I am not a dietician. I am not a nutritionist. I am no Doctor,
personal trainer, chemist or professional in the food industry. I am merely
someone who cares a lot about food, weight, health and learning about these
topics.
I like to research these issues because; at the end of the day;
it’s what helps me to keep my weight down, as well as that of my wife and
child. If what I learn along the way can help other people to achieve the same
goals then that can’t be a bad thing can it? Just take note that I have already
said I am no professional in any of these fields; im just a guy who has learned
certain things on his journey to a healthier life.
Let me start off properly by saying that I started my journey
weighing in at 96kg on April 24th 2014. I now; 2 days short of the
anniversary of that first weigh in; am at 77kg. I do still have a long way to
go; as I still have a lot more body toning/muscle building to do; but as long
as I can try to maintain a weight around 77-75kg I will continue to be happy
with where I am now in regards to my overall weight.
So what is the point of this blog post, this title, and the
upcoming rant? Well; it’s because of how many times I see; and hear; people
moaning about their weight, punishing themselves with certain diets etc… but
then moaning some more about the fact that they aren’t seeing any differences.
It’s also because I get so annoyed when I see people coming in to my office
workplace; supposedly on said diets; and then cracking open a can of “diet” coke
at eight in the morning. You didn’t read that wrong; EIGHT O’CLOCK in the
morning!
“Oh but it’s diet, it’s low calorie coke!”
It isn’t all about the calorie, or fat quantity, it is the sugar
content, and that isn’t just coke; its everything!
I appreciate; that many people have a generally good diet, but
there are still lots of questions that float around regarding weight loss.
People looking for advice on how to lose those few extra pounds in order to see
the benefit of the exercise they are putting themselves through.
At the end of the day it comes down to what you are putting into
your diet, not how much you are eating, or how little. Yes, obviously, if you
eat a ton of food a day you are going to put weight on, but what you are
actually eating makes a hell of a difference. When I say that you need to pay
attention to what you are eating, I mean seriously that you need to really look
at what you are buying in the shops, and what you are putting into your food.
When you eat is also a major part of weight loss. I eat more now, than I ever
did when I was overweight. I used to eat barely anything throughout the day,
and then stock up on a large meal at night. WRONG! That; it turns out is the
worst thing you can do. Now I eat five times a day; healthy breakfast, snack,
healthy lunch, snack, and then a healthy dinner as early as possible before
bed; and I restrict myself completely from eating anything at all after eight
o’clock at night. Eating regular healthy meals and snacks keeps your body
ticking over, it allows your body to receive a constant source of essential
nutrients which maintain your body functionality; keeps it awake; and keeps it
processing. Eating one or two meals throughout the day allows your body to go
into a hibernation state. It doesn’t allow for the body to continue working, to
continue processing all the different elements that you are putting into it. It
essentially has nothing to do with all that energy you just filled it with, and
so it stores it as fat.
I have known for a while now that a lot of products that are on the
supermarket shelves contain a lot of things that are bad for you. Last night I
watched a documentary on Netflix called Fed Up and if you are interested in
this topic then I strongly suggest you watch it, it is brilliant. Whilst it may
be focused around the American food industry, I still think that a lot of what
goes on over there happens over here too, and it certainly has made me want to
start looking; even more; into the things I put into our food at home.
Anyway, back to the points…
Why do we diet, yet struggle to see any changes? The answer is;
pretty much; because you are not eating the right things. It doesn’t really
matter (in general) that you have chosen the “low cal” or “fat free” option. It
doesn’t matter that you have reduced your full fat coke to a diet, or zero cal
coke. It doesn’t matter that you have changed your meals from pre-packed;
frozen, ready meals for a home cooked meal (though this is your biggest step to
reducing your risk of most heart problems, diabetes risks, and weight gain);
you are still not looking at the biggest problem in food; sugar! Sugar is the
biggest issue in food at the moment, and whilst I already knew that sugar was
bad, after watching Fed Up last night I realised just how bad.
Now, I totally accept that many people will sit there and say that
there are a lot of conspiracy theories out there, and that not everything is as
bad as they say it is. That’s fine, maybe I have one or two points in this
piece that are not 100% accurate; I’ve already said that im no professional in
this field; but ever since I cut sugar out of more than; I would say; roughly
70-80% of my diet, my weight plummeted, and I started to feel a hell of a lot
healthier, coincidence maybe, but I firmly believe that I made the right choice
to start cutting sugar out of the things I eat as much as possible; last night;
watching this documentary; really cemented that theory for me.
