Diet – A Horizon Guide
I try not to be too controversial in my blog and am always leaning towards a sense of balance. However I will not stop asking uncomfortable questions which leads me to the Horizon programme – Diet – A horizon guide. Two thirds of this programme was brilliant and completely spot on with the incoming industrialisation of food after the war which led to quantity over quality food being produced. Nutrients were stripped out, pesticides used as increasingly it looked like we would run out of food unless we produced it in this way. My problem came with the astonishing lack of accountability that this kind of farming has had on not only our food industry but also our waistline. I guess they dont want to put the blame anywhere so its now down to the consumer to help themselves. The huge rise in saturated fat and sugar, and in particularly in the US where cheap corn syrup is used to sweeten so much of their food has a lot to blame for this greedy society – because much of it not only changes our brain chemistry but much of it can also be highly addictive. So who is to blame for the problem? Interesting question? Perhaps a little of both – industrial farming and the individual certainly and yet GlaxosmithKline was then interviewed as the saviour of the future in producing a drug that could help it all go away. I’m glossing over the finer details here but basically arent the groups of people who assisted in the problem in the first place now giving us a solution to the problem they created.
It is crucial to remember that it is not how much you eat but what you eat. We are constantly being brainwashed the other way. The very obese people I see who say I eat nothing and put on a pound…… Well thats true, they hardly eat anything – but what they eat can be horrific. Generally when they eat much more of the right food the weight drops off. Let me give you an example.
Last year I saw last a woman of 5 ft 2″ who weighed 19 stone. She was obese. Her daily diet consisted of 8 black coffees, 2 chocolate bars, a bowl of cornflakes and a sandwich – she never ate supper. Her calorie intake was actually quite low. Taking her off black coffee alone made her shed 2 stone (yes! and I’m not making this up). She was retaining fluid (she drank NO water). Eating five small meals a day – high in omega 3, fibre, and low GI, organic and pesticide free gave her a 7 stone loss in weight in a year. My point is that she had tried every single diet you can think of, every single diet that promised so much and failed to deliver and then…..
she stopped dieting and lost the weight.
Going back to the horizon programme where obese women were being filmed as saying they ate nothing and yet couldnt lose the weight – I’m sorry but I would have loved to have seen a weeks food diary of what these women were eating. People are individuals but still many have no concept of how to lose weight and its different for every single person I see. Many obese people actually are suffering from malnutrition and by this I mean if you test their mineral and vitamin status its poor, so often breaking down food doesnt happen so readily. I’ve even seen scurvy in a 19 yr old boy and he was a normal weight.
To lose weight you need to ditch the additives, the pesticides, the sweeteners, the black coffee, the foods that make you bloat, assess other health problems you have, balance your hormones, remove ALL processed food, stabilize your blood sugar, increase your good fat levels, understand labelling, get rid of intolerances or allergies you have, get your thyroid tested….and so on…
quite a feat to do this by yourself unless you really know what you are doing, which is why so many people fail!
