18 Jun 2010 at 00:17
uzoma
Weight Control
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Obesity has now overtaken alcohol as the number one cause of liver disease
.In some cases the damage is so severe it means patients require a liver transplant.Doctors at King’s College Hospital in south London, one of the UK’s leading liver transplant centres, say the rise in obesity means the problem will get even worse in years to come.
We need to stop abusing our bodies and look after ourselves more selfishly. We are sending ourselves to a very early and painful grave. Parents, protect your children from this life leeching disease. No child should be allowed to get obese. It is abusive and has a lasting negative effect on self esteem.
When shopping for food, visit organic produce markets. Just like us, fruit and vegetables do not come perfectly shaped all the time. Due to our demands for perfection we are willing to eat produce that has been waxed shiny, toxin-ed bug free, and genetically modified to suit our demands. We have become more distant from nature and have lost the ability to really enjoy the food that we eat.
Make your food shopping a sensual experience! Pick up fruit and vegetables. Feel the differences in size and weight, gently squeeze to feel for ripeness, breathe in the scents of spices, herbs, and fresh fruit. Can you distinguish between coriander and cumin? How about a mango and a banana; or a black versus a green olive? Take your time choosing what you want. Treat this like you would any other shopping that you enjoy. Be a voyeur and get some visual stimulation! Look at the colours, the different shades, the curves and the presentation of the food. Imagine what you might look like wearing what you are drawn to. Do you think it suits you? Make choices to dress yourself from the inside out. Have pride in your dress sense!
When preparing food, take a moment to observe the sounds, the flavours, the textures and the colours that your ingredients produce . Notice how the food changes with different cooking methods. For example, a broccoli flower is much more vibrant in colour and firmer in texture when steamed than when boiled. Listen to the sound of crisp lettuce leaves being torn to make a salad. Breath in the aroma of fresh ginger and parsley as you cut into them. Feel the texture of your meat stock alter gradually, as you stir in some corn starch.
Food is something to be enjoyed from the shopping of it through to the preparation, and right through to the climax of savouring it. Aaah! That ‘afterglow’ of a well executed repas. Meals should not be rushed, forced or feared. You need to be present with every mouthful. You should leave the table knowing you are completely satisfied but feeling that you did not gorge yourself.
This week, I want to draw your attention to your gift of intuition and instinct, or the sixth sense. This is perhaps the most important of the senses when dealing with weight problems. You have no doubt heard of the terms ‘compulsive over eating’ and ‘emotional eating- these terms describe eating without consideration to your body’s actual needs and refer to ‘head’ hunger rather than stomach hunger. Applying our sixth sense to food choices is known as ‘intuitive eating’.
When you eat intuitively, you ‘listen’ to your body. You know when you are hungry and when you are satisfied. When you eat intuitively you never over eat. The next time you find yourself standing in the kitchen looking for food, ask yourself some basic questions before touching a bite:
1) Am I really hungry for food? -and if you are,
2) What do I actually want to eat? -This may take longer than you think to determine. However, when you have decided, eat that food. Do not substitute another food that you think you ought to eat because the chances are, in the end, you will eat the substitute and the food you really want. It is much more likely that you will feel satisfied when you eat food that you really enjoy.
3) After eating the food I actually wanted, am I satisfied?- If you are aware of your stomach starting to feel full, stop eating! Your food hunger has been satisfied!
It is very easy to override our natural cues for hunger and satiety because we have been conditioned from an early age to eat by the clock and to finish what is on our plate. Babies who are allowed to feed on instinct, never get fat. Children and adults need to get back to basics and actually listen to their gut feelings on food choice. Let your mind be free to choose, and listen to it when it lets you know that you have had enough. Reflect on this for a while.
This week I want to to raise awareness of two more of our senses – taste and smell. I have put these together under ‘taste’ because they are very closely connected to one another. Often, we smell something in order to determine whether we will like it or not, whether the food is fresh, going off, or rotten. Babies are able to detect the presence of harmful chemicals in their mothers’ breast milk via the odour. A baby will delay feeding when a high alcohol content is detected in the breast milk, for example. Our taste is dulled by the absence of our ability to smell- as experienced when we suffer with a bad cold or blocked nose.
In short, our senses of smell and taste are natural first line defenses that help protect us against harmful food pathogens and poisonous chemicals. Our primitive ancestors used their sense of taste to help them to survive as hunters and gatherers. Bitter tastes were warning signs of poisons, while sweet tastes were nourishing. As babies, our first taste is sweet(breast milk) but then we are gradually weaned onto a variety of other flavours. This variety is important because the nutrition provided by sweet foods alone is not sufficient for our bodies once we are developed enough to walk on our own.
Look at your diet and note the proportion of taste that is sweet, salty, sour or bitter. Do you cook a wonderful meal only to overwhelm the taste of the meal with added salt, ketchup, gravy (more salt), or hot chilli pepper? Do you prepare a creatively colourful salad only to mask the taste with salad dressing? Are many of your main meals heavy on the taste of one ingredient thereby preventing you from being able to distinguish one type of food from another? What about your drinks? Are they mainly sweet tasting?
In order to balance your meals effectively, ensure that you can taste or smell individual food items within the meal. Do not overcook food as this destroys some of its taste (as well as important vitamins). Do the blindfold test. Close your eyes and try to determine what your dish consists of. If you are only able to detect one taste, you are not getting the best out of your food selection!
Last week, I explained that The Arc Plan Lifestyle was about using our senses to balance our meals. I explained that food needs to be balanced visually. This week, I want to talk about balancing meals using your sense of touch.
Raw food has a different texture from cooked food and different food items have a variety of what I refer to as ‘mouth feel’. If you were to close your eyes when eating, you should be able to detect these differences without much of a problem.
The Arc Plan encourages a mixture of textures. Food generally falls into one of five categories – crunchy, soft, chewy, smooth, and liquidy. For example, raw carrots and nuts are crunchy foods; fish and avocados are soft foods; beef and baguettes are chewy foods; cheese and chocolate are smooth foods; while soup and yoghurt are liquidy foods. A reliance on only one texture in a meal will reduce the variety of nutrients in the diet and will also disrupt the healthy functioning of the digestive tract.
To add a further dimension to your sense of touch, you can experiment by making your meals a mixture of raw and cooked foods and by serving hot and cold dishes. A rough guide to textures in your diet would be to look at what eating utensils you use at the table. A spoon and a cup would suggest liquids, a fork would suggest soft, a knife and fork would suggest chewy, and fingers would suggest crunchy. When you include at least two different contrasts in mouth feel at each meal, you stimulate your metabolic system more intensely, forcing it to burn up more calories!
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