I’m going to start by saying that I am in no way in the best shape of my life. Quite the opposite, in fact. I could do with losing quite a bit of weight in order to get to a healthy level. Which is, I think, what has prompted this blog because I have been thinking long and hard about how exactly to do that in a way that is sustainable for me.
What also prompted this blog was seeing a woman I knew to be morbidly obese a couple of years ago. I don’t know the woman as a friend, she was the checkout lady I liked going to in a certain supermarket because she was just always so lovely. I used to go at a regular day of the week, it was a day she worked and we would chat. When I changed the day, it was to one she didn’t work so I haven’t seen her in a while. But I saw her today. And I have to say she looked great, she has lost a considerable amount of weight and I take my hat off to her for that. But I couldn’t help wondering if she had used one of the drugs now on the market – the so-called skinny jabs. If she has, good on her. This isn’t a judgement of her at all. It just got me thinking.
Why do we need to use more chemicals into our body to lose weight when just a few decades ago people weren’t obese as much as they are today. What has changed?
And it’s really quite simple. Overprocessed foods being sold to us as being healthy. The convenience of packaged foods in our increasingly busy lives. And stress and our nervous system meaning we are consistently flooded with cortisol and so eating more and retaining fat. How have we come to this?
We are bombarded endlessly with advertisements from McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Dominos Pizza, cereal companies, and other marketing campaigns for overprocessed foods. We are fooled by the ads into believing that they have somehow made this unhealthy food in some way healthy. McDonalds, for example, talk about the produce they use. The images of the cows on the farm, usually free-range, that we are led to believe is where their meat comes from. Yet they don’t tell you that the potatoes they use have to be stored in a warehouse for 2 weeks after harvest to be rid of all the pesticides and chemicals to make them fit for human consumption. All because a little brown spot is not allowed, when it’s perfectly natural and perfectly fine. That’s just one example, there are many, many more I am sure.
We don’t even have to leave the house anymore for our food (unless you’re in a rural area). You can have any form of take away delivered and any form of supermarket food delivered within an hour, increasing the sedentary life people are leading. Even if you bother to get in your car, for many of these things you don’t even have to get out of it to collect the food using a Drive Thru instead. Don’t get me wrong, I am very guilty of the Drive Thru especially when it comes to a coffee. But let’s take a look at ourselves for a minute, shall we? Check ourselves and our behaviour.
How many times do we eat vegetables or fruit in a week? And how many times do we eat food with hidden processed sugar in it? Not the naturally occurring sugars in vegetable and fruits, but the deliberate sugars placed in them to enhance flavour. Especially when it’s ‘fat free’ because what that usually means is it is flavour-enhanced by sugar or saccharine instead which is even worse. There is a well-known diet that penalises you for eating an avocado which is full of healthy fat yet not for a meringue which is basically sugar on a plate. And we are hooked on the stuff, it’s completely addictive. As I say, I am no angel in any of this. I have been on that diet, I have done the fat free thing. I have done the Keto and the eating healthy fat thing. I have done the meal replacement shake diet which destroyed my metabolism. I have done calorie counting. I have done fasting. There is not a diet out there I haven’t tried. And I have lost considerable amounts of weight over the years. Only to pile it all on – and more – when the psychological reasons I eat kicked back in. When I hit a plateau in my weight loss because my body had adjusted. And I invariably did these diets with exercise as well. But in some way, shape or form most of these diets include foods that have sugar in them.
So, I wondered how easy would it be to erase sugar from my diet? That would mean eating clean. It would mean making my own granola, having full fat Greek yoghurt, continuing with the berries I eat, removing sugar (well, sweetener which is worse) from my tea and coffee, removing white pasta and rice and making sure any wholemeal pasta and rice is al dente (it’s when we overcook them that the sugars are also produced), and it would mean eating significantly more vegetables than we do (though we do well there), eating a lot more salad (where we don’t do so well), and taking out chocolate other than dark chocolate which is now prohibitively expensive because of bad crop yield. It means no alcohol (not a problem for me, I’ve completely gone off it) and it means no cakes at all. It doesn’t sound easy and probably isn’t easy though I’m told after a few weeks, your tastebuds adapt and soon you dislike the sweetness of sugar. It would also mean taking a lot of time to prep food at the weekend for the rest of the week.
I remind myself that it would hugely help my heart health. I find it interesting that all the advice on heart health is about low fat foods and very little is said about sugar. There are healthy fats, science has proven this but we’re told not to eat them because there is a blanket ban on fats. Which brings me back to the avocado – very healthy, full of potassium and low in carbohydrates, and contain Vitamin E, protein and fibre as well as healthy fat which does help your body. They are good for your eyes, your heart, gut and muscular-skeletal health. Why would you not want to eat them? Obviously not mixed with mayonnaise! But with prawns or salmon they are simply lovely. And salmon – oily fish, known to be excellent for your health. Yet it’s seen as ‘fatty’ so should be eaten less than, say, bacon with the fat removed. Bacon that is overprocessed food. It doesn’t make sense to me!
Can I eat clean? How can I not, really. I’ve already had one heart attack and don’t want to keep taking tablets for my cholesterol levels or my blood pressure if I can help it. I’m arranging some exercise with a trainer friend and will get my backside into gear about walking every day. But you can’t out train a bad diet. So, that needs to change for me as well. I don’t want to rely on the skinny jabs (again, no judgement. You do you) because I know what would happen when I stopped them. I need to rely on me and on overcoming the psychological reasons I eat bad things.
Which is another story for another blog.
Louisa Simpson 