Whether we realise it or not – God has given us a truly amazing body – a body that many of us are abusing through our diet and lack of exercise. And as things turn out, it’s the only body we have, so what we do with it, matters.

The body we live in is something that we take largely for granted, it’s just kind of there. It’s been there as long as we can remember and sometimes we live as though it’s going to go on forever. But this body that you and I are encapsulated in is not going to go on forever. You know what they say there are two certainties in life – death and taxes. One day your body, one day my body will quite literally give up the ghost.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been doing a lot of reading about diet and food and in particular our digestive system, how we process food. See, I’m now in my mid fifties and for most of my adult life, no, no, for all of my adult life except the last couple of years I have struggled with my weight.

When you get to your mid-fifties you kind of know you’re getting to the pointy end of this whole healthy-eating, healthy-living thing because it’s at this age that many people suffer heart attacks, many people discover they have diabetes, many people end up with cancer, the three big killers in western society and in any country that’s adopted elements of the western diet

We’re going to talk a lot about that over the coming few days but today we’re going to kick off by just realising how utterly amazing your body is. If we’re going to lead a healthier lifestyle which many, many people need to do there’s this decision that needs to be taken about how we eat, how we live, how we exercise and how we sleep.

Healthier living is a deliberate decision that we need to take and when we do all of a sudden within just a few weeks we start feeling so much better that we can’t even imagine going back to the old ways of living. And part of making that decision I think is realising how incredibly precious this body is that each one of us is living in.

So let’s kick off by taking a look at just a handful of amazing facts about your body. Are you ready, here we go? Did you know that you produce twenty-five million new cells every second 24×7 for the whole of your life? Ha, twenty-five million in a second, that’s more than the population of Australia and each of the 2.5 trillion red blood cells in your body can circumnavigate your body in under twenty seconds.

Your nerve impulses travel at over 400 kilometres or 250 miles per hour and just one sneeze generates a wind gust of a hundred and 66 kilometres or 100 miles per hour. Today your heart is going to beat around a hundred thousand times or in an average life of seventy-five years that’s about 2.75 billion heartbeats.

And your lungs with a surface area big enough to cover a tennis court are going to inhale around two million litres or half a million gallons of air each and every day without you ever having to think about it. Your eyes can distinguish over a million different colours and take in more information than the largest telescope we’ve ever built which I’m presuming is the Hubble Telescope out there in space.

And as if that weren’t enough, do you know that your nose is your own personal air conditioning system? It warms cold air, it cools hot air, it filters out impurities. Take a look at your hand for a moment, just imagine one square inch right there in the middle of your hand, there you have nine feet of blood vessels, 600 pain sensors, 9000 nerve endings, thirty-six heat sensors and seventy five pressure sensors and when you touch something those sensors send a message to your brain at around 200 kilometres or 124 miles an hour.

Your eyebrows are there to keep sweat out of your eyes and you’re going to make a litre of saliva today and every other day of your life. And if you were able to stretch out your DNA, all the DNA in your body from end to end, it would be enough to take you to the sun and back 700 times.

Now I haven’t even begun to talk about the amazing chemical factory that your body is. It has the most finely tuned, complex processes that scientists and medicos are really only beginning to understand. Systems for regulating your temperature, systems for complex body functions, appetite, sleep. Do you know that science doesn’t even yet fully understand what sleep is all about? They have theories but actually they don’t yet know.

And all this in a body that’s made up of 70% of plain simple old water. My friend we’ve just scratched the surface in the last few minutes of how amazing your body is. Go ahead look in the mirror, this is you that we’ve been talking about here, your body, the only body that you’ve been given and as amazing and robust as this body of yours is it’s also so incredibly fragile.

If you lose the main chemical factory in your body, your liver, you have only seven hours of life left because without it you can’t function. Yet a rapidly increasing proportion of our society, particularly those who are overweight, have fatty liver syndrome that can lead to cirrhosis that can then lead to cancer of the liver. All totally preventable.

Somewhere between 60% and 80% of adults in developed economies are overweight or obese, that’s up from 20% at the beginning of the 20th century and right there you have heart disease, diabetes and increased cancer risk. People, something has to give, this finely tuned precious complex glorious body in which you live needs some looking after.

