2 Monday January 3 2022 | the times
times2
Grazing all day on toast and junk
food — all speedily digested stuff that
dumps a load of glucose in our blood,
prompting our pancreas to release the
hormone insulin — eventually leads to
excess insulin in our blood. If insulin
is present, we can’t burn fat. So we get
fat. It causes other health issues, too,
including high bad cholesterol.
The trick is to temporarily minimise
your carb intake — to eat mainly good
fats and protein, which don’t raise
insulin levels unduly. And to ensure
you have 12 to 14 hours a day of no
food. These adjustments “fat adapt”
your body — meaning (with insulin
behaving itself, and hunger hormone
ghrelin no longer growling) it uses fat
as fuel. The joy is, says Chell, that “this
isn’t a for ever low-carb diet.” It gives
you the tools — time-restricted eating,
the ability to cut carbs — which you
mix as needed. “If you want roast
potatoes on a Sunday, have them, just
not every day.”Psst! The
secret to a
healthy diet
Dr Paul Chell and
Dr Monique Hope-Ross
M
ost of us don’t know why
we’re fat — why we can’t
lose the weight and keep
it off, even if we eat
sparingly. Or why our
blood pressure is raised. Or why we
are pre-diabetic. And we’re harsh on
ourselves, blaming it on greed, laziness
or a lack of willpower. None of this is
true. The fact is, we’re fighting our
hormones — and they are beating us.
Our supposedly “healthy” diet and
lifestyle habits, such as restricting
calories, are causing hormone
imbalances and turning us into
fat-storing machines. Excess body
fat is a symptom, not a cause, of
a struggling metabolism. Our
metabolism is the foundation of all
we do — it’s the chemical reactions
that break down food and drink for
energy, then use this energy to
support, build and repair our body.
If we imagine our metabolism as
a car engine, obesity is the smoking
exhaust, a sign that the engine is
broken. If we don’t repair it we are
puttering towards more serious
problems: metabolic syndrome,IAN ROUTLEDGE/BBCKevin Maher
My fear of
cancelled
classes
Oh dear Lord, say it
ain’t so! Schools
returning to full-on
mask wearing is one
thing. I can appreciate
the sheer comedy
potential it allows the
kids: “Mr Douglas is a
prat!” “Who said that?”
“He said, sir!” “Who
said?” “I said, sir!”
“Who said that?” “Me,
sir!” “Who, sir!” But
education secretary
Nadhim Zahawi’s
suggestion that any
cancelled classes can
be supplemented with
a return to — agh, I can
barely even say it —
“online learning” has
filled me with dread.
For me it was, as a
parent, easily the worst
part of lockdown.
Online learning? Aka
bored students learning
absolutely nothing
except how to use the
“chat function” to
message each other
during lessons, or how
to manipulate the
system by saying that
the camera presence
alone is a violation of
their human rights
(my sister is a teacher
and got that a lot) so
they can only proceed
with online learning via
audio contact. And cue
45 minutes of fabulous
free time for scrolling
through Instagram.
On the positive side,
Jamie Dornan has
some good posts.University
needs
more boars
the guiding philosophy
of officials at the
University of Reading,
who have removed
several lines from the
ancient Greek poem
Types of Women by
Semonides of Amorgos.
They feared that the
violence described
might upset first-yearstudents. Which is
curious. Because only
last weekend I was
reading to my son of
the Calydonian boar
hunt, one of the great
tales of ancient Greece,
as a bedtime story. In
that one — before the
fearsome Atalanta
fires her deadly arrowinto the boar — a
plethora of Greek
heroes are literally
ripped to pieces before
her eyes, their entrails
spilling out onto the
barn floor. My son
loved it! Better not send
him to university,
though. Wouldn’t want
him to be upset.“Beware of Greeks
bearing violent
literature” is seemingly
You’re a great amnesiac,
Jamie — so please forget
what I said about you
M
ost people can
lose weight, says
Dr Paul Chell.
Trouble is, they
usually regain it.
“Unless you
understand why
your fat cells take
on fat in the first place, your weight
will keep coming back. You can invent
the banana and water diet, you can
lose weight by doing lots of things, but
if you’re calorie restricting, long-term
you will fail.”
That success doesn’t rest on
depriving ourselves is news to most of
us. And our confusion around food is
why he and his wife, Dr Monique
Hope-Ross — they met as junior
doctors, specialising in ophthalmic
surgery — wrote their book The Diet
Whisperer 12-Week Reset Plan:
Supercharge Your Metabolism, Reverse
Diabetes and Harmonise Your Brain
Clock. “This is about putting people
back in control,” he says.
Over the years, they saw increasing
numbers of people in their clinics, in
Birmingham and Worcestershire,
experiencing eye diseases resulting
from obesity or metabolic
abnormalities. “We’d send them off to
the dietitian at the hospital and they’d
come back worse and fatter.” Their
mission, says Hope-Ross, 61, became
“prevention, prevention, prevention.”
