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Written by: Connie

Category: Blog

Design your diet

10. Detective work

You don’t have to read Agatha Christie or about Sherlock Holmes to be a detective, but it helps. The only kit you need is a magnifying glass and an enquiring mind that sees the evidence, links the clues and arrives at the solution. You can also have fun with a magnifying glass and bottles of sauce. I’ll bet that you’ve already got the sauces, now find a magnifying glass for some detective work. It is very informative and it’s not information that you’ll find in ‘normal’ diet blogs. BUT, strange though this is, it should gradually begin to make sense as you go along. Be patient.

This is the most important information about 'Design your diet'.

You’ll have to study the evidence hard, as it is not very simple. Sorry!

It is about having a yardstick to measure food energy.

 This is what happened to me.

One day I was looking at my sauce bottle whilst I was eating my chips.

I started with Tomato sauce - a - 500ml bottle; that’s a ‘normal’ one.

I was interested to see that the label said that there were 38 servings in the bottle.

I never knew that before.

All sauce bottles have ‘Ingredients’ and then ‘Values’ listed on the labels. They tell you how much Ingredients in 100grams, so as you’d expect, there are a lot of ‘tomato ingredients’ in tomato sauce, but surprise – there is also some celery.

I didn’t know that either.

What is really important is that the label is going to tell you and me about how much sugar, fat, protein and salt is in the sauce, which are the things we like, but which are not always too good - if we overeat them. This where the ‘Values’ come in. In simple terms, it tells you:

How much ‘energy’ in 100grams of sauce.

It tells you in measures of ‘heat’ or ‘Joules’.

DO NOT bother to look this up,

unless you have a degree in higher mathematics.

Luckily, they also tell you the value in calories which are easier to understand – I think?

This means kJ (Joules) and calories

are both telling us the same thing –

How much energy there is in 100grams.

So, Tomato sauce has 435kJ (that’s the Joules bit)

and 102 calories in 100grams.

We can call that 100 calories to make it simple.

Here comes the game

We can use these measures to find out how they compare with other ‘sauces’.

You can forget the Joules bit now (Phew!)

and we’ll just stick with the calories.

The YARDSTICK

This can be our yardstick that we can measure all food by. We know what tomato sauce tastes like. We know how sweet it is and now we have an easy number to remember (100cals in 100grams) when we compare the energy in just about everything that we eat.

Remember: Tomato sauce = 100

To make use of this information take a look at another label on something similar. We can look at ingredients and then at the energy value in something like mayonnaise.

 Mayonnaise

This seems to be rather like tomato sauce.

This is what I found by looking at the bottle.

The recipes (ingredients) vary, so I looked at the same brand as the tomato sauce. Obviously, there are no tomatoes, but there is salt 1.0gram, that’s less than in tomato sauce. There is also spirit vinegar and sugar, but the big difference is rape-seed oil 68% and Pasteurised egg yolk (free range) 5%. How much sugar?

This how it usually describes 'sugar'

Carbohydrates 3.0 grams of which sugar 1.5grams.

Surprise!

This is a lot less sugar than in Tomato sauce.

But wait!

The energy value for 100grams is 644calories!

Massively more than tomatoes sauce that had value of 100 calories.

What is the difference? The sugar is low.

Where has the 'energy' come from?

It is mainly in the ‘Fat’, that is - the rape seed oil.  When it comes to ‘energy’ that we might store inside us to make us fat, we have been concentrating on sugar, but there is an even bigger culprit waiting in the background and we might call it ‘Fat’. This is why fried food can also be regarded as ‘dangerous’, because it can be covered in cooking oil. The food can absorb the oil, like in crisps. How many fish and chips have you eaten? The fish inside is OK, but what about the rest? It is the batter and the chips fried in oil that are the offenders. Unfortunately, you can do worse than fish. The 'American' battered chicken with 'fries' is no better, but we’ll come to those later.

The real lesson here is that:

   Tomato sauce = 100 calories, but

Mayonnaise = 644 calories

Energy value for the same quantity – 100grams.

I definitely did NOT know that!

