Category Archives: Health

We Are All On A Diet

21 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in Food, Health, Life

≈ 1 Comment

‘What diet are you following?’ I hear someone ask another lady the other day.

‘The ITG diet.’

‘Wow, you’ve really lost a lot of weight.  You look amazing.’

‘Thanks.  I’ve tried everything, but I always seem to put the weight back on as soon as I come off the diet.’

How many times have you heard this?  Quite a few, I bet.  Well, to be honest, so have I.  Not specifically the ITG diet, though the story above is true, but all kinds of different ones.  The Atkins, Miami Beach, Vitamin B Shot – the list goes on.  Many people swear by each of them.  However, I have seen what it does to those who know and understand little about food.  Their weight goes down and up like a yo-yo that never breaks momentum. It is heart-breaking to watch, and I’ll tell you why. While it is not good for anyone’s body weight to change so dramatically so many times, it surely cannot be good for anyone’s mind either. The stress of battling with how your body looks has got to be psychologically damaging, and all for whose benefit? The people making money off you, perhaps?

I trained as a chef eighteen years ago and know a bit about food and how it affects the body. Many friends and acquaintances have sought me out for my expertise and opinion, including those who are wanting to become healthier. What’s disturbing to me is when people assume that, because I am slim (ok, skinny), it means that I am eating ‘diet’ food. I use the term ‘diet’ here to mean low fat, low sugar, low sodium, and so.

I can’t tell you the amount of times people want me to give them a cookie recipe using no sugar and no dairy (and not because they are lactose intolerant, by the way), or a dessert recipe that has no fat and no sugar, including ice-cream! Again, I do not include anyone who has allergies in this equation. Don’t get me wrong, I will cut down on the sugar content in the majority of the desserts I make – cookies, cakes, ice cream, but not at the expense of disrupting the chemistry of the recipe. For meringue to come out perfectly, it really does need the exact amount of white sugar required – 4 tablespoons per egg white (provided it is not a small egg). And, FYI, I am definitely not going to use aspartame, saccharine, nor any other form of fake sugar. I cut down on sugar because I don’t want something to taste so sweet. I also won’t compromise my dish if eggs are in the recipes – sorry, but they go in, and if butter is asked for, it goes in, and so on. I am not going to use partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. I am not going to use that substitute for butter they sell in the supermarket, because it really is no substitute for butter, and it certainly is not healthier. I am not going to use low-fat cheese, low-fat yogurt, or anything that claims to be low-fat. If they took the fat out of something which was supposed to have fat, they have probably added something that is not healthy, or worse, not supposed to be eaten! If you come and ask me for a low-fat solution to a cookie, or to a cupcake, I’m going to tell you to go and eat some carrot and celery sticks, I’m afraid.

The key to eating healthily is to eat everything in moderation. Sure, sure, you all know this. You’ve all said it before, or at least heard it before. The question is, do you practice it? Are you quite sure this is the case? There is nothing wrong with indulging on popcorn, pizza, chicken wings, wine and dessert one night, provided you’re not doing it all the time. Providing you are getting a good range of vegetables, fruits, ground provisions and proteins the rest of the time.

The truth is, losing weight is a numbers game. It is a numbers game when it comes to calories consumed – in order to lose weight, you must burn more energy than you are consuming. And it is a numbers game when it comes to your blood and tissue chemistry and overall health, so it is imperative that you keep that diet balanced, to ensure you are still getting all the nutrients you are supposed to get. Giving up an entire food group will not achieve this, though it might make you shed pounds. I know, they make shakes to make up for the omission of some nutrients in one of these ‘diets’, but please be wary of these. Not everything in these shakes is always good for you. The concentration of certain nutrients might be unbalanced, particularly in relation to the other nutrients.

So the next time you decide that you need to go on a diet, please remember that we are all on a diet of some kind. I just believe that my non-diet diet is the best kind of them all.