Now perhaps you’re one of the small minority who exercises and who has a healthy weight and a healthy diet and that’s great but chances are, the statistics tell me, that you’re not.

Over these coming few days and weeks we’re going to be chatting about how you can start to look after your amazing body, how you can get into healthy living and increase the odds of you living to a ripe old healthy age. Is that just moderately interesting to you? The way our society and our health is headed, people something has to give and what I’m hoping is that it’s not going to be your body that’s going to give up the ghost sooner rather than later.

What I’m hoping is that over these coming few weeks we can talk about some things that will get you excited about healthy eating and healthy living. Because not only is your body going to thank you but if you’re someone who knows you need to do something about this you’re going to feel so much better, so much better, that’s a promise.

It shouldn’t be any surprise to us that we have an amazing body because it was handcrafted by God Himself, He designed it, He made it, He gifted it to each one of us, my body to me, your body to you, it is a precious, precious thing. The more I study and the more I learn about the body the more I marvel at the faith required for an atheist to say there is no God.

Really? If there is no God how did these finely tuned, complex systems and feedback loops and balancing mechanisms and protective mechanisms happen in our bodies? By chance? Hey that takes a level of faith that I simply don’t have. The psalmist had it right in Psalm 139 when he wrote this to God:

For it was you God who formed my inner parts. You who knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works O God, that I know very well. My frame wasn’t hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts O God, how vast is the sum of them.

It’s true, God’s given us the most amazing body and it’s not an unreasonable thing for God to want us to look after that amazing body that He’s gifted to us. A body that’s absolutely essential to the life that we live. Hey, God has a plan for you, He has a plan for me, plans that if we abuse our bodies with an unhealthy lifestyle are not going to be realised.

So over these coming days we’re going to be talking about how, how anybody can live a healthy lifestyle. No brutal diets, no fads, no starvation, just simple healthy ways of living and eating, ways that have certainly changed my life and might just change yours as well.

Heart disease, diabetes and stroke are increasing at an alarming rate. Yet at the beginning of the 20^th century – they were almost unknown. So what’s happened these last hundred and twenty years to cause such a radical decline?

As we chat about living a healthy lifestyle I know what some of you are thinking. There’s like this guilt thing going on because you know you’re carrying a bunch of extra weight and you know that’s because you’ve been putting the wrong sort of stuff in your mouth, too much of it and not exercising, am I right?

And so you’re sitting there squirming, feeling not just the guilt but this sense of hopelessness because you’ve tried every diet that there is under the sun and nothing has ever worked. Now if you’re wondering how I know that, it’s because I’ve been there too. Here’s my dark little secret: all of my life until a couple of years ago I have struggled with my weight – as a child and as an adult. In fact I have lost more than 20 kg at least seven times in my life, (if you still measure weight by the pound that’s around 45 lb) and each time, other than the last time, I’ve put it back on again.

I starved myself, I did the low fat diets, I exercised until I wore my feet out into little stubs, I tried everything and each time I put the weight back on and what drove me nuts about that was the fact that hey I am this incredibly self disciplined, focused, outcome orientated kind of guy. When I set my mind to do something I pretty much always achieve it as evidence by the fact that I have lost over twenty kilograms more than seven times in my life. That takes a lot of discipline and a lot of will power and yet, I’m being completely transparent with you here, each time I put it back on again.

The question you have to ask yourself is why? And I’ll tell you why, I was always hungry and when you’re always hungry you eat. But why was I always hungry? That’s what was driving me to distraction, there had to be a reason. Turns out that there was and there is, and it’s that reason, the root cause of obesity that we’re going to talk about today.

And to do that we need to take a historical perspective. What if anything has changed over time in terms of our eating habits and our health outcomes? It’s not an unreasonable question to ask because it may give us a clue or two as to the cause of the sky rocketing increases in obesity and its health outcomes, heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer.

Well some things have changed; they’ve changed dramatically. According to the author of the book “Sweet Poison”, David Gillespie, back in 1910 just over 1 in 5 of US adults were overweight and fewer than 1 in 5 of those was obese. So obesity was running at 1 in 25 of the whole population. Just a century later 2 out of every 3 adults is overweight and half of those are now obese. So now instead of 1 in 25 being obese, 1 in 3 in the population of the US and in fact in the population of westernised countries are obese.