When I discovered this, I became really interested in 'energy values' in different sauces, so I went exploring, putting my magnifying glass on the sauce labels. Here’s another commonly used 'sauce'. You don’t have to read all of this if you don’t want to, just get the message that some of the sauces that we add on our food varies hugely in it energy and we should know that.

French dressing (type) 250ml bottle

This is a thinner dressing in a thinner, smaller bottle. You can get it in various flavours, Honey and Mustard, Garlic Dressing etc. The first ingredient was Water. This is important, as the ingredients are listed in order of how much there is in the recipe for the product. Next ingredients, White wine vinegar 12% and sugar 2%. The other things were what you might expect, mustard, flour, rape seed oil. This last one will increase the ‘fat’ content to 2.4 grams.

Values: The calories at 103 was almost the same as Tomato sauce 102.

As I explained above

This can come from sugar which is always listed like this:

Carbohydrates 19.7grams, of which sugar 18.7gms

It's also from the ‘fat’ in the rape seed oil.

These numbers for Tomato sauce were:

Carbohydrates 23.2 of which sugar 22.8.

That’s quite a bit of sugar in tomato sauce.

These are the basic, important numbers when looking at sauces, because most of them are going to be based on some really ordinary ingredients that we have met before – salt and vinegar. Vinegar isn’t really fattening, but sugar is, so it’s useful to know How much sugar is in each sauce. And with some sauces, How much fat (oil)? There will almost always be some salt. Tomato sauce had 1.8grams of salt which is quite high.

I had learned quite a bit from just looking at sauce bottles - so much so that I went diving into my cupboards to check out some other sauces. I'll tell you what I found in the next episode, because it was more than just energy, it was ingredients too.

Walking.

Did you discover the words to the song I mentioned last time?

What good is sitting alone in your room?

If you spend too much time inside, watching TV or sitting too long, you won't be getting the exercise you need. Your mind needs exercising too, by talking to other people. These are some of the words. Could they apply to you?

What good is sitting alone in your room?

Come hear the music play

Life is a Cabaret old chum,

Come to the Cabaret …

The words come from the musical Cabaret by John Kander

There are some interesting people out there wanting to talk and they would talk to you, if you talked to them. Many are walking their dogs – just choose the dog to enquire about - by looking at its owner.

Is your life a cabaret?

Do you sit alone in your room?

Get up and go outside for a walk.

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Written by: Connie

Category: Blog

Design your diet

9. Salt and Vinegar

I’ll bet you like crisps, or ‘chips’ as they are called in America.

I believe the Americans call chips, ‘fries’.

Crisps (English) used to be an insignificant little snack in a greaseproof bag. Then Frank Smith put a separate little blue wrapper of salt inside. If you could find it, you could sprinkle the salt in the bag, or, you could throw it away, but nobody did. It was a masterstroke. We all like salt; possibly because we have been evolved from swimming in the sea? Watch the wildlife programmes on TV that show animals in Africa trekking miles across deserts, to find the minerals they need. We are not the only ones.

We need salt and we needed Frank Smith’s little blue bags.

It didn’t stop with just plain crisps, there were cheese & onion and salt & vinegar

and - you know the rest.

We used to buy them - one small packet at a time and then, six packets at a time

and - you know the rest.

And then came Pringles and all the other brands and flavours

and - you know the rest.

They’re not little bags any more, are they?

And, you’ve got some in your home, or, if you haven’t,

it’s because you’ve already eaten them.

You know the rest.

Does your body NEED them?

No, but your brain does.

They are addictive.

It’s your fat and salt habit.

They are the definition of a ‘Snack’.

They even make the right noise.

Can you go through the morning snack time without eating them?

If you can, it’s probably because you eat chocolate biscuits instead, which is your sugar and fat habit. Frank Smith ran a pub and putting salt on crisps made his customers more thirsty. If crisps are making you thirsty, you’re having too much salt – unless- you are running a marathon, then you’ll need salt. When did you last run a marathon?

The potatoes that make most crisps are vegetables and dieters get a ‘thumbs-up’ for eating vegetables, but not for the fat that they were cooked in. How much potato, or corn, or any other vegetable is there in a bag of crisps? Not much, but there is a significant amount of fat and salt. They could be the most expensive potatoes in the world? Diet ‘experts’ tend not to count potatoes as ‘vegetables’ like lettuce or cucumber, but as ‘starchy carbohydrates’ - that's like bread or rice.

