As January draws to a close, so too will many new year’s resolutions be wavering. In fact, around 80% of peoples’ resolutions will have failed by the second week of February. One of the most common ones will be to go on a diet and to join the gym. January accounts for around 12% of gym applications but most will have completely stopped after about 24 weeks. Even worse, around 87% of diets will have already failed by the 12th.
While I think the use of new year’s resolutions to kick start such health drives is a positive thing, there is so much information around, particularly online and largely unregulated, that may render those well intentioned efforts fruitless, quite literally.
Dieting is nothing new. At the beginning of the 20th Century, people turned to eating tapeworms to help them with weight loss – that is until they started getting intestinal cysts, meningitis and seizures. For some reason, during the 1930s and again in the 1970s, it became popular to eat half a grapefruit with every meal in the hope that the scales would become more complimentary. In the 1800s, apple-cider vinegar was added to water (apparently popularized by Lord Byron) and in the 1960s, a ‘drinking man’s diet’ emerged which consisted of eating lots of meat and washing it all down with alcohol, even at breakfast.
The purpose of all of these, you will notice, will have been to lose weight. I suspect now, if you asked most people why they go on a diet or go to the gym, it will be ‘to lose weight’ or ‘to look better’. We have an ideal body shape these days which is endlessly highlighted through online and social media. There is a huge pressure for us to look right.
Arguably, this has been with us for a long time. One only has to look at the statues from ancient Greece and Michelangelo’s famous statue of David in Florence to see the template for the ideal build and shape of a human that has persevered ever since.
Not reaching that ideal puts huge pressure on our mental health. The trouble is, achieving it is getting harder and harder with the choices and options available to us, both in the modern diet and our increasingly sedentary lifestyles.
In the UK, 29% of adults are classed as obese, as are 20% of year 6 children. It is thought that around 10,660 admissions to hospital each year are directly attributable to obesity. Thus the importance of controlling weight and fitness is not just about looking right.
All too often, people choose to make their lifestyle changes after something has happened – if they are lucky enough to do so – at which point the aims change from honing their body image to things like reducing blood pressure, preventing or controlling diabetes, treating depression, and lowering the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Ultimately, all of this is achievable, but not through the short term fad diets that are so popular in the consumer market of today.
Let’s look for a moment at the physiology of our body and its energy supply. We need energy to live, that much is obvious. That means every cell of the body, in order to function, needs a supply of energy. This comes from our diets which can broadly be split into three categories: fats, carbohydrates and proteins. The majority of our energy comes from fat and carbohydrates. Fat is too large to be absorbed into the blood stream on its own, so when we eat it, it is broken down in the gut to form fatty acids and glycerol so it can be absorbed.
Fat is mainly stored in the liver and in the subcutaneous (skin) tissue. It can also accumulate around internal organs (visceral fat). When we are not eating and need energy, we draw on these stores to power our bodies, a process kick started by a drop in insulin levels. This will also bring into play the sugars stored around our body, again largely in the liver, in the form of glycogen. A drop in insulin will convert this glycogen into glucose and the fat into fatty acids and glycerol once more, which can then race around the body to power things.
As we eat, insulin levels rise. This encourages cells to take up glucose as a source of energy in the short term, but also promotes a reversal of the process above and stimulates the storage of all of the new energy we are ingesting so we can use it later.
Put simply, our weight is governed by the rate at which we store the energy from the foods we eat against the rate at which we use that energy.
Energy is measured in calories and one calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of water by 1 degree Celsius or 4.184 joules. 1,000 calories is equivalent to 1 kilocalorie and it is kilocalories that we see on the sides of our food packaging.
Hopefully therefore it should be fairly clear that, in order to maximise our health, there is a need for both healthy intake of food and an active, energy burning lifestyle. If not, then our weight will suffer along with a lot of other things. The heaviest man ever recorded weighed in at around 635kg (99 stone) – about the weight of an American Bison. In the UK, the record stands at 444kg (70 stone) – the weight of the average Moose.
Our intake of fats should be around 30% of what we eat. Any more and it can build up in our bodies and cause problems, for example high cholesterol, heart disease and obesity.
In the same way, getting all of our energy from carbohydrates (sugars) is not the answer either, as this can reduce our body’s sensitivity to insulin and cause diabetes. In a cruel twist, excess sugar can also be converted to fat anyway.
We all lament the fact that, in general, the foods that are bad for us are the ones that taste nice. The key, as I suspect you have heard many times over, is balance. This is not repeated for the sake of it but because it is truly important. Many modern diets will hinge on cutting out whole areas of energy – for example the Atkins diet and its dislike for carbohydrates. While this can result in fast initial loss in weight, it falls down in many other areas. If one cuts out an entire food group, one loses the benefits of the foods within that group. If you cut out carbohydrates, you’re cutting out a tremendous source of fibre, vital for gut health and a healthy microbiome. It is also likely you are depriving yourself of the many vitamins and minerals contained within those foods that your body needs. Longer term it falls short and, perhaps most important of all, it is not sustainable.
This brings me to my most important point. If you want to be healthier, reduce your risk of heart disease and diabetes, look better, feel better, lose weight, or whatever your goal, you need to make a permanent and sustainable change to your diet and lifestyle and avoid something that is unrealistic. If you say that you are going to the gym every day but one having not been for the past 5 years, it won’t work. Likewise, if you say you will cut out fat completely from your diet forever, it won’t work.
That’s not to say that making a change won’t be difficult but crucially, if you do it in the right way, it is something your body will eventually assimilate as the norm.
So…
- Prepare your food for the week ahead and don’t shop while you’re hungry. If that chocolate bar is in the cupboard, you’ll eat it!
- Join a gym, club or class but make your activity levels fun and sustainable so you aren’t put off it.
- Watch out for portion size.
- Use brown rice, brown bread and brown pasta
- Avoid saturated fats and eat more polyunsaturated fats and cooking oils.
- Plenty of fruit and vegetables
- Set goals and guidelines to stay within
- Eat 3 main meals a day and snack only on nuts and seeds (a tricky one but very important)
- Drink 6-8 glasses of water a day
- Reduce your alcohol intake
- Stop smoking!
Good luck!