This is what Gillespie writes:

In just a hundred years the chances of a US adult being overweight have gone from being very unlikely to highly probable and the trend is accelerating. If it continues by 2036 a person with a normal body mass index will be as rare as an eight leaf clover and in Australia our statistics are just as shocking.

That’s a dramatic change and remember back then in the early 1900’s there was no concept of a low fat diet, you understand that. There was no so called healthy margarines; people ate lard and dripping and bacon and eggs for breakfast yet back then very few were overweight and almost none had heart disease and today the majority is overweight and heart disease is the biggest killer.

This doesn’t make sense and here’s another fact, did you know with heart disease which was almost unknown back then, in fact it was only in the mid 1920’s that cardiology became a speciality. But now, to be sure, life expectancy has gone up in western societies. In the US before the 1900’s 75% of all Americans died before 65 age, today more than 70% will live to be over 70.

That comes from a dramatic eradication of many diseases like polio and typhoid, a bunch of those diseases that used to kill people on mass but now are almost unheard of. And yet the deadly irony of all this, with all the advances in science and medicine, heart disease which was virtually unknown at the beginning of the 20th century, is today the single greatest killer in the western world. It will kill 650,000 Americans this year.

Those facts beg the question, what’s changed? It confounds logic that more medicos aren’t asking the same question. Some are but most of the medical community seems to me to be focused on treating heart disease, something they’re doing quite well because the death rate from heart disease is falling, rather than asking how can we actually eliminate heart disease all together. Since it’s only a product of the 20th and 21st centuries how can we wind the clock back and get rid of it all together.

The answer to what causes heart disease lies in the research of a naval physician Dr Cleave who came up with the “Rule of Twenty Years”. Cleave made a careful study of hospital records of third world nations, particularly Africa, and what struck him was that virtually no single native person came down with the common diseases of western cultures like obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Now listen to me, those diseases weren’t merely less frequent, they were virtually non-existent. His research further led him to conclude that the culprit was the western diet, which is high in refined carbohydrates, sugar and white flour and so on. Conducting further research Cleave observed that about twenty years after a society introduces refined carbohydrates into its way of life diabetes and heart disease will simultaneously begin to appear. If you want to know more, Google “Cleaves Rule of Twenty Years”.

Cleave found that the average inhabitant of the British Isles was consuming just seven kilograms or fifteen pounds of sugar way back in 1817. By 1955 that had grown to around fifty kilograms or a hundred and ten pound a year and today people, Australians and Americans and a lot of western cultures are consuming up to seventy kilograms or a hundred and fifty pounds of sugar and that doesn’t count other refined carbohydrates like chips and rice and flour and bread and cakes and all that stuff.

The medicos will tell you quite simply that all those refined carbohydrates are turning our blood stream into porridge, you may have heard the term atherosclerosis which literally means ‘porridge of the arteries’, and it is killing us in droves. The thing that distinguishes the so-called western diet from the traditional diets isn’t the fat content. Inuit in Alaska traditionally only ate meat and fat and had zero heart disease. The thing that distinguishes the western diet is the highly refined carbohydrate content and people it’s killing us.

Let me prove a point to you about this whole increase in refined carbohydrates. How many times does the word sugar appear in the Bible? I’ll tell you, exactly zero times because sugar wasn’t known back then. Sweet cane is mentioned three times but as a exotic delicacy from a far off place. Jeremiah chapter 6, verse 20:

Of what use to me is frankincense that come from Sheba or sweet cane from a distant land.

The other sweet thing was honey but you had to kind of fight the bees for that and it was a rare delicacy and finally fruit but then only in season and only if you happen to live near the apple tree in question. Sweet things were very rare, in fact historically that’s been true until sugar went into mass production in the late 19th early 20th century to support, of all things, cocoa and chocolate sales.

So if we want to track this cause of this rapid acceleration in western diseases we need only correlate the increase in consumption of refined carbohydrates with the increase of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity.

