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!

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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.

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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.

Quotes of the Month – Meat

People that promote one diet for everyone are mistaken. Humans are a varied species. We have to answer to our ancestry. I have to eat red meat 4-5 times a week. I am on the carnivore side. I’ve tried vegetarian diets on an experimental basis. I last about 3 days. I get so depressed I just want to stop living so I eat red meat. I can see the difference in myself after 2 days.

Dr Nicholas Gonzalez

Some say that one cannot be an environmentalist or love and respect nature if one is not #vegan. On the contrary, I think that those who truly love nature, and understand it, cannot be vegan.

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@AndreaBertaglio

Quote of the Month

Unpopular truth.

If you train 5 times a week and your nutrition isn’t aligned, you would benefit from dropping to 4 times and use the time you gain to sort your nutrition out.

Coach Benjamin Yeezus

@BenjaminYeezus

Glasgow Times

 

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.

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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.

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Plastic in You

Plastic in You

“Our oceans are rapidly turning into a plastic soup – awash with 14 billion tons of tiny, toxic particles that will never break down. And every day, more microplastics flow out of our drains into once-pristine rivers and seas.” (Eko)

There’s so much plastic in the sea they estimate that it will exceed the fish by 2050. Huge amounts are being used every day. Plastic pollution on land is even greater, including from farming. Fruits and vegetables are being grown under plastic sheeting or in plastic covered poly tunnels. Land is sprayed with sewage that includes micro-plastics from our laundry (see below).

A study looking at plastic microparticles in human waste (lovely job!) has found that on average there are 2 bits of plastic in every gram of faeces and each person had 9 of the 10 types tested for. There are indications that microplastic in the gut can cause inflammation and damage your gut bacteria. Plastics have even been found in placenta.

Where does all this come from? We buy it.

I noticed with dismay how much plastic packaging increased during lockdown. I now have to ask to have my meat in a thin bag because the standard has become the use of a plastic tray wrapped in cling film – hundreds of times more volume of plastic.

When most businesses were forced to close, the government supported junk by leaving the takeaways open. People have carried on this same pattern. Home deliveries used to be rare, now they are common. All come with masses of packaging. Ready meals are more commonly eaten than real food. And whatever it says on the label, never heat any plastic dishes, bags or containers in the microwave or oven.

Drinking from plastic bottles is another way plastic gets into your body and almost all bottled water is contaminated. A study, reported in Time magazine, found the worst to be Nestlé Pure Life at 10,390 particles per litre. The best in this test was San Pellegrino at 74 particles per litre. Here’s a 1¼ min video.

Then there are the coated paper single-use coffee cups that have become standard since lockdown too. If you haven’t time to sit and enjoy a drink in a cafe with proper crockery, invest in your own, non-plastic, reusable cup and take it with you when out and about.

Our council has changed the three small recycling boxes – one for plastic and metal, one for paper and another for glass – with a wheelie bin for plastic, glass and metal and another for paper and cardboard. I notice that lots of people’s bins are so full they can’t shut the lids.

Real food involves much less packaging, less plastic and generates much less waste.

Synthetic clothes are another major source, contributing a third of all the micro-plastics – from our washing machines. The government has looked at requiring manufacturers to fit them with filters which would probably help (France has made them compulsory for new machines). But this still doesn’t address the root cause which is that we will keep making things out of plastic.

(Here’s an old Guardian article.)

Measures to clean up the mess are well and good – but it would be better to make less mess in the first place.

I don’t know whether you buy second hand clothes made of natural materials, but you, my Eat Well Gang are helping resist this destructive plastic trend by eating real food. Keep up the good work!

Top tip: Keep down your plastic consumption.

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.

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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.

NHS at 75

But this seems little cause for celebration when it’s clinging on by its fingernails and may not survive to see 76.

We have a 7.4 million waiting lists that beggars belief. Patients arriving by ambulance have to stay in them for hours because they can’t get into A&E. And after that they are kept in corridors because the wards are full. GP appointment systems seem to be designed to prevent us from seeing our GPs.

We have worse health than we had decades ago – among the worst in Europe.

Is this progress???

Contrast this to the Health system in Denmark

The emphasis is on keeping people out of hospital and encouraging independence. They’ve dealt with social care and turned hospitals into lighthouses that help patients steer their own course.

And that’s what the NHS doesn’t do. It’s not about health. At the beginning it dealt with infections and injuries. Now the majority of the work is for patients have avoidable lifestyle-related chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease. Even many cancers would be at much lower rates with better lifestyles. We’ve seen the return of diseases eliminated since Victorian times like scurvy and rickets.

If we want to keep the NHS, we first have to help people be healthy to reduce demand.

Britain has about the worst diet in Europe. Last year 11,000 people were hospitalised with malnutrition. Over half what is eaten is ultra-processed junk, convenience is king, essential life skills have been lost. Schools don’t teach cooking and we’re into the third generation who’ve never eaten a proper meal, instead subsisting on ready meals and take aways. And that’s expensive. With food prices up even more than overall inflation, it’s never been more important to equip people to make low-cost, nutritious, home prepared meals.

The Government refuses to take action to help people, instead protecting the food industry that’s profiting from our demise. As I shared in Eat Well News last month, Rishi Sunak had the opportunity to clamp down on junk-food BOGOF deals. But he chose – not to. Clearly the NHS isn’t a priority for him. Or the health of the UK population.

The UK Eat Well Guide encourages rubbish diets that are nutrient deficient and high in processed food.

High streets are full of c*%p

Time to turn your back on what’s causing the harm and nourish yourself to good health.

