and I don’t follow some impossibly difficult or expensive diet, but I am incredibly healthy and I’ve successfully overcome chronic mental health problems by following the steps I’ll share with you in this book.

I’m an average woman who started life in a council estate in a working-class area of Glasgow in Scotland. Beyond the stereotypes of haggis eating, whisky drinking and kilt wearing, Scots are generally warm, funny and pretty blunt. We call a spade a spade and political correctness is often lost on us – so expect some straight-shooting in this book. If you’re fat – own it, accept it and change it. If you’re mad – own it, accept it and change it. I promise you it’s possible and it won’t require you to find countless extra hours a week, turn into Mary Berry or Julia Child overnight or find a hidden stash of cash – anyone can follow the advice in these pages to help wean themselves off antidepressants, lose weight, and maybe even look and feel ten years younger!

I don’t know about you, but when I was a child I didn’t even know a vegetarian, never mind someone who was lactose intolerant or allergic to soy. There were no kids in my class at school who carried an EpiPen (adrenaline-injecting device) in case they had a close encounter with a peanut. Today you would be hard pressed to find a classroom in the UK or US that didn’t have at least one child who was allergic to peanuts. In 2014 a four-year-old girl went into anaphylactic shock on a flight after a passenger ignored repeated warnings that the girl had a severe nut allergy and opened a packet of mixed nuts. To be clear, he wasn’t sitting next to her, she didn’t eat, touch or even see the nuts, and yet it was enough to almost kill her.

But it’s not just peanuts, a growing number of people, especially children, are allergic to milk, eggs, wheat, soy, fish and shellfish to name just a few. In the UK each year the number of allergy sufferers increases by 5 per cent. Between 1992 and 2012 there was a 615 per cent increase in hospital admissions because of food allergies and the number of people suffering from food allergies in the UK has doubled in the last decade. In Europe it’s estimated that 150 million people have allergies. In the US 55 per cent of the population test positive for one or more allergen. We now have conditions, diseases and disorders that didn’t even exist in our grandparents’ day – Crohn’s, lupus, IBS, ME – the list is almost endless. In the US there are just under six million children diagnosed with ADHD and in the UK 130,000 children are diagnosed with severe ADHD. These are all relatively new health challenges that are not only costing us billions every year and putting enormous strain on healthcare but they are having a significant impact on our quality of life.

It never ceases to amaze me just how little regard we have for what we eat and drink. We are intelligent human beings, capable of space travel and mind-boggling innovation and invention, and yet we serve junk food in hospitals and consume food laden with ingredients we can’t even pronounce and wonder why we don’t feel like Usain Bolt. And while it may be obvious that we are not eating the right things if we are overweight – so far the link between what we consume and mental health has been completely ignored in the mainstream media. This book is going to set the record straight so you can get the information you need to make better choices, not only for your waistline but for your mental health too.

In the 1980s having a chemical imbalance in your brain was barely understood by doctors and even less so by the average person on the street. Most people knew who shot J. R. Ewing in popular US soap opera Dallas but no one had heard of serotonin. Back then, when you got labelled with depression it was assumed that you had suffered some horrific childhood trauma or it just ‘ran in the family’. At the time, I didn’t know what was wrong but I knew something wasn’t right so, like most of us, I went to my GP. I explained how I felt and within three minutes he handed me a prescription for antidepressants adding, ‘Here, take these and don’t worry, half your colleagues will be on them.’

I was never asked about my diet, no tests were run on the condition of my blood to establish if I had any nutrient deficiencies and I certainly wasn’t asked about my life or the environment I was living in. Instead I was bundled out the door with a prescription for some pills and an appointment card to see a psychiatrist. The following years were a blur of monthly prescriptions, scab-picking sessions at the shrink’s office and regular trips to the slimming club. By my thirties I was a whopping 224 pounds – which would be fine if I was six foot five inches tall. Unfortunately I am the same height as Kylie Minogue or Reese Witherspoon and I was almost as wide as I was tall. Plus, I was bloody miserable – every day was a battle.

Thankfully I managed to maintain my career during those dark years. Granted, I needed to lean on the occasional imaginary sick relative when the black dog held me captive in bed but like so many of us, I muddled through. And ironically my career became my salvation because I worked in the food industry. Through my work I became increasingly aware of the dangers lurking in our weekly shopping trolley and the potential link between cost-saving initiatives, increased use of additives and mental health problems, obesity and countless other modern-day conditions that simply did not exist 50 years ago. Working across 12 countries with various Fortune 500 food manufacturers, grocery retailers, farming groups and government organisations provided me with unique insight into the way in which our food is farmed, processed and marketed in the UK, Europe and North America.

