UK’s Broken Plate

One of the greatest determiners of your health and well-being is getting the right advice. It’s a sad fact that in Britain today most of what is eaten is not food. How is it that unhealthy products are now the norm? Bad advice. They call it – Great marketing!

It’s crucial to choose carefully whose messages you put your trust in. Surely official messages from the government are sound? I wish they were. But Public Health England appointed a committee of fake food industry reps to design the UK ‘Eatwell’ Guide as explained here by Zoe Harcombe who concludes that public health cares zero about your health.

My discovery in 2004 of its shortcomings, through the effects on my own health, destabilised my world and made me cynical, suspicious and angry. It’s why I work so hard spreading the real food message. A bit like Steve Bennett (review of his book Fat and Furious coming soon) who has done tremendous things since he found out the truth.

Last month I wrote about a healthy vegetarian diet and this month’s Eat Well News will be about the healthy omnivorous diet and the benefits of meat and fish. Either way there is one foundational principle in common – if you want to be healthy you need to eat food not edible food-like products full of health-damaging sugar, vegetable oil and chemicals.

The Food Foundation publishes an annual report called The Broken Plate.  It looks at our food system, its impact on our lives and the remedies we could pursue.

It makes sobering reading. Here are a few snippets (in italics) with my comments:

Weight

“For many, food is a source of anxiety and misery, with over a third of people reporting trying to lose weight most of the time.” (30% of men, 45% of women – that’s almost half the female population dieting most of the time!) With diet clubs and diet products never more popular, for me this is proof that the low-fat message is not helping people and drives them towards unhealthy processed foods. In the 1970s, when we all ate full-fat, real food cooked at home, almost everyone was slim.

80% of UK adults said they check nutrition labels on food and drink, mainly for calorie or sugar content. Buying products with labels is the real root of the problem.

Health

What we eat has become the biggest risk factor for preventable disease.

“competition to maximise market share creates an economic imperative to sell us foods that are cheap to produce and have the greatest profit margins – but these are the same foods that are making us unwell.”

“The food system was not always this way.”

The problem was started by government policies after the second world war. They wanted maximum calories produced cheaply – they didn’t understand nutrition and health at all.

“mass producing cheap foods that cause disease and damage the environment.”

Cost

There are graphs showing the affordability of the Eat Well Guide. Since the Eat Well Guide is not helpful for people’s health, it’s of little interest to know how much it costs.

There are lots of people showing how to cook healthy cheap meals – God bless Jamie Oliver. I wrote my own recipe booklet Eat Well and Save to prove the point that real food is cheaper than ready meals and takeaways.

Comparing 100g of chicken to 100g of chickpeas makes little sense. Chicken has way more nutrition and chickpeas are in no way equivalent. Plant-based fake chicken is ultra-processed and contains vegetable oil so is massively unhealthy. Plants are healthy. Plant-based fake meats are among the most unhealthy foods now sold.

A key recommendation I heartily agree with is the need to stop marketing sugary breakfast cereals and yoghurts to children. These fuel childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes, which used to be very rare in children but are now common. The legislation was all done and ready to enact but Rishi kicked it down the road and failed to do something obvious and beneficial. Guess who’s not getting my vote?

Perhaps the most telling thing is this picture breaking down marketing spend.

So Big Food has mislead everyone into having habits they believe to be good which are really damaging their health.

Top tip: If it’s advertised heavily, don’t eat it!

.

Welcome to my website.

If it’s your first visit, head over to the Welcome page to find out what I’m about and for links to my top articles.

.

Eat Well News

To get my full Eat Well News, sign up here. It’s so much more than the blog posts I write. I’ll be in touch with you about nutrition and health, and to provide articles, and updates (eg research and campaigns relating to nutrition and health), and marketing (eg events, products, services, talks and courses), and recipes, and things to bring a smile.

Self-Image

2023 is almost over and we turn our thoughts to the coming New Year, what it might hold and what we hope to do. Gym membership will soar (briefly) and diet clubs will swell (briefly) but for most people by mid February, everything will be back as it was with us no further forwards.