“but I don’t buy frozen meals anymore, and I do cook from scratch
now!”; I can hear some people saying these things already, because this is what
I get at work when I talk to people about food during our lunch breaks. These
conversations arise based on people commenting on how healthy my lunches look compared
to theirs.
Maybe you do cook at home now; well done; you are well on your way
to improving your health; but now you need to look at what you are using to
cook with. Is everything you use “clean”? Does it still have sugar in it? I
think that if you start looking at the ingredients and figures on food
packaging you will be shocked.
Are you going to use a jar of sauce for that pasta dish that you
are going to make tonight, or are you going to use some proper; fresh produce
to make your own sauce? I can guarantee you right now that the sauce you make
from scratch will not only taste better, but it will contain a hell of a lot
less sugar than that jar you were going to pop open. Why? Because the jar of
sauce you’re using will have heaps of added sugar on top of the natural sugars
that you will find in the ingredients; whereas the sauce you are making will
have nothing extra added to those natural sugars.
Someone actually tried to argue with me that the apple I was eating
was just as bad as the coke that they were drinking in regards to the sugar
content. This may be true, however; the sugar that is contained within that
coke is just sugar. The sugar that is contained within my apple, or any other
fruit; contains different elements such as different levels of carbohydrates,
fibre and other essential nutrients. These other elements are what help the
body to create insulin, which is needed to turn the sugars into glucose, which
is then absorbed into the body and used up as energy. The coke does not contain
these added essential nutrients, the sugar stays as sugar, and the body stores
it as fat!
Today someone in the office is celebrating their birthday, they
have brought a number of yummy, sugary treats into the office. I stood with a
colleague who eagerly chomped down on one of the yumyums from ASDA that were on
the table; I used to love yumyums; I stood and ate my apple.
“Just have one!” she said, “it won’t kill you to treat yourself!”
“actually, given the fact that I am not running anywhere near the
amount, or distance, that I would normally be covering at the moment, having
one of those will do more damage than you think!”
It isn’t that it would have killed me to have one of the treats,
it’s the fact that the sugar would make me want more. Having the will power to
just say no to it is the biggest effort I think. The minute that you allow
yourself to slip; at a time where you wouldn’t normally slip; is where the
slope heads downwards. I am not saying that I don’t treat myself at all, hell,
I had a bowl of ice cream last night, with two teaspoons of crunchy peanut
butter mixed into it, because I know that at that time it isn’t going to cause
me a problem. I wasn’t going to sit there craving another bowl of ice cream,
but if I am sat at work, knowing that there are treats in the canteen calling
my name, and I tease my taste buds with that sugariness, I am going to want to
go back time and time again looking for more, because I will be able to. One
treat may not be too bad, but five, six, or seven most certainly will.
I do also appreciate that many people will sit here saying that
they simply do not have the time to cook things from total scratch; or that
they can’t afford to buy fresh products all the time like that, or even the
worst; that they don’t know enough about cooking to enable them to do so. I
know that these questions will be floating around because I used to say things
like this to myself.
I don’t have time. You will be surprised at just how
much time you actually do have. Maybe stop watching much of the tele that you
sit through and go into the kitchen and try something new. You could even try
going to bed a little earlier so that you can wake up earlier, you will be
amazed at just how much you get done when you get out of bed earlier than
normal. Please don’t come back at me with the old fave “im not a morning
person”, that just winds me up. My wife hates mornings, but once woke up at
about the same time I went to work; this never happens. When I got home from
work that night she couldn’t stop banging on about how much work she had
managed to get done around the house, and then had loads of time left on her
hands to do whatever she wanted; funny that!
I can’t afford fresh produce all the time. I totally empathise with this statement as
this was the game changer for me. I always used to think that fresh produce
cost so much more than pre-packed goods. If you actually shop around you really
will be amazed at what you will find. My wife uses an online shopping website;
I can’t remember the name unfortunately; that allows you to input your shopping
items, it then sorts out the best deals between the different retailers and
shoes you where sells what for the best prices. We end up using one of the
major retailers for our household items; and frozen goods such as mixed veg,
peas, meat etc…; more than the others purely because they always come out on
top by nearly £30-£40 on average, I won’t mention which store this is purely in
the interest of remaining impartial. I then remove that amount spent in the
online shop from the overall monthly shopping budget that I have sorted from
the household earning. The difference of the online shop and the monthly budget
is then split equally across the rest of the month into a weekly budget. I then
go to different nearby stores on a Saturday morning and purchase our fresh
produce, fruits, certain veg like courgettes, butternut squash, kale, lettuce
etc etc etc… things that you wouldn’t normally put in the freezer, but can’t be
kept for very long periods of time due to how quickly they are used. I have
managed to bring our grocery shopping down to an average spend of £200 a month,
and given that we are a single earning household I don’t think that is too bad
at all. I think we do even better when people tell me that they spend
approximately £100-£150 a week, and we eat better than them! £100-£150 A
WEEK!!!! Jesus, im in the wrong sodding job! It is literally all about being
aware of the options available to you, making sure you don’t get sucked in to
the marketing ploys that are out there.