As I was cutting my teeth in the industry developing new products and helping to create big brands in various food categories including bakery products, fresh produce, meat, confectionery and desserts, I quickly learned that the need to make a profit was vastly more important than the need to create nutritious or even safe food. Competition for supermarket shelf space meant that even the most honourable product developers, who initially took great pride in creating safe and healthy food for their customers, were being forced to find cost savings. Besides, if the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) approved a substance safe to eat, or a supply chain fit for purpose, nobody questioned the science behind such decisions or the morality of using synthetic or potentially unhealthy ingredients. If the government says it’s OK, then it’s OK – right?

Only it isn’t OK. I still vividly remember countless sleepless nights after I was instructed to remove 20 per cent cost from a popular children’s sausage brand. I lay there in the darkness, watching my bedside clock pass each hour. Twenty per cent cost saving meant ‘remove the meat’ – and at the very least it meant reduce the quality of the meat and add bulking agents and chemical flavour enhancers. I knew mothers who bought that product for their children. How was I going to look them in the eye knowing the true content of the product? Not long after I left that role and jumped over the fence to help track and measure the quality of our food up and down the supply chain but frankly it’s an endless battle.

What we are eating is making us fat, mad and ill. And I’m not just talking about the obvious culprits like too much fat, sugar or processed foods. I’m talking about the hidden ingredients in so much of the food we consume and the production techniques that increase quantity but reduce nutritional quality. I’m talking about the loss of essential micronutrients from our food chain that are having a profound effect on global health and mental well-being. ?

We need to shout from the rooftops so that women everywhere understand that the government decisions to endorse certain food groups and products are often the result of corporate lobbying on the behalf of big business, not stringent testing and approval because they are safe and healthy. Even today, in the US for example, millions of dollars are being spent by big food manufacturers to prevent genetically modified (GM) labelling and to avoid country of origin labelling because the major food processors don’t want to admit what is in the food they create or where it’s produced. They know that knowledge will impact sales but we absolutely need that knowledge if we are to make good buying choices for ourselves and our families. Without proper labelling the small traditional farmers who care about what they produce are all at a profound disadvantage to the corporate giants who only care about profit and shareholder return. Plus, many of the worse culprits are cheaper processed, synthetic products masquerading as ‘real food’. And frankly the people making the laws and passing these products fit for public consumption will never eat them and they certainly won’t serve them to their children. Did you know, for example, that the food served in the Houses of Parliament is all GM-free – there isn’t a genetically modified ingredient within half a mile of Westminster! Suffice to say politicians and food policymakers are not eating frozen horsemeat burgers and children’s sausages stuffed with ‘E’-numbers and ‘meat’ you wouldn’t give your dog. But busy mums and lower-income families are and it’s making them sick, sick, sick.

Part One of this book will be dedicated to defining the problem so we are really clear about just what we are up against. Part Two will then explore the history of the problem so that you can appreciate what happened to bring us to this point. You may not think this is important and may be more interested in getting to the solution so you can start to take some action and feel better. But, change is not always easy – even when we desperately need to change and want to change. Knowing how we got here and all the behind the scenes wheeling and dealing will hopefully fuel your anger and keep you motivated towards your goal of better health. We’ll also look at the history of medicine and how many doctors are as ignorant of the facts as we are. Part Three is the ‘get educated’ section, where we will look at the influence of marketing on our buying choices and how we are being manipulated and hoodwinked, and what we can do about it. It’s only fair to warn you that I do mention various biological systems and you may come across medical or technical words and phrases that are unfamiliar, even if you can still remember some high school biology. Please don’t be put off by this. I’ve deliberately kept this to an absolute minimum because, let’s be honest, it can be excruciatingly boring to read, but some explanation is often necessary to ensure you take this information seriously and don’t simply dismiss it as my opinion . Everything I say in this book is verifiable and a snapshot of the science demonstrating it is listed, by chapter, in the reference section. And finally, Part Four details the action plan which looks at all the food groups and what we need to know for each one, how to be a savvy ‘mood food’ shopper and how to successfully supplement your diet to ensure we get the right micronutrients for optimal physical and mental well-being. This section will also give you a programme for how best to safely wean yourself off antidepressants if you are currently on them. These drugs should never be stopped cold turkey – instead you need to take the dose down slowly with the support of your GP, once you have made some positive changes to your diet.