I gave up on resolutions long ago; instead I set goals. Achieving goals is about building better habits and to change your habits, it helps greatly to first change your self-image.

How to Change Your Self-Image

To start, vividly imagine yourself the way you want to be:

• how you want to look
• how you want to feel
• what you want to be able to do
• the taste of the healthy foods you want to eat
• the sound of the crunch you get from salads
• the things people will say to you

Next get specific and create affirmation statements, written in the first person, and the present tense – as if they were already true:

• I have lots of energy to play …. with the grandchildren…. my sport….
• I eat healthy, nutritious, natural food
• I move my body every day
• I weigh XX stone XX pounds (your desired end weight)

Then to get your subconscious on board, embed your statements repeatedly.

Look at your affirmations every day. Read them. Write them out like doing lines. (Very few people write down goals yet research shows that people with written goals achieve much more than those without.) Speak them aloud to yourself so they go into your subconscious via your ears. Say them while looking in the mirror and smiling!!

At first, it might feel like lying, but even then part of your brain will believe it. The mismatch between your new, created self-image and your old reality will set up subconscious tension – and to relieve the tension your subconscious will cause you to change your habits.

Finally, to keep it up reinforce only positive thought pictures.

Sometimes you’ll eat good things and sometimes bad things. How you react is really important.

The classic diet mentality is on it or off it. You eat one bad thing and the day is ruined so you may as well binge. You eat one chocolate so you may as well finish the box etc. When I speak to clients, they’re quick to tell me their slip-ups even when they’ve actually done lots of good things. Beating yourself up about failures reinforces the negative and makes it more likely you’ll fail in future.

You can free yourself from these flawed thinking patterns with this helpful tip from Lanny Bassham.

In any situation, start with a good intention eg “I’m going to eat good things.”

If you eat good things, reinforce it by saying (in your head!), “Well done, that’s like me.”

If you eat bad things, replace the bad memory by putting a positive picture in your mind of yourself eating good things by thinking, “What I need to do is eat good things”.

The pictures you make inside will make it more likely that you’ll succeed in eating good things in future.

——–

My coaching on your image, goals and habits, combined with sound nutritional advice could be just what you need. Drop me an email to get started.

——–

——–

 

---

The Terrible Truth about Treats

Once upon a time in the merry, 3-meals-a-day, real-food land of Britain, we didn’t snack and were slim and healthy. We farmed the earth and ate its good plants and animals. Then they invented ultra-processed snacks, manufactured not for their nutritional value or because we need them but for the sole purpose of making money. The damage to our health is well established so they’re marketed as ‘treats’ or ‘fun’ and the £££s roll in as we stuff our faces.

Adverts stick in your subconscious: Milky Way “the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite” (1970) “A finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat” (1979) “Have a break, have a Kit Kat” (1958). “A drink’s too wet without one” Rich Tea (1985). And I bet you know who makes exceedingly good cakes.

The culture shifted from occasional treats to snacking every day. There’s no escaping temptation, unhealthy nibbles constantly surround us. They’re at work, in town, thrust at us when buying a newspaper, alongside us as we queue to pay for petrol. The young people have noticed and are rightly angry (@BiteBack2030).

Autumn is a danger to our health.

• September – The Macmillan coffee morning
• October – Halloween
• November – Bonfire Night
• December – Christmas (although the chocolates have been on sale since summer).

Halloween masks, costumes and pumpkin lanterns are scary enough, but read the ingredients lists on these products for a real fright. How weird that we “treat” our kids (and ourselves) with health-damaging sugar and chemicals.

For better health

• Only eat when you’re hungry
• Eat high-nutrition, satisfying meals so you don’t get hungry
• Snack on healthy real food like nuts, cheese or a piece of fruit.

Top tip – Avoid terrible treats

If you’d like to clean up your habits, book a consultation.

jackie@learntoeatwell.co.uk

Welcome to my website.

If it’s your first visit, head over to the Welcome page to find out what I’m about and for links to my top articles.