My biggest secret to getting back into good health again including the loss of twenty-five kilograms is drastically reducing the refined carbohydrates in my diet. People think that’s extreme, radical, everything in balance is the answer Berni, are you nuts? And I guess in the context of our sugar-laden culture it does seem extreme but in a historical context it’s the sugar-laden diet that most of us are eating today that’s extreme, and people, it’s killing us.

Today I’m is going to share my top secret for losing a substantial amount of weight and keeping it off – which is what I’ve done. And that secret, as you’ll discover, is … well, bittersweet.

I’m really excited today because I’m about to share with you my number one secret for losing 25 kg, that’s about 55 lb and keeping it off permanently. The truly exciting thing was that it was relatively easy. It required a little of willpower at the beginning but in maintenance mode almost zero willpower.

Yesterday on the program I talked about the fact that the consumption of sugar in societies like the one in which I live has skyrocketed over the last century. Back in the 1800’s we ate like about seven kilograms or fifteen pounds of sugar a year, today it’s topping out at seventy kilograms or over a hundred-and-fifty pounds.

The crazy thing is that we think that that’s normal but before the early 20th century the only way you could get sugar into your diet, anything sweet was to fight a bee for their honey, there was no farming or mass production as there is today or be near an apple tree when it was in season once a year or chew on a log called sugar cane because hey 99% of sugar cane is a log and 1% is sugar.

What we today consider normal is in a historical context grossly abnormal and it’s our high consumption of sugar and other refined carbohydrates that very clearly is at the heart, pardon the pun, of so called western diseases like obesity, cardiovascular disease, that’s heart attack and stroke and diabetes.

And the reason we’re talking about this stuff is that Gods given you and me this amazing body, complex, brilliant, exquisite and whilst in the 20th century we managed to wipe out many of the traditional diseases that killed us on mass, increasing life expectancy in most countries, we’ve also managed to introduce new ones and not just in the western world.

As the western diets have crept into countries like India especially with its high consumption of sweets, well India is now the diabetes and heart disease capital of the universe and I see it too as I travel around Africa. The research shows that within twenty years of the western diet, high in refined carbohydrates, making it into a country almost like clockwork heart disease, stroke, obesity and diabetes appear.

But don’t take my word for it, if you’re online go to YouTube and watch the video called ‘Bitter Truth’ by UCSF Professor of Paediatrics, Dr Robert Lustig. The high refined carbohydrate intake isn’t just killing us and disabling us it means that many countries now have a problem with childhood obesity, previously unheard of.

Today in America and Australia and Canada and lots of other countries childhood obesity is a pandemic. For the first time in the last few centuries if current trends continue it’s likely that our children’s life expectancy will be lower than our own. That’s a scary thought.

So here is my number one secret for losing the twenty-five kilograms, which I’ve lost and I’m now able to keep off without ever having to think about it. I have as completely as possible removed both sugar and refined carbohydrates, white flour, peeled potatoes, white rice, white pasta from my diet.

And I know that you think I’m crazy but hear me out. As I said, when I came to this conclusion my wife and I went through our pantry and we removed everything that contained refined carbohydrates. Barbeque sauce 42% sugar by weight, breakfast cereals which we thought were healthy 35% sugar, fruit juice, see I thought that was healthy too, cake, chips, chocolate, cookies, white bread, Thai sauces, full of sugar. Pretty much anything and everything that had been refined and prepared by someone else and there was nothing left.

Meat in the freezer, eggs in the fridge, some cheese and vegetables and some fruit. It was very demoralising, really. And the first week for me was hard not having any sugar because we’re addicted to the stuff. I used to kid myself that I wasn’t but I was. Do you know that researchers bred some rats without taste buds and they put two clear fluids into their cages, one was water with sugar the other was water with cocaine, each rat chose the sugar and became addicted to the sugar solution.

The change in our diets was radical when we did this because just about everything out there has sugar and flour in it. It became a bit like our friend Bill who is a celiac. He always has to check everything before he eats it and now we’re the same. I check the label, I ask the waiter and I will not allow refined carbohydrates to get into my mouth.

I know, you think I’m nuts right? Well let me tell you what happened. The weight just fell off me. Now let me tell you I eat butter, cheese, eggs, bacon all high cholesterol things that traditional medicine tells you are bad for you, I’m going to talk more about that tomorrow, because my Doctor is absolutely over the moon with my blood test results. I eat as much as I want, whenever I want and I lost twenty-five kilograms, come on its fifty-five pounds.

