Sweet Enough Already - Why I'm Cutting My Sugar Intake

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!

Photo Cred

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. 

Photo Cred

My Journey

This is my first blog post! I have to say it’s extremely daunting to actually put this online but it’s something I have thought about doing for a while and I’m going to give it a try! Honestly, I don’t expect anyone to read my blog but if someone does then great! I really hope you enjoy it!

There are two reasons why I decided to start a blog, the first being that I love to write and the second is that I really want to start looking after myself. At the moment I’m working as a research engineer and part of that involves writing papers to publish your findings. I complain a lot about this part of my work, but secretly I love it! I find that it helps me to understand my work so much more, you can’t write something down and then present it as fact without being 100% confident in it. So you end up spending an awful lot of time just reading around the topic to make certain that you know exactly what it is you’re talking about! This brings me on to the second reason for starting a blog – I really want to start looking after myself, but I haven’t a clue what I’m doing!! I want to lose some weight, get fit, eat right and take care of my skin and hair (who doesn’t?). A year ago, I had gotten very unfit and my clothes were either really tight or didn’t fit, my skin was starting to look dull, my hair…we won’t even go there… and I ended up being quite unhappy with myself. As well as that, I was often tired, had no energy and found it hard to concentrate. So, to try and make a change for a better me, I hopped right onto the health and fitness bandwagon and promptly fell right back off! I tried this a few times but it never seemed to stick and I couldn’t understand why. I blamed myself for having no will-power but this isn’t me; when I put my mind to something there’s usually no stopping me! So why couldn’t I get the results I wanted even though I was so determined? 

Photo cred: Sparkpeople