Diets – there are thousands of them and it seems there’s a new miracle one coming out every second day.
Atkins, Grapefruit, Cleansing, Paleo, Israeli Army – the list is endless.
Most involve a significant change to your lifestyle, eating habits and require things like measuring calories, calculating carbs, weighing portion sizes and then avoiding particular combinations so you can’t have protein with carbs or sugars with carbs or carbs with carbs and other obscure and arcane rituals.
Invariably they don’t work.
The main reason they don’t work is people stay on them for a period of time and get bored, frustrated, hungry, socially isolated and so give up and go back to what they were eating before.
When that happens the body, being very clever, decides that this on-off, up-down input of nutrients is so erratic it starts to store whatever it can, whenever it can and that is usually in the form of fat (for some weird reason the body doesn’t decide to store extra nutrients as muscle or nerve tissue – clearly a design fault).
Now, when I say “nutrients” I’m being generous.
Most of what get’s passed off as food these days has more in common with a chemistry experiment than a source of nutrition.
Have you read the list of ingredients from a common food item lately?
I suspect you have because that’s an obligatory ritual in just about every diet known to man (and woman).
A useful thing to know, or so I’m reliably informed, is that the order of ingredients on a package reflects the quantity of the ingredients.
Here’s a simple test – grab an item from your pantry, any item, and check out the ingredient list.
If it’s a manufactured item I’ll bet that the first ingredient is sugar.
It’s fascinating, and scary, to investigate the origins of the so-called foods of today.
I had a recent visit to my doctor and we had a lovely time discussing where things came from.
For example:
– fluoridation of the water supply. Sodium fluoride is the chemical added to drinking water to improve the resistance of teeth in children to tooth decay. It is also a by-product (or waste product) of the aluminium industry. They found a way to make an extra sale from the aluminium by selling their waste to councils and water authorities. By-the-way, it also increases bone brittleness in the elderly but hey, what’s a few broken bones when you can keep kids on sugar (the major contributor to tooth decay).
– margarine was originally invented as a substitute for candle wax. Once it was realised there was no market for a candle wax replacement they decided to add yellow colouring and sell it as a replacement for butter, which co-incidently, was no good for you because it contained animal fat.
– the food pyramid, which many people use as their nutritional bible (lots of grains making up the base of the pyramid) was originally developed by the grain board, as a marketing ploy. My doctor’s observation was that people who follow the food pyramid guidelines are becoming more and more obese.
Interestingly, as we come up with more products which purport to be food but are really the output of laboratories of huge corporations we are also seeing an increase in obesity, child allergies and other ‘diseases of modern society’.
OK, so you know all this – I get it, that I’m ‘preaching to the converted’.
But what can you do about it?
How do you get off this perpetual hamster-wheel of trying to have a diet which works for you, gives you the nutrients you need and lets you enjoy a long and healthy life.
You can, of course, follow a new set of dietary guidelines by having organic food, free-range eggs (yes, eggs are now back on the ‘good’ list), becoming vegan and more.
For my thinking these are all good things and may be appropriate to aspire to, but should only be practiced by more advanced initiates of the sublime art of being a conscious eater.
So how to get started in an easy and simple way?
There are two rules (and only two rules) which you need to pay attention to:
– eat food which comes FROM a plant and is not made IN a plant
– 80% of your shopping should consist of GST free items
There’s not a lot I’m grateful to John Howard for, but he did get it right when he excluded unprocessed, basic foods from the products which carry GST.
So, when you collect your docket at the supermarket check to see which items have GST applying to them.
Next time around, don’t buy those items.
Of course, there will be a selection of things which are available like your dish cloths, matches and so on which do have GST, and these can be excluded for the list.
But, if what you put in your mouth has GST then it’s time to look for something else to eat.
And on that note – have a lovely dinner 🙂