How can you reduce the amount being eaten?

This is a very tough one for dieters, or anybody trying to limit eating. My first thought would be to only buy the six-pack bags and try to limit eating them to one little bag at a time. The single, big bags are just too tempting once they are opened, you’ll eat the lot. Only one thing is worse – salted peanuts and you find those free in pubs too. I notice that the big single bags of crisps are now slowly being replaced with an intermediate-sized bag with a similar price to the big bag - less fat, but less crisps for more money. 

The classic English lunchtime meal was

and maybe still is? Fish & Chips.

The stuff we used to put on them

and maybe still do? was salt and vinegar.

They are the classic combination.

The next possible addition to fish and chips might be tomato sauce. When I first went to Belgium, I was amazed to see them putting mayonnaise on chips - then I tried it. Yummy! A mix of mayonnaise and tomato sauce could be even better, but if you’ve never tried it, DO NOT start now. The combination of all these tasty things becomes addictive and irresistible and we are trying to get control of what we eat - Remember!

But, but, but, it’s not all bad news about salt and vinegar. Salt does not make you fat. The ‘danger’ with salt is that it tends to raise your blood pressure which can be very bad for the heart. If you have a heart condition, you’ll already know about it, so stick to your medical advice. Vinegar is a very dilute acid (less than 8%, Acetic) and the rest is water. It can’t be good for teeth, or acid indigestion, but after that, it is not something ‘fattening’ to fear. We now understand that salt and vinegar helped us love some very unpromising flakes of potatoes in a bag and they could do the same again with other, more healthy food. Both salt and vinegar in moderation, might help as a flavour boost to some other less-popular stuff that we could eat – so they might be helpful to us? We shall see when we look more closely at some other vegetables.

Walking. When you walk it gives your mind time to think, to talk to yourself about what you can see and where you are going. It gets your circulation going and gives you exercise. If you walk far enough, often enough, you should feel your legs getting better at walking. It’s not immediate, but you will get better at it. Don’t push it. You should always try to be comfortable.

There is more talk these days about mental health and loneliness.

If you are alone, you can easily meet people who will talk with you.

They are called dog-walkers as already explained in Parts 2 & 3.

You only have to 'Like' a dog and its owner will tell you all about it.

Find out its name and enquire after its health

and you will be rewarded by endless conversations about where it goes

and what it does.

It is a family member.

Also

Quiz. Where does this quote come from?

What good is sitting alone in your room?

What are the other words that go with it?

Think about it.

I'll tell you next time.

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Written by: Connie

Category: Blog

Design your Diet

Hello and Welcome to a favourite page.

Many people are directed to this page by the Internet,

probably because they put Eat Less into the search engine. 

If you are looking for a quick (and painless) way to

Eat Less.

I fear that you may be disappointed.

There is no magic bullet.

But there is hope for you.

Slow down a bit and invest some time

to learn.

I urge you to get the full story.

Go to the beginning - Home (above)

and then Introduction

(top of the page) and relax.

Read it all.

This is NOT a normal Diet blog.

It is unusual.

Please read it.

ALSO

If you do read this to the end

there is further Eat-less information.

The stuff below is for those who have read it all so far.

We have been concentrating on Move-more.

Now we can Move-on from Move-more

to two more words - Eat-Less

5. Watch TV

To Eat-less, - watch TV.

Don’t eat anything whilst watching.

Look at any programmes on: How to Diet.

And learn the words.

The key words are Protein and Carbohydrate.

They will become more important later.

Why they can’t call them by some simple names I don’t know. There is another word - Fat. These are the main words about things that make you fat. They say so on the programmes … I think? Which programmes? Lots of them. There are two main types. Programmes about food and then, others about different Diets to eat. I’ve watched tons of them and you might have too?

The ones about various foods often line up lots of different brands from different supermarkets and then ask a ‘typical family’ (How do they choose them?), which of these yoghurts or milkshakes has the most sugar? Or which of these loaves, or which of these bars of chocolate, or buns? You get the idea. The family then gets it wrong, or sometimes right, but they are always shocked at the number of sugar cubes in the yogurt, which is usually more than the cubes in a can of Cola.