Even Your Kid Will Eat Healthily If He/She Is Hungry

17 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Children, Food, Health, Humour

≈ 4 Comments

Several weeks ago, I was asked to give a talk to the kids in my eldest son’s class about healthy eating.  I suggested that along with speaking, I would bring snacks in for the entire class, saving their parents the trouble.

In I went with fresh watermelon wedges, raw carrot sticks, blanched broccoli, callaloo muffins and cocoa beetroot muffins – all homemade.  FYI: the muffins had literally a smidgen of sugar in them.

The class had recently been learning about proteins, carbohydrates, fats, minerals and vitamins, so the idea was for my talk to tie in with that.  In fact, all these food groups were included in the snacks I had brought – right down to the protein in the eggs used in my muffins.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how many of the Grade 2 children would actually eat what I had carried along, but they all seemed enthusiastic and excited.  In fact, what happened amazed me.  Fifteen out of sixteen of them ate everything.  These are children whose parents have often told me: “I can’t get him/her to eat vegetables.  He/She just doesn’t like vegetables.”  Well, sitting there altogether, with the same menu as their peers, each child did indeed eat their vegetables.  And the proof of liking what they had eaten came with the fact that most of them asked for second helpings.

So why is it that these children ate what I gave them, but won’t eat the same at home?  Okay, it could be because I’m a much better cook than everyone else’s parents!  However, it doesn’t take a master chef to prepare these five different foods which I brought, so I don’t think it has anything to do with my capabilities.  Which is probably why more than half the class had lunch boxes full of junk – chips, cookies, juice – all of which came in store-bought packets.  The parents had little faith in me perhaps?  Or, more importantly, perhaps they had little faith in what their kids would actually eat.

If the latter is true, then these parents underestimated their children and they did a disservice to them, in my opinion.  That said, it is easy to judge when you don’t have the same problem, which I don’t.  Not that my kids don’t like junk food.  Trust me, they do, but I have always insisted that they eat the healthy things first and they accept that – most of the time.  When they give me trouble about it, I spend time explaining to them the benefits of healthy eating and the negative side effects caused by the unhealthy options.  It is not always easy though, because there is peer pressure.

Which brings me back to why the Grade 2 boys and girls were happily willing to gobble up all the goodness I had taken into their classroom.  Peer pressure.  Sit them all down together, give them all the exact same healthy meal (with no alternatives), and they will eat if they are hungry.

 

 

 

What Can Someone Handle?

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Health, Life

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One of my pet peeves (I have several) is when someone says to me: “God only gives you what you can handle.”  Okay, it’s more than a pet peeve.  I find it excruciating to hear – like when someone runs their fingernails down a blackboard.  Remember blackboards?  If you have grey hair like mine, then you might 😉

While I can understand why there are those of you who believe that we really only get what we can cope with, you might consider keeping it to yourself.  Just because it helps you to come to terms with unfortunate happenstance, it does not necessarily follow that it is of any assistance to the rest of us.

The truth is: shit happens!  And that shit is random.  Plain and simple, folks.

So what can we do with that?  Well, we are certainly not ecstatically flying around the room and thrilled that life has dealt a bad deck.  “Woohoo!  I am so excited that…….(insert really awful event here)!”  Hmmmm, no.  You are not thrilled about that.  I’m certainly not, anyway.

When bad things happen, we have no choice but to deal with it.  I lost a chef friend of mine to brain cancer – he and his wife did not succumb to such a tragedy because they could handle it.  My girl friend died of a heart attack, due to complications from scleroderma, at age 40, leaving her husband and their three young children – they handled it because they had to.  Another friend of mine has had a hell of a year and a half beating breast cancer – again, she had no choice but to deal with what life had thrown at her.

So did ‘God’ give those people these awful illnesses because they could cope more than the person living in bliss?  I don’t think so.  Are the earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions that take numerous lives sent by ‘God’ because those particular populations were able to manage better than others?  Really folks?  Do you honestly believe that?  I’m actually asking you the question, by the way, because I would love to know what exactly it is that you think someone could handle.