You know you think I’m crazy or maybe I’m lying or both but that’s what happened. The moment I removed all those refined carbohydrates and by the way the withdrawal from sugar lasted about a week for me and then I was fine. I lost my appetite, I just wasn’t hungry much anymore and here’s the science behind it.

When you eat refined carbs with a high glycaemic index your body digests them very quickly. In an instant your blood sugar spikes so now your body is pumping masses of insulin into your blood stream to deal with the sugar because insulin is the stuff that processes the blood sugar into energy and carries the surplus into fat.

A spike in your blood sugar produces a very strong insulin response and the insulin does such a good job of mopping up your blood sugar so quickly and effectively that now your blood sugar plummets and your left with a very low blood sugar and what does that tell your body? I’m hungry. What’s your response? I’ll eat. And you’ll eat something that will give you a quick fix so your blood sugar is rapidly going up and down, up and down, your insulin is pumping way too high and there you have the beginnings of insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome and diabetes.

Remove the spikes in your blood sugar and most of your hunger goes away, that’s the secret, that’s the reason I can eat whatever I want whenever I want because I now want less food and I want it less frequently. I can do that as long as I don’t have refined carbohydrates and my friend that’s it in a nutshell, that’s how I lost twenty five kilograms, fifty five pounds. And for the very first time in my life ever I’ve kept it off without having to try. All I do is I avoid refined carbohydrates.

And as I walk past those sweet muffins at the cafe right at eye level that looks and smells stunning not a single twinge of desire in my body to have them because I’ve broken the habit, I’ve been through the withdrawal and the desire is gone.

What I’ve just told you may sound completely counter intuitive, it did to me at first and please remember I’m not a Doctor and I’m not qualified to give you medical advice but you know what I’ve noticed, truth is almost always counter intuitive. God’s truth invariably flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

Now here are three resources that I access frequently to wrap my mind around this stuff. The first is in fact two books by a lawyer and author David Gillespie who like me was grossly overweight and given his gifted legal mind applied his forensic skills to the problem of weight loss, something I’ve greatly benefited from. His two books are ‘Sweet Poison’ and ‘Sweet Poison Quit Plan’. Buy them on Amazon Kindle or iBooks.

The second of those videos that I told you about by a Professor of Paediatrics specialising in childhood obesity, Professor Robert Lustig just search for “Bitter Truth” on YouTube. And finally there’s a great blog and website by brilliant young Doctor Peter Attia called www.theeatingacademy.com.

All three are brilliant and if you were a person whose lifestyle and waistline and blood tests aren’t what they should be it’s time for you to wrap your mind around this stuff. Remember my Secret Number One – get rid of the sugar and the other refined carbohydrates in your diet and the weight will just drop off.

Today Berni Dymet I’m going to share my second secret for losing a substantial amount of weight and keeping it off – which is what I’ve done. And it’s all about what we eat – replacing bad with good.

Without any shadow of a doubt the best thing I ever did for my health was to give up sugar and other refined carbohydrates. Of course in this world you can’t completely give them up but I drastically reduced the intake, and when I did not only did the weight come tumbling off my body without me ever having to starve myself or go hungry but my blood lipid profile, (that’s the readings of your cholesterol and your triglycerides and all that sort of stuff – those things that tell you if you’re at risk of heart attack and stroke) improved so dramatically that it had my Doctor asking me, what have you done?

He’d never seen such a dramatic improvement in blood tests in such a short period of time over just a couple of months. See for years my Doctor had been telling me to reduce my cholesterol by going on a low fat diet, limit your dairy products, no more than two eggs a week, the traditional things that Doctors tell you to do and for years I tried that and for years it hadn’t been working.

In fact I’m not the only one. The whole idea of low fat diets emanated from a flawed study done by a man called Ancel Keys back in 1939. He promoted the message that fat makes you fat. He did a study of some twenty countries and chose just seven of those to demonstrate that increased fat consumption was making people fat.