Eat Well News

To get my Eat Well News, sign up here. It’s so much more than the blog posts I write. I’ll be in touch with you about nutrition and health, and to provide articles, and updates (eg research and campaigns relating to nutrition and health), a little marketing (eg events, products, services, talks and courses), plus recipes and things to bring a smile. Please let me know all the ways you would like to hear from me either by using this form or sending me an email jackie@learntoeatwell.co.uk

Ultra Processed Food

Did you see Panorama?

– “Ultra-processed food, a recipe for ill health”?

Yes, it is a recipe for ill health.

People think that if they sell it in the shops, someone is making sure it won’t harm us. Sadly not the case.

What did they look into in Panorama?

Chemical additives – check the ingredients list on things you buy. If you’d need to be a chemist to understand what in the food, don’t buy it. You don’t want to fill your body with strange chemicals.

The additives, sweeteners and emulsifiers are linked to cancer, heart disease, strokes and dementia.

Panorama ran an experiment with two girls who were twins. For 2 weeks, one ate real food, the other ate processed food. The calories, nutrients, fat and sugar were the same. The processed food girl suffered with raised blood sugar, raised blood fats, headaches, hunger and generally feeling rubbish – and she put on a kg – 2 lbs in 2 weeks!! The other felt great on real food.

I recall that years ago Family Circle magazine asked readers with twins to do something similar aimed at sweets, food colouring and ADHD. Lots of twins took part and I think it was for a longer period. The mood, concentration power and behaviour of the real food children was so dramatically improved that many of the families switched their siblings over once the experiment was finished.

In Italy they’ve been studying aspartame in particular and found that it causes cancer in rats.

Panorama also looked at how research can be biased by the organisations that fund it. Lots of studies are funded by Big Food, pharmaceutical and chemical corporations. The Food Standards Agency is not free of this bias either and are failing to protect us from BPA, a hormone disrupter found in plastic containers. Our limit is 20,000 times higher than in Europe. I advise people never to eat ready meals or to cook in plastic of any sort.

The consequences of our rubbish diet can be seen in the misery of people on any street in any town. A doctor in Slough talked about the high percentage of patients he now sees with diabetes and pre-diabetes.

If that’s you, check out the free resources available from the Public Health Collaboration https://phcuk.org/resources/ and also the Freshwell surgery – I’ve just bought their recipe books and they’re available to download free. https://lowcarbfreshwell.co.uk/meal-planners/ 

Find out whether your GP is one of the increasing number now able to support you with a real food diet to put you into drug-free remission.

Michael Mosley tweeted about the programme https://twitter.com/DrMichaelMosley/status/1666367770311753730

“..When I made a series called Who Made Britain Fat for Channel 4 we were promised controls on junk food advertising by 2022.. still waiting”

So don’t expect help from the government.

Ultra-processed food is doing so much damage, what’s the solution?? Take control of your own health and….

Top tip: You guessed it – Eat Real Food!

Weight Loss Magic Jab?

People love an easy answer to their weight problems – a magic bullet – a quick fix – even though they almost always turn out not to solve anything other than in the short term. So there’s been a flurry of excitement about a new injection that’s popular with celebrities.

So what it is they’re offering?

Semaglutide is a drug you have to inject in your stomach every week. It was intended and has been used so far for Type 2 diabetes to control blood sugar. In America they approved its use for weight loss a couple of years ago. Its effectiveness was shown by a robust trial with impressive results. In particular, it reduces appetite.

What’s the catch?

As always with drugs, there’s a sting in the tail. Side effects were suffered by the majority of those who had it and might explain why people lost their appetite.

Of the people in the trial who got the drug rather than a placebo:

• nearly half (44%) reported nausea
• one in three (32%) suffered diarrhoea
• one in four (25%) reported vomiting
• three quarters (74%) reported gastrointestinal disorders.

Others suffered problems with their pancreas, eye damage (1 in 10!), plus a host of lesser things like bloating, pain, wind and weakness. More worryingly, in animal studies it caused thyroid cancer. It’s too early to tell whether that will happen to people.

The NHS will prescribe it for a maximum of 2 years. (BBC news.)   But note that you also have to do a calorie controlled diet at the same time plus an hour and a half of exercise a week. And you only get the benefits if you keep having it. When you stop, you’ll regain weight – just like dieting.

