I remember, with horror, my days as a
Carbo Crashing Junkie (CCJ) when I ate the standard “healthy”
diet prescribed by practitioners throughout the western (entire?)
world, full of “healthy whole grains.” A diet, I now recognize
in retrospect was loaded with calorie dense, highly glycemic and
highly palatable (read, you eat more and more and more) food
guaranteed to, among other ills, cause metabolic syndrome. There is
no doubt that, like trickle down economics, the standard western diet
has failed miserably at achieving a healthy population. Rates of
obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart disease and more, are
now endemic in the western world, affecting at least two thirds of
the population base.
The standard advice to exercise more
and lose weight through a low fat calorie controlled diet is doomed
to failure when the standard diet, focusing as it does on
carbohydrate dense foods serves only to make people hungrier and
hungrier as insulin spikes, then falls, then spikes again. The only
answer is to reduce the amount of carbohydrate in the diet,
particularly calorie dense carbohydrates that are promoted as a
weight loss strategy by well intentioned but clueless practitioners.
Here in Australia, fatness is epic. I
rarely see a slim Australian. What I do see are Australians whose
entire diet is composed of various grains (in all their myriad forms,
from breads to pastas to rice to noodles), calorie dense but nutrient
poor starchy vegetables (the ubiquitous white potato), and an excess
of treats. I am astonished at the amount of biscuits, cakes, pies,
ice-creams, muffins, and other goodies that Australians eat. A treat
is “an event that is out of the ordinary and gives great pleasure”,
all those treats should be just that, treats, eaten sparingly, not at
every snack and every meal. Even in my days as an unenlightened CCJ,
I only ate treats sparingly, like one biscuit or a small serving of
ice-cream per day.
Here in Oz, breakfast is some calorie
dense, carbohydrate junk (frequently advertised under the “healthy
whole grain” logo), followed by biscuits and cake for morning tea,
capped a couple of hours later with some other calorie dense,
carbohydrate crap (a thin slice of lettuce or tomato might accompany
the “meal”). Then, as blood sugar inevitably crashes two hours
later, some more biscuits, muffins, ice-creams, are consumed,
followed in a brief two hours by dinner with, no doubt, white potato,
rice, noodles, and possibly a very small amount of green vegetables.
It makes me crazy to watch. Some
people seem to get away with it and are not too grossly obese, just
mildly plump, others are big as buses. What they all share, plump
and obese, is weight around the midsection, one of the cardinal signs
of metabolic syndrome and the worst possible place to carry excess
weight. The absolute disregard for their own health appals me. I
worry about just sitting an excess amount of time on days when I
can't be moving around all the time or missing my regular yoga
session; these people are slowly (?rapidly) killing themselves and
they don't care.
Some days I just want to scream at them
all 'EAT REAL FOOD!'
Protein powered, tucking in to bacon and eggs before a ski day
at the Caribou Cabin