Had he reported the findings of all twenty countries he wouldn’t have been able to say that and in fact had he chosen seven different countries he would have proven exactly the opposite. But there’s a certain elegant simplicity about the message that fat makes you fat. So by the 1960’s and 70’s the low fat diet was in full swing and it’s still being promoted today. The only problem is that over that same time obesity rates have climbed dramatically.

See the low fat thing isn’t working and that my friend is something that I’ve proven with my life over and over again with the yoyo effects of dieting, losing over 20 kg, that’s 45 lb, more than seven times in my life and each time except for the last time stacking it back on again whilst watching my fat intake very carefully and wondering why I still had a fatty liver, a precursor to cirrhosis and cancer and why I couldn’t keep the weight off.

So finally having lost this 25 kg (55 lb), the easy way, the easy way by virtually eliminating processed and refined carbohydrates from my diet I came upon secret number two. Replacing those bad calories, the ones that kept causing my blood sugar to spike and then plummet making me hungry all the time, with good calories.

See a calorie ain’t a calorie, what we replace them with matters. Whilst Ancel Keys was promoting the low fat approach to dieting there was another man, you may well have heard of him, Robert Aitkins, the famous Aitkin’s diet promoting a low carbohydrate diet that didn’t limit the fat intake.

Now I read the Keys study and I read the Aitkin’s approach and whilst I had always thought that those Aitkin’s people were nutters I decided to give it a go. So I replaced the chips and cakes and bread rolls and mashed potato with three things and this is my secret number two.

Firstly – lots of vegetables. Every colour, every variety, cooked, raw, salad, stews, you name it and I am into vegetables. Secondly protein, lots of meat and fish of all kinds. Well neither of those things are particularly controversial are they but the third one is. The third thing was fat and not the fats they tell you are healthy, the polyunsaturated ones, the research is telling us that those manufactured oils created in laboratories and factories are in fact bad for us but saturated fats, animal fats and monounsaturated fats like olive oil.

I no longer restrict my fat intake. In fact, hang in there, I haven’t gone crazy, my high sugar content cereal breakfast of fruit juice, tin fruit and muesli, total sugar content around 45% by weight has now been replaced by eggs fried in butter, bacon, spinach, fried tomatoes.

Why did I do that? Well as an experiment. Here was an alternative theory. The low fat one that I believed most of my life simply failed to deliver and as much as it was totally counter intuitive that having so called bad fats in my diet will help me lose weight I decided to give it a spin. And I thought I’ll give it three months. I would not restrict my fat intake but would make sure there were very few refined carbohydrates passed my lips.

Remember the green, red, yellow, purple, orange vegetables are full of carbohydrates so I still have plenty of carbs in my diet, the difference is now that the carbs are packaged inside the fibre which makes them slow to digest avoiding spikes in my blood sugar and my tummy rumbling, plummeting blood sugar that followed, that’s what was making me fat.

So what were the results? Firstly I am now very seriously addicted to vegetables and I’ve rediscovered vegetables like egg plant or aubergine, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower. By the way cauliflower mash is a great substitute for mash potatoes and in fact I’ve been watching myself, now when I sit down for dinner I instinctively reach for the vegetables before the meat. Interesting.

Secondly – the fat has not increased my cholesterol readings, to the contrary. My bad cholesterol and triglycerides are low and my good cholesterol, the HDL type, is high. See it turns out that there’s a reason for that, 85% of the cholesterol in our body is manufactured by us, mostly by your liver. Your liver hates refined carbohydrates and can’t metabolise 50% of the sugar, the fructose component into glucose, which is what your body uses for energy. So you turn it into triglycerides, into fats.

Of the cholesterol in your body only 15% is from what you eat and a good chunk of that you can’t digest so it passes straight through. So my Doctor continued to rave about my blood tests which included a complete healing of my fatty liver condition which I’d carried around for years and finally I was never hungry and to this day I can eat basically as much as I want and not put on weight. The key is that I want less because I’m not hungry.

In practice your body doesn’t want too much fat at all anyway although I’m liberal with the butter on my Brussels sprouts and now my body has found a healthy equilibrium at a healthy weight without me ever having to count calories, go hungry or feel deprived. And as though that’s not evidence enough my Doctor remains over the moon with my blood tests results.