Top tip:

. . . Prevention is better than cure.

. . . . . Help the NHS.

. . . . . . . Learn to Eat Well.

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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.’

 

Muscle, Exercise and Protein

Muscle

One of the things I love over Christmas and New Year is watching The World’s Strongest Man contest. It’s brilliant to see these guys carrying cars and tossing kegs.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon did a podcast with Dr Rangan Chatterjee and said that if we gain more muscle, we can protect our skeleton, improve mobility and balance, burn more fat, lower our risk of disease, increase our energy levels and live longer, better lives.

The WHO definition of healthy ageing is “to retain functional independence”.  So it’s the strength rather than the size of muscles  that matters and the new drugs that only increase muscle mass do not bring benefits.

Ageing

Our muscle mass reaches its peak in our mid-30s and then goes down by about 1% per year. For over 60s, it’s been found (WHO) that the death rate is halved in the strongest 1/3 of the population. If you didn’t get an exercise habit when you were young, it becomes more and more important as you get older.

Muscles store energy as glycogen, a type of sugar. With less muscle, there’s less storage space for sugar and this can change your metabolism making insulin resistance and diabetes worse. Muscles also burn energy all the time even when you’re resting, so increasing your muscle is great for weight loss.

Hospitalization presents another danger. 10 days of bed rest causes a muscle loss of 2% in a young person but 10% in an elderly person. That’s 10 years of muscle loss in just over a week – and very hard to get back. Accelerated muscle loss in the elderly is called sarcopenia and is a cause of frailty, falls and death.

Exercise

Even though muscle is important in so many ways, weight training remains much less popular than aerobic exercise. Gyms can put people off – the costs, the equipment, the other people that go there…(!)… Luckily, it’s easy enough to do resistance training at home, either with some simple hand weights (eg dumbbells, tins or bottles) or your body weight (eg press-ups, lunges and squats).

Large weights put people off and can cause injury. Fortunately you can get a similar benefit by using small weights and doing the exercises very slowly. Women worry about getting big muscles but it’s very unlikely. I’ve been weight training for 40 years and my upper arms still measure only 10″ (25cm) like they always have.

Best of all is to do a mix of exercise types. Gabrielle recommends resistance training at least four days a week plus high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Dan John suggests everyone >50 should check that they’re able to stand on one foot for 10 seconds, so a 30-sec deep squat, hang from a bar for 30s, get off the ground without using their hands and do a 5 foot standing long jump. Brendan Egan recommends 2 sessions of strength work and 3 sessions of aerobic a week plus stretching/flexibility – I once heard Donny Osmond say, “as you get older it’s important to stay limber.”

Another big hazard is sitting for long periods. Just stand up every 20-30 minutes to engage with gravity – it’s called non-exercise movement (see Joan Vernikos, Sitting Kills) and brings big benefits for something so simple.

Brendan concluded from his studies that it’s never too late to start exercising and everyone can gain strength. Find a gym or personal trainer to advise you if you’ve never done it before or look at YouTube and people like Joe Wicks. Anything you do is good and if you start doing more than you’ve been doing before, that’s great so have a go and feel good about getting moving.

Protein

We all need protein, and not just for building muscles. Protein is made of amino acids and these building blocks are also essential for making your bones, enzymes and hormones. There are ways of calculating how much you need if you’re willing to go to the trouble. Dr Stuart Phillips believes the sweet spot is ~1.2g of protein per kg of body weight. The modern carb-heavy diet mean we get little protein except in the evening meal.

I encourage people to include three things in every meal: plants, proteins and fats. Most breakfasts are not much more than sugar and really class as deserts so it’s the meal with most scope for improvement eg by adding some egg, ham or fish. In Norway they serve herrings done 3 ways. This morning I had mackerel (protein) with half a pear (plant), some seeds (fat) and half a slice of buttered (fat) toast.

If you don’t want protein in your breakfast, you could add more to your lunch, like this salad. There’s a threshold of about 20g to trigger muscle building (3 eggs or a couple of ounces of meat). In studies of older adults, protein and exercise, Brendan Egan found the key amino acid is leucine (whey is a good source) and that omega 3 fats increase the effect suggesting that animal proteins are better. On the other hand I just saw a pubmed abstract of a 10-week study showing similar results from exercise with plant only or mixed omnivorous protein.

There’s no need to go mad though. If you eat more protein than you need, or you eat it without exercising, your body will turn it into carbohydrate and burn it or turn it into fat, which is a waste of such a high quality food when we all get more than enough carbohydrate already.

Older people will need more protein in each meal just to meet their basic needs. Appetite decreases with age often leaving people getting too little. At the same time, absorption decreases so it’s a double whammy.

When trying to build or retain muscle, timing matters too. Brendan’s trials found that eating a high-protein snack 20 minutes after exercising is best. After 2h the muscle-building effect is lost.

Bonus Nutrients

Protein source foods bring other valuable nutrients with them and the type matters as well as the amount. Animals fed on grass produce superior fatty acid profiles to animals kept indoors and fed on grains and soya. If you don’t eat animal foods you are probably deficient in vitamin B12, iron, sulphur, creatine, carnosine, taurine, long chain omega 3 fats (EPA and DHA), collagen and conjugated linoleic acid. There are supplements available. Fake meats should be avoided by everyone. They usually contain high levels of harmful omega 6 fats as well as chemicals (not necessarily listed on the label) to make them look and taste fit to eat.  As always, eat real food.

Top tip – Do resistance exercise and include protein in your meals.

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