Weight or Health?

The balance of priorities between weight and health seems to be ever skewed towards losing the pounds at any cost. It’s been like that for decades and I’m sure things like Instagram and TikTok have only made it worse with image comparisons. For me, health comes first. I lost my health for years due to eating wrong and I wouldn’t wish that misery on anyone.

If you’re tempted by this jab, it’s probably because your past habits have not given you the body you want. What you really need is better habits which lead automatically to your body returning to an appropriate weight as everything comes back into balance. Artificial ways that force your body to lose weight eg pills, injections, meal replacement shakes, bars and diets, don’t help you learn how you eat well.

Or both?

To be slim and healthy, there is no quick fix. You’ll have to invest a bit of time and effort although perhaps not as much as you feared or the ads for convenience food-like products have brain-washed you into believing. You can make easy changes eg eat a bit of salad with your lunch instead of bread or crisps, reduce how often you indulge in sugary things (biscuits, chocolate, snack bars), cut out vegetable oil and go back to butter, drink some water.

You shouldn’t expect a new body next week but you can enjoy a more vibrantly healthy life year after year with real food. I love it when I see or hear from past clients who find that as time goes by, their body shape improves and their health and energy levels too. So I don’t promise a quick fix. Healthy eating isn’t a magic bullet, it’s a better lifestyle.

Top tip – for a more vibrantly healthy life, say no to any quick fix and learn to eat well.

I got the numbers from Zoe Harcombe’s piece ‘A story about weight loss.’

 

Your Best You Helps the NHS

It’s clear that the NHS is in dire straights and we hope it’s not broken beyond repair. It’s understaffed and over-burdened and people are suffering and dying from not being able to get help they need, when they need it.

• It’s not just that it’s underfunded.
• It’s not just that it’s hampered by bloated, unsuitable systems with lots of wasted resources.
• It’s not just that it’s understaffed (exacerbated by staff losses due to a badly executed Brexit and Matt Hancock’s mandates).
• It’s not just the bed-blocking (again exacerbated by mandates that cost the already struggling care sector 40,000 workers, laid off for refusing to be bullied into giving up their right to informed consent).

By all means lobby your MP to sort out the big top-level problems.

And also think about how you can help more personally.

The main thing the NHS struggles with is

• ever increasing demand.

And not just from the ageing population – who could and should be healthy enough to mostly take care of themselves, but also from younger and younger people. The percentage of the population succumbing to lifestyle-related diseases (T2 Diabetes, Heart Disease, Obesity, Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, Cancer, Alzheimer’s) continues to go up and up and up.

Obesity and related diseases took a massive, sudden step up because of lockdown. Some people did use the time as an opportunity to get fitter but most didn’t and I bet you know people who are still heavier now than in 2019.

One of the best things you can do to help the NHS is to be your best you. To use them as little as possible – for the things they can fix that you can’t.

To quote Dr Phil

Health care begins with self-care.

So take self-care to the next level.  Do all you can to avoid such chronic diseases as can be avoided by prioritising movement, fresh air, sunshine, rest, stress reduction, relationships, sleep and real food. However young or old you are, whatever maladies afflict you, it’s always worth looking after yourself as well as you possibly can.

In recent conversations, people have asked, “What do you do?” And then when I said, “Nutrition Coaching”, exclaimed (while patting their tummies) “Ooooh I could do with some of that!!!” It wasn’t one person, or two, but several. People know what they need, they know what they’re unhappy with and they know what they want.

Translating desire into action is a different thing. Yes, their enthusiasm could carry them through to action, but what action?  You need to know the right things to do.

I can give you understanding of why many real foods you’ve been avoiding are actually your friends and help you learn to eat well.

So far, so good – enthusiasm and understanding are hugely important; so is commitment.

1.Commitment to change

“If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.” (I’ve seen this attributed to many people from Albert Einstein or Henry Ford to Forest Gump).

If you’re not slim and healthy the way you’re eating now, you won’t become slim and healthy eating the way you’re eating now.  You need to reach the point where you’re ready for change.

