Last week I posted about my exercise goals. I had intended to follow it up fairly quickly with a post on what I am aiming for in terms of healthy eating but work got the better of me during the week and I'm only getting around to this post now!
A couple of days before I started this blog, I watched a documentary on Netflix called "Fed Up". Believe me when I say that this documentary changed my life! Now, I have been known to exaggerate from time to time, but this is nothing short of the truth! Fed Up is a documentary on the obesity problem in the US, specifically among young children. They begin by comparing the level of obesity in American children today (1 in 5) to 40 years ago (1 in 20). The number of cases of type 2 diabetes in children in the US today (almost 60,000) was also compared to 40 years ago (0). They also showed a surprising link between the rise in the number of people joining gyms and the number of obese people. Surely if one goes up, the other must go down? This is slightly reminiscent of my own problems with losing weight in the past, that I spoke about in my first blog post - I was eating what I perceived to be healthy food and exercising so why wasn't I seeing a change? With people becoming increasingly interested in losing weight in the 70's and 80's, companies began to introduce more and more "low-fat" and "zero-calorie" products to the market. But, if you remove the fat from food you're also removing the flavour, and companies compensated for this by adding more sugar.
The problem with sugar is that it is absorbed into the blood stream quickly causing a sharp increase in blood sugar levels. The rise is dealt with by the release of insulin which tells the body to store this energy as fat. Insulin also blocks the hormone that tells us we are full. Over time, the body can become insulin resistant and more susceptible to getting Type-II diabetes, heart-disease and strokes. Essentially, sugar is not only making us fat, it's making us sick! Sugar is also addictive and can be found in abundance in some seemingly healthy products: yoghurts, beans, cereals, granola bars, pasta sauces etc. Some of these products are even marketed towards children, meaning that from a young age we are hooked and a sugar addiction is extremely difficult to kick. The harsh reality though is that sugar is a billion dollar industry, meaning that it is very difficult for governments and the World Health Organisation (WHO) to introduce regulations to limit sugar intake because of the power of money!
I could write for hours about this documentary but I won't as I don't want to take away from anyone who wants to watch it. This is an amazing documentary and if you can, I recommend you give it a watch, nothing has ever compelled me more to change the way I eat. From watching this documentary I have been inspired to try and adopt much healthier eating habits. So how much sugar should we be eating? It is recommended that sugar make up less than 10% of your daily calorie intake. So, if you consume 2000 calories in a day, that means at most 200 of those calories should be from sugar. There is approximately 4 calories in each gram of sugar so that would mean a maximum of 50g of sugar. That seems like a lot but if you consider that there is 33g of sugar in a can of coke, it's very easy to exceed this daily maximum. WHO however recommends that sugar intake should be less than 5% of your calorie intake meaning that women should not consume more than 25g of sugar a day and men should not consume more than 35g of sugar a day.
So how can we make a change to our diet to avoid the (literally) sickeningly sweet foods? The first thing to address is calories. Many people believe that if you balance your calorie intake and output you will not gain weight, and if you create a deficit you will lose weight. This may be effective in some cases and not work at all in others. The reason for this is that not all calories are created equal. A useful rule of thumb to decide if you are getting the best from the calories you consume is to consider the caloric density of the food: divide the number of calories per serving by the number of grams per serving. Most fruits and vegetables have a value below one, meats, cheeses etc. will range from one to three, and if the caloric density is higher than three put it back on the shelf!
But, if we take a diet fizzy drink, for example, that will have a caloric density much lower than one, suggesting you can have as much as you like, right? Wrong! Diet fizzy drinks have no calories but the artificial sweeteners cause your body to act in the same way it would as if it had consumed a caloric drink by triggering a spike in blood sugar and a release of insulin. So, another important rule when deciding what to eat is to read the list of ingredients; if it's really long or you don't recognise the names of some of the ingredients, put it back! Also, an important point about sugar in fruit is that when the sugar is accompanied by fibre (when it is consumed as part of the fruit) this sugar is absorbed into the blood stream much slower than if you consumed the fruit as a juice where the fibre has been broken up. So be careful to get your 5-a-day mostly from vegetables, partially from fruit and never from fruit juices or smoothies.
Basically, the rules to eating right can be summed up pretty easily:
If it needs an ad on tv to sell it, don't eat it.
What you'll find is that these rules eliminate about 50-75% of the contents of the supermarket! I was appalled when I did my food shop last weekend by just how much sugar is in the supermarkets. I have to say I found it difficult to do the shopping, but all it takes is a little bit of planning and you could be on the way to a healthier and happier you! I will be posting next weekend about what I ate this week and how I found the week with a much reduced sugar intake. Fingers crossed that it goes well!!
I hope you enjoyed reading this post. My eyes have been opened by watching the documentary "Fed Up" so I seriously recommend giving it a watch. This blog is my way of learning all I need to know to improve my lifestyle, so if anyone has any tips or advice I would love to hear from you!
Niamh x
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