I am on a permanent quest to eat healthily, exercise and lose weight. On the face of it, this is a simple task. Calories in have to be less than calories out. I have to balance what I'm eating with my metabolic rate and the exercise I do throughout the day. This means healthy food - lots of fruits and vegetables, lean protein like white meat and fish and wholemeal carbohydrates like wholemeal bread and pasta. It also means plenty of exercise - at least thirty minutes everyday. And, most importantly, it also means not eating junk food like burgers, chips, crisps, pizzas and hot dogs which are high in saturated fat and salt, and not eating sugary snacks like chocolate, cake, biscuits and ice cream.
I know what I have to do. So does everyone else. We know what we should be eating and how much we should be exercising, and yet people in our society are getting more and more obese. So why is this, when we all know what we have to do, and how to do it?
The fact is it is so easy to over-eat in our society, and the first and most significant reason for this is that food is simply everywhere, and that means temptation is everywhere. A quick walk up and down my high street sees me passing many fast food joints selling all the kinds of junk food that taste so good, are so cheap, so quick, so easy and so convenient to buy and eat. It would be very easy to go into one of those joints everyday, spend a small amount of money, and eat food that tastes good until I feel full. But I have to desist, and that's not easy. Especially if you happen to be hungry. Your body craves these high-fat foods when you're even slightly hungry - they produce calming effects in the brain as soon as you start eating them, essentially making you feel good. And they fill you up, at least at first.
Even if you do manage to resist the temptation that our high streets bombard us with, there's still the supermarkets. You could go into a supermarket with the very best of intentions but you still simply need a will of steel to be able to resist the special offers that the supermarkets place right at the front of the shop or right by the checkouts - so you have to walk past them - and the special offers are almost always on sugary snacks. Chocolates, sweets, cakes, biscuits and ice cream will always be on special offer in supermarkets. Often supermarkets will have special offers on fruits and vegetables but these will never be placed as prominently in the shop as the sugary snacks. Again, if you're even slightly hungry these snacks will be irresistable - sugar gives you an instant high as its released into your blood, making you feel great, then you crash again and need another hit and then another, causing you to snack on it again and again and over-eat. That's why just one biscuit turns very quickly into four or five.
And then there's exercise. It's difficult and takes hard work, and why should we need to do it when most of us can very comfortably live a sedentary life without it? Most of us go most places in our cars, have office jobs where we spend a lot of the day sitting down, and don't even walk up the stairs - we have escalators to take us up or down to where we need to go. Exercise makes you feel uncomfortable - you get out of breath and sweaty, and there's just no need for it in our day-to-day lives.
Restaurants are another minefield. Most restaurants provide foods literally full of fat and calories, that could see you eating your full calorie count for the whole meal in a single sitting - especially if you have desert and a few alcoholic drinks with it. Those tempting offers are too much for most of us, and eating out has simply become more common than ever before. It used to be the case that eating out was a once-a-fortnight-or-less occurence, a real treat, but now most of us go out to eat several times a week. Once again, it is so easy to over-eat.
These are the things we're up against, and so we need to confront the problem head on - weight loss (or maintaining a healthy weight) takes strong willpower and effort, and isn't easy in a society that thrusts unhealthy food in our face. I will be writing more blog entries in the future on tips on how to avoid temptation and on just what is in those junk foods we all know and love, and what to eat instead. I'm giving the warning here - those fast food restaurants and special offers are not our friends, although we may see them as a comfort. In the cold light of the day they will cause obesity and they are to be avoided as much as possible.
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