2.Commitment to effort

You’ll have good reasons why you do what you currently do. Haven’t got time? Ready meals so much easier than cooking? There are always better solutions. OK, it might take a little while to get used to new habits but the extra energy you’ll have will compensate for the time taken to prepare your own food.

3.Commitment to yourself

Need to do this for this person? Or something else for someone else? Or your job? Or your family? Great. Except your own good intentions can easily get squeezed out. By moving yourself higher up your priorities you can start to enjoy better health. With extra energy you’ll be able to look after everyone else better too.

That’s why I’ll be asking for your commitment as a client if you want to work with me. We’re all wasting our time if all you gain is understanding of how your current diet is harming you while you carry on eating the same. If you’re determined to subsist on breakfast cereal, low-cal ready meals, take-aways and fizzy pop, then no-one can help you much.

If you’re serious about making your health important in your life then I can help you to enjoy a more vibrantly healthy life, – and you’ll help the NHS.

Top tip – Be your best you to help the NHS

Free Yourself From Counting

Do you track what you eat? Wear a fitness watch? Like a long streak? Lots of us love a good graph but it can be dangerous too. Achieving measures and collecting data can be addictive – to your detriment.

Calories

When I help people learn to eat well, one of the things that surprises them is the lack of counting. It’s all about nutrients, pleasure, satisfaction and health, caring for yourself with real food, with not a calorie in sight. Calories are all very well as a physics measure of energy but they tell you nothing about biology or how your body uses different types of foods in different ways. Counting them tends to drive people towards bad food choices.

Most diets are based on calorie restriction, even if they disguise that by using measures like points. So dieters head for lower calorie foods and manufactured food-like products. Often these are low in fat, so valuable nutrients are lost.

Natural fats like butter, lard, dripping, olive oil and coconut oil are useful to the body.

• We need fat soluble vitamins.
• We don’t absorb minerals as well without fats.
• Fats boost our metabolic rate so we burn more energy. Depression of metabolism caused by calorie restriction is one of the key reasons that dieters stall/plateau and then regain weight.
• And fats add flavour which is why low-fat and fat-free products have to be loaded with sugar, sweeteners and flavouring chemicals.

The supermarket section labelled as healthy contains many products that are bad for you.

Food Apps

Pausing midway through a film to boil the kettle, I caught a few minutes of a BBC3 programme about eating disorders. A girl was saying that having put on weight as a student boozing and eating kebabs she started using a food-tracking app. I suppose the same thing happens with these apps as other types of scrolling, addiction to likes and other built-in artificial rewards. It’s all designed to keep you doing the next thing, and the next, making it hard to control or to stop. The girl became obsessed with her food app and lost so much weight her periods stopped and a year later they still haven’t restarted, although thankfully she’s eating again.

Exercise Apps

The same day I had been speaking to someone who had read that the fitness apps, exercise trackers and watches that people wear has made them over-exercise at times when their bodies really wanted to rest and this has exacerbated chronic post viral fatigue (including long-covid).

Like so many things that ‘everybody knows’ the 10,000 steps a day has no science behind it at all. It was marketing by a Japanese company that manufactures pedometers. Yes, it’s good to walk. No, it is not good to feel forced to do a certain number of steps each day, regardless of how you feel. And there are better types of exercise that get neglected because apps reward you for consecutive days of doing the same thing. Research shows aerobic exercise on its own reduces your all-cause mortality by 16% and strength training one its own reduces it by 21%, whereas if you do both, you reduce your all-cause mortality by 29%.

Not only that but exercising every day can be counter productive. The benefits come during the recovery phase, so you need days off or to change the part of the body you work on. Here’s a study showing muscle weakness caused by 3 days of consecutive exercise.

When I was competing internationally (and also had a very demanding full-time job) I kept records, even created a visual monthly training records chart to identify training patterns leading to better performance.

I certainly trained at times when it would have been better not to – even when injured, which caused me damage as well as pain (more fool me).