Drink more Cola?

Is the lesson to drink more Cola if you want to slim?

Well, No! Now you’ve got it wrong yourself. They are just trying to tell you in as entertaining a way as possible, not to eat too much sugar. It’s the energy in the sugar that is too much for you to use. Why is it too much? Because you don’t move enough – you have to Move-more or you will store the extra energy in your fat and you certainly have enough fat to store it in, don't you?

One chocolate digestive biscuit is worth about 85calories.

I didn’t know that. I’ve just looked it up.

‘Calories’ is the name for the energy … I think?

How many choccy biscuits have you eaten?

The other kind of food programme is about trying different diets on people. The people often have a reason for wanting to diet. They are usually going to a wedding in two month's time. They sometimes use what they call 'shock tactics' by putting all the food that the potential wedding guest eats in a month on a table for them to see. It is a sickening sight. What might it look like for you?

The experts give them a Diet to follow.

Sometimes the diets are awful,

like just eating one kind of food

– could be cabbage!

- but not usually.

Sometimes they have lots of meat, eggs and cheese and they are called protein diets (there’s that word)

Sometimes there will be lots of pasta, bread, rice and spaghetti, which are the carbohydrate diets (the other word ).

Now the interesting thing about the results, is that they ALL seem to lose some weight over the 4 to 6 weeks, whichever of these two diets they are on. Most say it was hard, it was monotonous, but it worked. Some say they will continue.

I’d like to see a surprise-visit to them later, to see if they did.

If a diet is hard, will they keep to it?

Would you?

But diets are supposed to be hard, aren’t they? No Pain - No Gain, they say. A Diet has to be different from your normal life to signify to you that you are paying a price, making an effort, holding on as long as possible, but relief will come soon if you can endure it until the final date. I have seen successful 'TV dieters’, being celebrated by their extended families, applauding the participants, holding parties with plenty of cake and celebratory cans of booze and bottles of champagne, when the conclusion has been reached at the end of the month’s dieting and the participant has lost almost a stone. How long will these people stay ‘slim’ surrounded by people with similar shapes and attitudes to themselves?

Commercial Diets and TV programmes that promise

or produce a significant, rapid weight loss

such as one stone in a month

generate an expectation

that losing weight should be quick.

It has to be quick for TV programmes,

so that the viewer can be amazed,

entertained and

wish that they could do the same.

Quick success has to be on your wish-list.

It also has to be quick for Commercial Diet plans,

in order to dangle a dream in front of the customer.

It sometimes has to sound as though it is easy and needs no special extra effort other than a possibly brief and very limited adjustment by eating the slimming product that they are selling to you. With Commercial Diets the dream has to be financially tempting and hopefully for the seller – ongoing – the longer the better.

If it doesn't work, could it be that you have been cheating?

OR

Could it be that you need more of their product?

If you have tried Diets

You might have dreamed of quick, or easy.

You might now believe that Diets don’t work.

Maybe you have not had the right idea in mind?

It isn’t rocket-science to realise from your experience that,

It is easy and quick to

put on weight,

BUT

it takes a long time to take weight OFF

and it is neither quick nor easy, to do that permanently.

I know that.

You know that now.

Read on below if you can understand this.

It is Time for a rethink

Time for some careful thought.

(This is serious)

If you have been overweight for a period of time your body will have adjusted to that weight. Your muscles have developed to carry that weight. Your internal systems expect to extract the nutrients and energy from food to support that weight. Your brain has an understanding of eating certain things at the usual times each day to keep that weight going.

All this has happened over years.

Your body runs to this clock.

Yes, of course all these body systems can be shocked by a complete break from what has happened daily for such a long time. The shock of not eating, or of a radical omission such as no carbohydrates or no protein from a diet is guaranteed to produce an effect such as those seen on the tele, BUT, as has probably already been proven (by you?), it is unreasonable to expect a short, sharp shock to be a permanent change.

Expecting ‘effortless’ diet miracles is not a sensible expectation.

We need to think again.

You need to think again.