I stopped a bloke in a shop the other day because I saw him about
to fall for one of the biggest jokes I’ve ever seen in a store; again I won’t
say which one. In this store they have different Nandos’ bottled sauces, I
don’t know the exact sizes but one selection of bottles are small; let’s say
75ml; whilst the others are large; let’s say 200ml. One or two of the flavours
are the same, but most of them are different. The prices for all variations;
flavours, sizes etc? £1.99 per bottle. Now, know that when it comes to the
different flavours between the bottles, yes, I may want to get the smaller
option because it doesn’t have a larger bottled option, but I am certainly
going to pick the bigger bottle if the flavours are the same, and I will
certainly consider changing the flavour option to the bigger bottle rather than
paying the same price for a bottle that is half the size just because it’s a
specific flavour. Bear in mind though, this would only be a treat situation too
as I wouldn’t normally buy bottled sauces anymore ;) my point is that people
don’t pay attention to what their buying, they see a different coloured price
tag, or a different font, and BANG, it must be a good deal, not always. You may
think I have no place in stopping a complete stranger and pointing out that
they could be saving themselves some money, or getting a better deal, I like to
help people, and the bloke I stopped was not only amazed at the comparison, but
also very thankful that I had pointed it out to him.
And finally; the classic; I don’t know how to cook well enough
to cook from scratch! Well; simply put; learn. People often tell me that
they find cooking boring, fair enough, if you find it boring, you find it
boring, I cannot change that, but have you tried? Or have you made yourself
believe that it is boring because you are not willing to try and learn new
things? Personally I find cooking extremely rewarding, therapeutic and fun. You
can include the entire family in it, or you can do it on your own. And at the
end of it, you either come out with something extremely nice that you have made
all by yourself, from scratch, OR, you made something that isn’t that great;
but hey; let’s try and see what happens if I change this ingredient for this
instead, and see if that changes the flavour for a better one? I read cook
books, I watch cookery shows which help me to learn new things. Fair enough I
had a lot of help to know the basics because my mom was a damn good home cook
who included me in a lot of the cooking, because I showed an interest; and my
dad has been in the hotel/catering industry his entire life which meant that he
showed me a broader variety of international cuisines. The point is that
cooking is something that everyone; especially those wanting to improve health
and weight etc…; should really give more time to in order to be able to monitor
what it is that you are putting into your body.
At the end of the day, the more fresh produce you put into your
body, the more you will start to regulate the sugar content that is going in to
your diet. I am not perfect, I am not claiming that I am, nor that I think I am
better than anybody else. I still snack, I still buy certain products from time
to time that I know are not great for me, but I don’t make it a habit, and I
certainly don’t sit there wondering why I put a few extra pounds on in a week
where I helped myself to a bowl of ice cream three or four times in that week.
We don’t buy ice cream every week, we had some because I made a fresh apple
crumble for pudding after a Sunday roast where my dad paid us a visit, the
first time we have seen him since Christmas.
I am sorry if anything I say comes across as a high and mighty;
wannabe statement; or even if you think that I should just keep my thoughts to
myself. If you think that that is fine; but there are people out there who
don’t know what to do; who do ask certain questions. People who do genuinely appreciate other people speaking out,
or pointing out specific things. I am not trying to say that anybody is wrong
in the way they live their lives, just that maybe they are missing a few things
that can aide them in their quest for healthier living.
I like to help people, knowing that someone was able to improve
something in their lives because of something you said, or wrote, or did, is the
best feeling in the world.
And also please accept, that I would not make any of the comments,
or statements I have above, if I hadn’t actually experienced, or practiced
any of it. I try to live my life as best I can, and am always tweaking things here and there based on new pieces of information that I learn along the way.
I hope that you have read this as an informative piece of writing,
and not just some oddball rant.
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