The morning of writing this blog post I slept in. Weirdly, even though I work for myself, I still feel guilty about things like that, such are the expectations on us to work hard all the time. But truthfully, with plenty of time to prepare for someone coming later in the morning, it wasn’t a problem. No need to crack the whip.

It’s a part of human nature to push ourselves to do more and now it’s been made worse by tech.

Time to take back control of our lives and not be told what to do and when to do it. Ditch the apps sometimes – at a weekend or for a week or a month or forever.

Time to listen to our bodies, be kind, recognise that we change day to day and sometimes rest is good.

Be Free From Counting

I help people to change their relationship with food so that they are not trapped in a prison made of numbers. Your body’s needs won’t be the same every day or in every situation. There’s no need to be trapped in a rigid ‘on it – off it’ diet mentality. Rather than fighting against yourself with miserable, strict denial you can listen to your body and provide nutrition in a caring, flexible way.

Top tip: Set yourself free from the tyranny of counting.

Eat Well, Feel Good

Has lockdown left you overweight, tired and fed up?

Enjoy a more vibrantly healthy life. Learn to Eat Well.

Here’s my latest blog post –

I’m invariably late cottoning on to what everyone else has been doing for ages, so it was only recently I started doing some Joe Wick’s workouts.

I love them!

I started with the ‘Wake Up With Joe’ series and the other day I did the 1 Jan 2021 workout. Joe started the year by reading a letter he’d written.

Like most of us (including me) he has found Lockdown has affected his mental health, motivation, energy and mood.

He says you never regret a workout and he always feels better after some exercise.

He encouraged people to exercise in lots of different ways, not just focused on losing weight, but to get stronger, fitter and feel better.

As I listened, I thought about the parallels with food.

My work is all about people feeling great and having confidence choosing food that will boost their energy and health.

The main thing people enjoy when they learn to eat well is more energy. It’s almost instant. My old habits of cereal for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch gave me a feeling of fatigue that dragged me down. I’ll never go back to them because now I eat differently I enjoy feeling bright and ready for action.

Feeling good is the best motivator to carry on eating well.

Weight loss is a happy side-effect.

Joe also spoke about goals – not what you want in the end (outcome goals) but things you commit to do (process goals).

eg. resistance exercise each week is a doing goal to increase your strength.

Applying the same idea to food, a goal could be to eat one good meal each day.

I suggest starting with a real-food breakfast. If the first thing you eat (at whatever time) is good, it’s easier to keep eating good things later on.

Like increasing your resistance training as you find it easier, you could then progress to eating a real food lunch as well as breakfast.

Give it a go and feel good.

Top tip: To enjoy a more vibrantly healthy life, Learn to Eat Well!

 

For a Good Day, Eat a Good Breakfast

Some say breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

I say it’s the most important meal to get right.

Sadly, years of mis-information, marketing and confusion mean it’s often the worst meal of the day consisting of little more than processed carbohydrate (here’s why that’s bad).

The trick is to find things you know will last you through to lunchtime. That’s very unlikely to be breakfast cereal or jam on toast which can set you up for rapid hunger, unhealthy snacking later on, and weight gain. Eating no breakfast can be preferable to bad breakfast.

Some of my clients have improved their weight and health simply by changing their breakfast habits.

  Here are some ideas that might suit you better.  They use the principle that every meals should contain plants, proteins and fats.

Some people do well on porridge made from natural oats. (Beware the type in sachets as some contain loads of sugar.) To add some protein and fat, top with nuts and seeds and a dollop of cream. For plants sprinkle on a spoonful of berries.

Boost your weight loss with low-carb porridge. It doesn’t have any oats! Mix ground flax seed, chia seed, desiccated coconut and protein powder with some coconut milk and warm until thick. Top with a bit of fruit, some full-fat plain yoghurt and a few flaked almonds.

.

Muesli can be good – choose one with plenty of nuts and not much dried fruit. Again, top with full-fat plain yoghurt.

Granola is less good as it’s generally sweetened and cooked in vegetable oil. If you enjoy it, it’s definitely worth making your own using coconut oil.

Smoothies are quick to make and easy to consume and with the right ingredients can keep you satisfied for 5 or 6 hours.

