Who wouldn’t like to eat loads and stay slim? That’s what Dorset writer Della Galton thought as she struggled through yet another diet.

“I’m lucky enough to be tall, nearly six foot, but when you’re overweight at that height it’s horrible, you feel like a lumbering hippo,” she says.

“I avoided hugging friends I hadn’t seen for a while so they couldn’t feel how much weight I’d put on. I was size 16 and I tried everything; slimming pills, herbal remedies, not eating in the evenings, small portions and marathon running.”

She did go on diets ‘for years’.

“But when I stopped I immediately started putting it all back on again,” she says.

“I’d be the right weight for about a week. I’d had enough of it and thought there must be a better way.”

And now she thinks she’s found it.

After meeting writer Peter Jones, whose book How To Do Everything And Be Happy is a best-seller, Della said to him: “Wouldn’t it be great if someone wrote a book called how to eat loads and stay slim?”

And so the idea was born.

Della and Peter’s book is based on the premise that if you make enough lifestyle tweaks you can literally eat loads yet not put on weight.

To do this the book engages seven basic principles:

  • Eat loads – but whatever you eat must be nice and you must be able to eat loads of it
  • Stay slim – by making smarter choices, not by denying yourself nice stuff
  • Diets don’t work – so change your diet, don’t go ON a diet
  • You have to change something – otherwise you won’t lose weight
  • Make many, many imperceptible changes – a tweak here and a tweak there will steadily make it less possible for you to be anything other than slim
  • Healthy eating most of the time is usually good enough – you need to get to a point where, on the whole, the stuff you put in your mouth is both tasty and good for you
  • Plan – If you can organise yourself to a moderate degree, effective weight management is within your grasp

The book also contains a number of ‘Action points’ where the reader is asked to make a change and is also based on a star system where if you collect enough – Della advises around 30 – you should find you have made enough small changes to be able to follow the advice in the book’s title.

“You can award yourself a gold star just for buying the book,” says Della.

“It means you know you want to change.”

Further stars are awarded for committing to making changes, trying new foods, choosing tomato or vegetable-based soups when you eat out, and using semi-skimmed milk in your coffee.

The book also contains a handy list of calorie-saving swaps such as beer for lager, wine for gin and any drink you can think of for water.

“And whatever you choose to drink that’s cold, do put it in a nice glass,” says Della.

“There are positive psychological reasons for this. You will feel as if you are getting a better deal.”

Della is a great advert for her own book as she now weighs the same as she did when she was 20 although: “I feel I can never afford to put on any weight at all now, having written this book!”

However, she says: “Being slim, having the means to stay slim without stressing about it, has changed my life in more ways than I ever thought possible.”

  • howtoeatloadsandstayslim.com