Quote: Rock God X "There are some relevant points in your post, Minty, but there's no escaping the fact that, for the overwhelming majority of people, a balanced diet and regular moderate exercise will result in them maintaining a healthy weight. That we are one of the fattest countries in Europe is not because we eat cereal for breakfast, but because, as a nation, we eat too much and exercise too little.
On the whole, people do know what they need to do to lose weight, it's actually doing it that's the problem. Of course there are exceptions (like in the cases that it actually is 'glandular'), but these are relatively few and far between.'"
Don’t disagree with all of this: for instance, it astonishes me to see people who are apparently perfectly able, getting on a bus to go one stop. We all know about the school run and the culture of getting in the car to go around the corner for a paper.
This is an example of where the French (I’m going to stick with them as an example) walk more than we do, just on an ordinary, everyday basis. They are not a nation of gym bunnies – and indeed, I think that can be counterproductive as a weight loss method.
Not just on the basis of my own experience, but it’s widely documented that many people trying to lose weight experience weight loss – followed by regaining the same weight and then some more when they start to eat normally. That is not to say that they eat badly.
We also know that, at any one time, an estimated 80-odd percent of British women are on a diet. We know that gyms and health clubs and that sort of thing are thriving (y’see – obesity is actually good for the economy).
Research suggests that many, many British women suffer from sub-clinical eating disorders (SCDs).
Not simply on the basis of personal experience, but I’ve seen this in many other people (mostly women).
Standard diet advice – as mentioned earlier – is counterproductive. Yet it remains the mainstream understanding of what to eat. It is wrong.
One of the biggest root causes is the extent to which we have lost our national food and understanding of eating. We don’t know what to eat, when to eat, how to cook or even how to eat. And no, this isn’t just me saying this, but people like Raymond Blanc.
We do have more of a snacking culture than the French too.
But I’ll add in something else: we don’t enjoy food and, when we don’t we eat more.
Anecdote warning.
Last June, I was working at a conference where we didn’t really have time for proper lunch breaks, so food was brought into the office, where we ate while continuing to work.
One of the things that was served was a big bowl of chips – oven cooked from frozen. I’d get some on a plate and fork them into my mouth while writing. I’d eat quite a lot.
Fast forward a week or so. I was making chips at home (something I do about four times a year). I hand cut a couple of potatoes (one each) and then cooked them in lard.
Then I sat and relished eating them – flavour, textures etc. They were gorgeous. But even though I’d served less than I’d have had on my plate at that conference, I didn’t eat them all. Taking my time to enjoy, I allowed my body to recognise and convey to me that it was sated.
Back to France. Where obesity levels there are rising is where there is an attack on a the classic French lunch time – and where the ‘Western’ diet (ie the US-style of fast and junk food) is taking over. Although research has shown that even when the French have a Mackie D, they sit down and take longer to eat it than we do.
Another anecdote warning.
After 26 years of dieting – with ‘cut calories, cut fat, fill up with complex carbs and exercise’ as the mainstays of my very mainstream approach, all I had succeeded in doing was lose weight, pack it back on and then add some more for interest.
After a sort of Damascus moment, I stopped the endless cycle of dieting, ‘discovered’ food and started enjoying it. I even decided to start trying to cook.
Over the next five years, I didn’t put any more weight on. In the subsequent five years, I started losing weight. Very slowly, entirely sustainably, I’ve now dropped almost two clothes sizes.
I do my usual amount of walking, but don’t do the gym (or running or swimming) as I did in the past. I very, very rarely snack, but eat what I want – cooking it for myself and investing the time in that and in shopping for good quality food. As with the chips I mentioned, I use fats like lard and butter. I won’t touch marg. I won’t have those spray fats in the house any more, any more than I’ll buy diet foods.
And an element of all this has been rediscovering seasonality and proper northern European food and eating culture: I’ve just found that – by gum! – there really is nowt much better than a proper, homemade meat and potato pie, with lard shortcrust pastry (homemade).
It's also worth noting that, unless we have managed, in the space of a generation and a half to become far greedier and far lazier (and the gym bunny cult, that did not exist beforehand, suggests otherwise on that front) then the issues are, in general, more complex than I think they are in some cases where the simple explanation is true, just as it would have been true of those same types of cases in the past.