Base them on coconut milk, avocado, ground almonds, flax, spinach, protein powder, peanut butter, cream, eggs, yoghurt etc.

Add just a little fruit for sweetness eg ¼ apple, 1” banana or a spoonful of berries. (Fruit is sugar so an all-fruit smoothie (bought or home-made) is not a healthy option.)

To save time, you can batch up any dry ingredients in advance so that in the morning you just tip them into the glass with your veg, fruit and milk choice, whizz with a stick blender and drink straight from the glass.

Dry ingredients ready to tip in

Fry-ups can sustain you for ages. For traditional Full English, choose from bacon, egg, black pudding, sausage, mushroom, tomato. Another favourite of mine is the Aussie classic – steak and egg – fab with wilted spinach.

Fancy something a little lighter? Go continental with boiled eggs, ham and cheese (you can save time by hard boiling an egg the night before).

Dip avocado or buttered, wholemeal toast ‘soldiers’ in soft-boiled eggs.

.

.

In the summer, Jon Gabriel’s light but satisfying plain yoghurt mixed with nuts, seeds, protein powder and fruit is hard to beat.

 

.

For a change, go fishy with a tin of mackerel plus half a pear and some seeds or indulge in smoked salmon, delicious teamed with scrambled eggs and courgette.

Prepare in advance for a quick get-away with these breakfast buns.

 

 

Top tip: To have a good day, eat a good breakfast.

Obesity Strategy

Have news reports about obesity and coronavirus alarmed you? Do they make you determined to lose the weight that’s putting your life in greater danger?

Boris has certainly been spurred into action by his time in hospital. He realised that carrying extra weight is one of the highest risk factors for becoming seriously ill with COVID19.

Obesity also makes you more likely to suffer from heart disease, diabetes, several types of cancer, fatty liver, respiratory disease, and mental health problems.

To tackle all of this the Government has launched a strategy to slim down the nation.

Pexels

So what is their focus?

Calories.

Sorry, that’s how we got into this mess in the first place. Calories don’t help you make good food choices; they drive you towards processed foods.

Surely cutting calories helps. Will you not burn more energy than you eat?

Only for a while.

Our bodies are survival machines. Cut the food you eat and your body shuts down your metabolism and hangs on in there until it can put all the weight back on again. That’s why 100 people on a diet will all lose weight but later 95 of them will find themselves back where they started or even heavier than before. And the cycle will repeat.

Let’s go back to the beginning. What are people eating now that causes obesity and poor health? Food-like products. And that includes the low-calorie ones.

• They’re addictive – so you over-eat.

• Chemicals make them taste great – so you over-eat.

• They’re low in the nutrients your body needs – so you over-eat.

• They interfere with your body’s control mechanisms and stimulate appetite – so you over-eat.

• The label says they’re healthy – so you’re fooled into thinking it’s OK to over-eat.

  

  A Colin Shelbourne cartoon from Survival Guide for the Skint.

Since calories became popular and the food industry got into gear 50 years ago, the weight of the average Briton has gone through the roof whilst health is in an ever steepening decline.

.

.

The Government rightly blames advertising and the food environment we live in. We’ve been brainwashed into buying this junk and thinking it’s an acceptable way to feed our bodies. Offers are always for extra junk, not BOGOF on cabbages or steak. They’ve recognised this and I’m glad they’re introducing some controls.

What can you do?

Britain’s health was best between 1950 and 1970. Almost everyone was slim. Almost everyone ate real food.

Real food works with your natural appetite controls. When food satisfies you, there’s no need for will-power and no desire to over-eat.

I so hope you’ve all got used to doing your own cooking during lockdown and that you’ve been soothed by the rhythm of spending time in the kitchen, enjoyed what you ate and noticed how much money you saved.

It’s a missed opportunity but in reality the Government is unlikely ever to tell people to eat real food; they don’t want to damage the processed food industry.

So it’s down to you.

• You can take control. 🙂
  

• You can choose better food. 🙂
  

• You can care for your body and nourish it. 🙂
  

Top tip: To be slim and healthy, forget the calories and learn to eat well.