Of course, all diets have an element of truth in them. The no/low fat diets of the Eighties had a point—saturated fat (animal fat) in huge quantities is obviously not a good thing and probably a case of ‘a moment on the lips a lifetime on the hips’. The problem is that when you take the fat out of food it tastes really disgusting and so the manufacturers of processed food, in their wisdom, add a whole pile of sugar to products to make them taste even half decent—either real sugar or fake sugars like aspartame. So there might be no fat but there is a load of sugar in it, too.
Low calorie diets
Low calorie diets work too—but boy, do you have to concentrate on the whole thing—either adding up calories or avoiding forbidden foods. And when the day comes that you start eating ‘normally’ again—like an elastic band that has been stretched and stretched and stretched, when you finally let go and eat a cream bun, you go nuts and can’t stop eating ‘forbidden’ things.
High fibre diets
Then there were the fibre diets, which worked mainly because it was about eating healthier food, but all that fibre without drinking enough water gave people constipation. Also, many of these types of diets relied on wheat as the main source of fibre, and wheat is in a lot of junk food, too. Also eating too much bread can’t be good for us either as flour and water, the two major ingredients in bread, make glue. Enough said, I think, don’t you?
High protein diets
Then things really swung the other way with Old Dr Atkins and the fear of carbohydrates really took off. Of course, he wasn’t the one to actually invent high-protein diets—variations have been around since the ark—but it was Atkins who got rich and famous on it. Eating loads of protein increases your intake of saturated fats (and all the dangers of that), also all that protein to digest puts your body under a lot of pressure, which the poor old kidneys don’t like much.
Atkins thought that the diet worked because the body was producing ketones as a by-product, but in fact all it gave you was bad breath and a bad case of constipation, too. Bliss begins in the bowel and if the bowel is not working properly, you may get all sorts of nasty things down the track. Not worth it.
The glycaemic index
Lately, the glycaemic index (or GI) systems have become all the rage or, even more lately, the GL (glycaemic load). There’s nothing new in the GI diets, as Montignac devised his series of books largely based on a GI model in the Eighties. These systems are entirely sensible—lots of fruit and veg, whole foods, some protein, lots of water—real food eaten sensibly. And I love the way that in the front of his book Montignac thanks not one but two cordon bleu chefs. Now that’s what I call a diet!
But I come back to the point that these two systems (GI and GL) are still eating plans that trap you in a horrible point-counting black hole. You are not encouraged to think for yourself, but have to buy even more props to keep you on the diet. Before too long you get in a muddle as to which food is high or low GL, or was it GI? Just as you thought you knew how it all worked, you start to have doubts—you’d better check back with the book just in case. ‘Blast! The book is in the other handbag. I really don’t know what to choose. Yikes!’ Then, just when you’ve got the system down pat, you find out that there are all sorts of exceptions and variations. And for one, such as myself, whose strong point is not maths, calculating all those blessed points is a real pain. I never have enough fingers. Life is really too short. Unless you are absolutely determined and unwavering in your belief in the diet, by day two everything has already gone drastically pear-shaped.
The thing is with dieting and being on a diet, the implication is that one day you won’t be on a diet—and then, of course, the pounds slowly but steadily start to pile back on. And so the whole cycle starts again. But read on and you will become a liberated woman, enjoying food for its own sake, safe in the knowledge that by eating healthily, your weight will look after itself.
The easy peasy eating bit and how it works
What we are going to do together is loosely based on the GI system but I have made it really, really easy and in doing this, I’m handing the power back to you, your decisions and you knowing if a food is on the programme or not. There are no lists of good foods and bad foods. There is no point counting, just five really, really simple guidelines that absolutely work—and with only five things to remember, you can keep track of them on the fingers of one hand!
The five rules for healthy eating in a nutshell
1 Keep your energy stable by balancing your blood sugar (sounds complex, but it isn’t).* Eat food that is thick and fibrous and/or full of protein—this is slow-burn food.* Avoid food that is primarily sweet, fluffy and white—this is quick-burn food.
2 Whittle down the wheat. Wheat isn’t the only grain in the world, try to replace it with rye, spelt and other grains, such as buckwheat, millet and quinoa. This increases the variation in your diet, so you are not relying on the same old things all the time.
3 Vary your dairy—don’t just rely on cow’s milk, try other forms of dairy as well, such as goat’s and sheep’s milk (pasteurised please) and mozzarella. You could even try rice milk. Don’t over do the dairy—you can get calcium from loads of other sources including green leafy veg.
4 Eat breakfast. You must do this—no arguments—and, if possible, include some protein.
5 Eat like a caveman—this means eating real food, organically-produced if possible.
6 Make up your own rule. I know I said there were five rules, but this is one for you to make up for yourself if you want to. It is a wild-card rule. You might, for example, decide to eat only a handful portion of low-burn carbohydrates at your evening meal as opposed to a great big plateful. Or you might want it as an exercise rule or to build it around portion size or drinking.
Rule 1: Keep your energy stable by balancing your blood sugar
You must keep your blood sugar balanced to avoid crashes of energy. This sounds more complicated than it is.
We have about a teaspoon of sugar (glucose) in the blood at any one time. Sugar is our fuel and powers our system, but too much of a good thing is not necessarily wonderful. In fact, too much sugar is positively not a good thing at all. The body is always trying to maintain a state of balance and has complicated feedback systems to keep everything in check. The blood sugar is lowered by a hormone called insulin, which allows the cells of your body to open up and ‘put away’ the sugar. Therefore, if we eat foods that produce too much sugar and raise the blood sugar too high, our bodies panic, pump in a lot of insulin and the blood sugar is rapidly lowered. Slump!
At this point you say to yourself, ‘Hmm, I feel a nice chocolate biscuit calling.’
Because that chocolate biscuit is quite sweet, up shoots the blood sugar and in comes that hormone insulin to lower the sugar in the blood. You have a rollercoaster of blood sugar, instead of a nice even, consistent energy supply.
Stimulants will also raise and crash blood sugar (think caffeine or nicotine—surely not still smoking?). What I should just mention is that insulin’s other job is to store fat—so if you have too many of these big rushes of insulin, caused by a rush of sugar, your body is going to decide to store some fat and this fat loves to deposit itself around your tummy and hips.
Avoid sweet foods
Some food burns quickly and some burns slowly in the system. Foods that are sweet are going to put more sugar in your system than foods that burn slowly. Any food (pretty much) that you put in your mouth that is sweet is going to affect your blood sugar. So although some sweet foods have other benefits (like they contain vitamins and minerals), from a blood sugar point of view, they are not such a good idea. A good example