If you’d told me at the beginning of my three month experiment that that would be the outcome I’d have said you were nuts. In fact I read all the stuff, the book by Aitkin’s and others, I thought they were nuts but I tried it out of sheer despair as a last resort. I never feel stuffed full anymore after a big night out because I didn’t eat those refined carbohydrates. Remember I don’t restrict unrefined carbohydrates just the refined ones.

And I’m never so hungry that I’m pecking on bad stuff. Do I still get hungry sometimes between meals? Yeah occasionally, so I go for a handful of healthy nuts, a piece of cheese, some left over protein, chicken, whatever’s in the fridge.

I travelled overseas recently and packed my suitcase. When I checked in at the airport they weighed the bag and it was 24 kg, I couldn’t believe it. Lumping that suitcase around was hard work, it was incredibly heavy, certainly my wife couldn’t lift it but that’s the weight I used to carry around on my body, no wonder I was always tired, no wonder my joints were hurting, no wonder I didn’t want to exercise. I’d spent most of my adult life carrying that incredibly heavy suitcase strapped to my body. It’s a scary thought.

When you think about this stuff as radical as this approach may seem in a historical context it’s not radical at all, it’s simply winding the clock back a century and a bit to eat exactly the sorts of foods that my grandparents were eating in the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s when, by the way, heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes were as rare as hen’s teeth before Ancel Keys sold us the lie that fat makes us fat.

Hey listen, I’m not your Doctor and I’m not here to give you medical advice but because so many people have asked me I’m just telling you what I did and how it worked.

Today I’m going to share my third secret for losing a substantial amount of weight and keeping it off – which is what I’ve done. It’s all about exercise – oh really, do we have to talk about exercise? Yeah, I’m with you!

I have a confession to make, I have never, ever, ever enjoyed running. Every now and then you hear about a big fitness event being organised and they call it a “fun run”. How dare they, running is never fun, at least not to me. In fact in my younger years I trained to be an officer in the Australian army, four years at the Royal Military College Duntroon, which is the Australian equivalent of the UK’s Sandhurst and America’s West Point.

Now I’m not overly tall nor am I overly short but my little legs just weren’t made for running. We did a lot of it in the army, each year we had a nine-mile battle proficiency run to complete in our boots and wearing all our military gear and carrying our rifle. I lived in dread of that, it was like torture and each year we had to pass the cross-country run, eight kilometres in forty-two minutes over hill and dale and I always struggled.

In fact in my last year I failed the cross country twice, first by twenty-two seconds and second by twelve seconds and I came very close to being kicked out of the military college for failing the cross country run.

I wanted you to know that so that when you hear me talk about exercise you don’t think I’m one of those crazy people who runs marathons or spends hours working out in the gym. For most of my life I have hated exercise. Now I’ve been sharing with you over the last few days my top three secrets for losing 25 kg.

First was to drastically reduce my intake of refined carbohydrates that cause your blood sugar to spike and then to plummet making you hungry again and causing you to gain weight. People have said to me, ‘but Berni, don’t you miss all those sweet things?’ And the answer is, not at all.

See for 99% of the population, as David Gillespie writes in his book “The Sweet Poison Quit Plan”, it requires precisely zero willpower to avoid cocaine. I don’t feel deprived by not having cocaine, I don’t have to fight the impulses to buy it and to take it because I’m not addicted to it and once I’d broken my addiction to sugar, took about a week, well since then I simply don’t desire it and I don’t have to exercise any willpower to avoid it. That was the first thing.

The second was to replace those bad habit foods with healthy foods – vegetables, meats and fats. Now the fats component is counter intuitive I know but they’re an important component of a healthy diet and now I ravenously look forward to vegetable dishes in a way that I ever thought would be possible.

Today I’m going to talk to you about exercise, the third secret of losing weight but not in the way you think. The prevailing wisdom is that in order to lose weight and to get into shape what you need to do is to exercise and by spending all those calories on exercising and restricting your calorie intake you create a calorie deficit that causes you to draw on your fat reserves to lose weight. That’s the theory. In fact the whole exercise and fitness industry is worth billions of dollars each year and it’s booming and yet people are getting fatter and fatter.