For two decades, they’ve taught the
science of nutrition and weight loss
to patients and professionals alike.
Eventually, in their mid-fifties, they
both quit high-powered jobs as
consultant ophthalmic surgeons to
focus on spreading their key to success
— taming your fat storage hormones.
When and what you eat prompts them
to respond one way or another — to
either store fat or burn it.
Losing weight by slashing your
calorie intake panics your hormones,
says Chell, 60. So “they do all sorts of
clever things, like increasing your
hunger. They say, ‘I don’t like this, he’s
lost half a stone, I’m going to turn
down his metabolism.’ It puts you into
battery-saver mode.” He adds: “You’re
in a fight with your hormones and you
will not beat them.”
But why fight? We can win them
over. The Diet Whisperer shows us
how. And once you get your hormones
“on side”, says Hope-Ross (think four
to six weeks), “you will lose weight,
your metabolism will improve, you
will become healthy, you can reverse
diseases and, once everything is
sorted, you can stay there.”
So what does it take? Our biggest
issue, says Chell, is “carbohydrate and
sugar overload, and food timing”.Follow the diet
Many diets fail because we’re fighting a
losing battle with our hormones — but
there is another way, the authors of
The Diet Whisperer tell Anna Maxted
Midlife makeover: day 1
Reboot your hormones through diet
Jamie Dornan in The TouristT
hat Jamie Dornan, he’s
something special, eh?
The star of the BBC’s
must-watch new year’s
barnstormer The
Tourist is on white-hot
form, playing the
show’s mildly baffled
amnesiac protagonist who wakes up
in an Australian outback hospital after
a pre-credits crash with a mysterious
and dangerous past that’s clearly about
to catch up with him.
Me, I listened especially closely to
his accent, and slightly wished he
couldn’t remember what I’d said
about it in the past. You see, to my
super-sensitised ears his soft Belfast
tones (he grew up there) have just a
hint of an Americanised flattening, the
kind that you get from years spent as
a globally recognised media figure —
in his case, first modelling (he was
dubbed “the golden torso” by The New
York Times) and then performing in
mega-hits such as the successful and
loudly derided — often by yours truly
— Fifty Shades franchise. And I
pointed it out, earlier this year, rather
pleased with myself, in a review of the
movie Nowhere Special. Dornan wasn’t
even in that one, but I noted wryly
that its star James Norton, a Rada-
trained and Ampleforth-educated
London posho, produced a “more
convincing” Belfast accent therein
than that which (derisive epithet alert)
“Fifty Shades star” Jamie Dornan can
manage in real life. Big mistake.
That day I received an email from
Dornan, annoyed for being slammed
in a review of a film in which he didn’t
even feature. I didn’t, at first, believe it
was him. He has an army of passionate
online Dornanites, and so I replied to
the email, addressed it to “Jamie
Dornan” (quotation marks included)
and said that I knew it wasn’t him, but
that the accent comment came from
a genuine place. I am from Ireland, but
my original Oirish brogue (“Top o’ the
mornin’!”) has been battered into
submission (friends and family now
call me a “Brit!”) and so I am sensitive
(perhaps oversensitive?) to spotting
shifting speech patterns.
Dornan replied that it was indeed
him, and that in the meantime he’d
contacted me on Instagram, as proof,
and that even with the accent
explanation considered he couldn’t
help but detect a certain sneering tone
in my allusion (which was fair enough;
the Fifty Shades movies really don’t do
it for me). He ended magnanimously,
though, with a conciliatory note, by
mentioning my dogs. He had spotted
them on Instagram.
In a world of rigorously policed
Hollywood branding, I was struck by
the authenticity involved in Dornan’s
act of simple, direct contact. I thanked
him for the dog nod, and mentioned
that the pictures were taken in the
woods in Gloucestershire, near the
town to which I had recently
decamped. He replied that he lived
near that town too, and that we were
basically neighbours. It’s a small world,
I observed. He replied that we should
meet up some day. I replied that I
could think of nothing better.
I’ve since, of course, seen him in the
soon to be released Kenneth Branagh
“Troubles” movie Belfast and have
realised, to my shame, that he’s not
just a golden torso but a proper actor
too. I now follow him on Instagram
and found myself nodding with
approval at his Christmas Day video
post — an icy dip in the Atlantic on
the west coast of Ireland (been there,
done that, have the frostbite). My
appreciation, in fact, of all things
Dornanite has grown to such an
extent that I will now defend him
against anyone who dares to traduce
his choices, his previous movie roles
— and certainly his accent. Although
I’d steer clear of the accent, if I were
you. He’s clearly quite capable of
handling that one.