Almost the only way to begin to introduce change in your body behaviour - to try to gain control of it, is to do it gradually.

You will have to re-educate the body and

give it time to adjust to changes slowly.

You CAN be permanently less heavy,

but the changes have to be in attitude

and in expectation to do it.

You can only do this if you really want to.

You have to say to yourself -

'The Time Has Come!'

You are not in a TV show.

You are NOT required to produce rapid weight loss to entertain an audience.

Losing weight is for you.

This adjustment is between you and yourself.

Surprisingly, you CAN expect it to be easy,

if you take it one-small-step-at-a-time -

over a realistic timescale.

I guess that, like me, you live on the too-much-of-everything diet, no matter what it is. I thought that I’d never keep up on a diet like just living on Cabbage Soup. It's unrealistic. I like my biscuits (carbohydrates) and my bacon and egg (protein), so I decided that the only diet that I could follow was one that I had designed for myself - so I did.

I would design a diet that I could sustain

That was the most important thing in the diet – to keep going,

so I could continue to follow it.

If I designed my own diet I could avoid it being too hard – and

You can too.

Interval whilst you think about it.

Go for a walk.

And to take a positive, practical step to Eat-less

read Diet 6. Know your habits.

To Read more go to top of page.

Hover on 'Eat Less'

Read Diet 6 - 7 etc

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Written by: Connie

Category: Blog

Design your diet

Diet 4. The Six-Word diet

(Continued from Diets 1 - 3)

Please read them or this may not make sense.

You MUST have walked, to go any further with this.

It does not matter how far. You can still do it.

My two-word diet - Move-more, had not effected radical change in my life. However, it was something that I found I could do. I suppose that, this was the secret. My Moving-more was walking, but I found that the benefit was more than just the exercise. It was pleasant to be outside seeing the natural world. It gave time for thinking. It is as much for these reasons that I strongly advise walking and I'll keep on about it to try to persuade you to join me. If I had been 'punishing myself' by trying to run or jog a set distance to lose weight, it would not have worked in the same beneficial way that walking does.

Don’t start anything that you can’t keep doing.

If it is too painful, don’t do it.

Walk, don't run if you want to.

You don’t have to run a marathon to lose weight. You don’t need a personal trainer to tell you what to do; you know what to do. It’s just a matter of you doing it. If you are overweight, you have to admit that you are not comfortable being fat. You can say FAT. You have to recognise that you can find lots of excuses for not doing something about being fat - BUT -

It is only you, talking to yourself.

The hardest six-months work that I ever did was to stop smoking. That was tough, because I liked smoking. Liked the flavour, liked the activity, liked the camaraderie and the inclusiveness within the group, but I came to know that it wasn’t doing me much good and the truth about the harm was being revealed by science. There were easy excuses for carrying on smoking. It settles my tummy; it calms my nerves. No, it doesn’t. That shaking feeling isn’t nerves, it’s the addiction to the weed. To stop smoking you need will power and to lose weight you will need it more than ever.  You like food. You like eating, just as I liked smoking. Actually, when you think about it, Will Power, is all you need. The four-word diet Move more – Eat less, should be a six-word diet.

Move More - Eat Less - Will Power

To find Will Power you have to look inside yourself.

You can’t buy it or borrow it.

To follow any diet, you have to want to do it, for yourself. You DO want to do it otherwise you wouldn't be reading this. There are many reasons for not managing your diet, but there are just as many good reasons for you to manage your diet. As you get older the reasons to manage your diet become more important, especially when weight begins to affect your health. At that point, as I found with my sciatica, you have the added encouragement to make some changes. No doctor said ‘Type 2 diabetes!’ to me, but struggling to put my socks on could lead to that.

Why wait? 

Walking.

Moving-more made a start for me.

It can make a start for YOU.

You MUST walk.

Now it is time to look at the tough one

Eat Less.

'The Time has Come.'

You MUST walk-

To the front door.

To the gate and back.

To the first tree and back.

If you don’t walk somewhere, don’t read any more of this.

You have given up before you even started.

Make the effort.

Or Be Fat

To Read more go to top of page.

Hover on 'Eat Less'

Read Diet 5 - 6 - 7 etc