If you’ve been able to join me this week you’ll have heard me share that I have lost over 20 kg, that’s 45lb more than seven times in my life and each time except this last time I’ve put the weight back on. Anybody who’s ever tried to lose weight will tell you that losing that much weight, 20 kg, is a herculean effort, it’s huge.

Think about it, each kilo of body fat contains seven thousand seven hundred calories of energy. So to lose just one kilo you need to create a deficiency between the energy you spend and the energy you consume of 7,700 calories, that’s hard work and so when I lost all that weight all those times before I would set about creating as much of a deficit between my energy output and my energy input as I could to force my body to burn fat.

At one stage I was walking twenty kilometres a day, that’s twelve-and-a-half miles a day and consuming only around 1,100 calories. In other words I was starving myself. It took a lot of time; it required a lot of work over many months. I would lose the weight and then I’d put it straight back on again. Bottom line with all my life and blood and sweat and tears I have proven that exercising doesn’t help you lose weight in a way that will cause you to keep it off.

The reason for that is if you’re constantly hungry, well that’s something you can’t sustain. You can’t fight your appetite every day for the rest of your life. When you spend calories by exercising your body wants to replace them by eating. Exercise more appetite goes up and if I bothered to read the research that’s exactly what I would have discovered. Study after study proves that very fact.

So here’s my secret number three, exercise doesn’t help you lose weight because it increases your appetite, that’s what the research shows. Now if you’re living on a diet high in processed and refined carbohydrates you’re actually breaking your finely tuned appetite control mechanism.

By applying secret number one, drastically reduce those refined carbs in your diet you allow your brilliantly sophisticated appetite control feedback loop to start working the way it’s meant to work and now all of a sudden you’re going to eat less. Not because you’re forcing yourself to but because naturally you want to. Don’t believe me? Try it.

Now all of a sudden exercise takes on an entirely different role in a healthy lifestyle. You’re no longer beating your head up against a brick wall by trying to exercise to lose weight which the studies say doesn’t work, you’re exercising to be healthy. Do you know the biggest single indicator of impending heart attack statistically? It’s not high cholesterol, not high blood pressure, it’s not being overweight, it’s the absence of exercise.

But when you’re carrying all that weight you don’t want to exercise, believe you me I know. I used to sit there on the couch having consumed a high carb snack and feel so tired and lethargic I couldn’t get out the front door. But once I’d lost the weight by doing what I’ve been talking about, modifying my diet to get back what my body needed I discovered I had so much energy that I needed to exercise. So these days I walk rather briskly about seven kilometres or just under four-and-a-half miles most days.

It takes me about an hour and if for some reason a couple of days go by without me being able to get out there and go for a walk I get really twitchy, I have to get out there and exercise. Sometimes I run for part of it but only because I have excess energy to burn and I feel like it. I never take a watch, I never time myself, I don’t make it a competition, just get out there for a brisk walk and I enjoy myself and I do it because I feel like doing it not because I have to. I’m not training for a marathon, I’m just getting my body to be mobile.

Walking may not be your thing, you might enjoy bike riding or swimming or basketball playing or going to the gym, we’re all different. But once the weight started to come off, trust me, your body is going to want to exercise just as natural as night follows day.

Let me ask you something: is that good news or what? I mean you and I have been given this incredible amazing body by God, He handcrafted you and me in our mother’s womb, He laid down every strand of DNA to make us who we are and the moment this western diet gets dumped on us, the fizzy drinks full of sugar, the white bread, the white flour, the sugar laden cereals and juices and sauces, the moment that gets dumped on us we break the finely tuned appetite control system that God designed and gave us, that’s what we do, we break it.

Hey what I’m about in these messages I guess is helping you to wake up to what’s going on. Again here are some of the great books to read and please read them critically, make up your own mind, accept or reject what I’ve said and what others say by thinking through it critically.

David Gillespie’s books – ‘Sweet Poison’, ‘Sweet Poison Quit Plan’ and ‘Big Fat Lies’.

Dr David Attia’s brilliant website – eatingacadamy.com.

Professor Robert Lustig’s YouTube video “Bitter Truth“.

Dr Robert Aitkin’s book – ‘The Age Defying Diet Revolution’.

May God bless you as you take hold of your life, your eating habits and get your body, the only one you’ll ever have, back into the healthy condition that God meant for it to be in.