Marguerite
Active Member
OK, time to start a new thread.
We were talking about how when I diet, I go crazy and start into a cooking frenzy. I don't necessarily eat it all, I cook to feed other people.
Tonight husband was packing away the side of lamb I bought, and found some offcuts, chunks of meat. He then mentioned how he was craving a lamb stew, without the tomatoes I've been putting in everything lately. So I rose to the challenge and searched my recipe books, depending on time I'll be making that stew tomorrow.
Tonight I did a potato dauphinois with roast lamb and other roast vegetables. To make space in the freezer for husband I made strawberry sauce with frozen strawberries from last year's shopping bargains. The strawberries will take up less space in jars in the cupboard than in punnets in the freezer.
Food - I can't stop. But tonight when I got hungry, I just had another serve of my breakfast muesli.
I'm highly motivated to continue dieting but I have to keep remembering to take my vitamins.
The diet - it's a month now, and I've lost 5 Kg. That's the fastest and most consistent weight loss I've had for decades. I really think the Reductil is the only reason this is working so well. True, I have to cut back ridiculously with food, but I'm still trying to keep some sort of balance. A dietician would want me to eat more bread, potatoes, pasta etc but I know my body, and I think the food pyramid is skewed too much towards carbs.
Now for the science lesson.
Our bodies need a range of things from our food. Carbohydrates, protein, fat, various trace minerals and vitamins. We evolved to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle & diet, where we'd get occasional big lumps of meat plus a steady trickle of harvested food such as berries, seeds, roots, leaves, plants, small critturs. We also would have got a lot of exercise getting our food.
Now in modern times our food is easier to get. We also don't have to eat it raw or whole. Our grains are husked and polished, often ground, bleached, sifted, added to, mixed with a lot of other highly refined and processed stuff until it bears little resemblance to the food our digestive systems were designed to handle.
Think about sugar - it's so easy to get now, it's in almost everything we buy that's processed. But in the wild, sugar is IN other things. It has other components to it chemically, or it has to be physically extracted with effort. It's not so readily available.
Food groups.
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/C/Carbohydrates.html
Carbohydrates are called that because chemically they all have the same proportion of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Water is H2O. Carbohydrates have always got hydrogen and oxygen in water-like proportions. There are also the same number of carbon atoms as oxygen atoms.
Pure glucose is C6-H12-O6. If you juggle the atoms around a bit you can get, with the same formula, fructose (fruit sugar) and galactose (milk sugar). More complex sugars are built from blocks of these sugars. Sugars are soluble in water.
More complexity again comes when sugars are joined into long chains and other structures composed of many sugars. These are the starches and they are insoluble in water. Plants make glucose but store it as starch. Think of a potato plant - it makes glucose through photosynthesis, but stores what it makes in the large tubers under the ground. We dig these up, cook them and eat them. Classic comfort food, because our bodies an fairly easily digest them - we break down the longer molecules into water-soluble sugars and eventually into glucose, which our cells use as an energy source.
Not all carbs can be so easily broken down - not in human stomachs, anyway. Cellulose, which is the fibrous stuff used to keep cell walls in plants rigid, is still strictly a carb, but our bodies can't digest it. Horses can, but not too efficiently (which is why their poop is still so full of undigested straw). Cows and sheep do it better, because they have extra stomachs loaded with friendly bacteria to do a lot of the digestion for them. Various animals have all developed interesting ways to help them digest cellulose. I won't go into detail, a lot of these are gross.
Glucose that trickles in from a sustained-release kind of supply keeps our bodies ticking over at a fairly steady rate. However, eating sweet things especially if we binge on them is giving our bodies a sudden sugar 'hit' which then causes the pancreas to respond by releasing a lot of insulin, which we use to help our cells access the glucose. If the pancreas learns to over-react, eventually the cells get too accustomed to high insulin levels and it stops working so well. We then need to secrete more of it to get the same result. Eventually it can stop working entirely, or the pancreas can stop producing insulin, and then we have diabetes Type II.
We also get our energy from fat. All oils are fats too. It's just a matter of what temperature they are, as to whether they're liquid or not. Make it cold enough, all oils will solidify. Fat produces a different kind of energy, it's more concentrated. In really cold countries the diet is often high in fat because it keeps them going better, often on less food. Eventually, the fat gets broken down into glucose and our cells can then use it. And the reverse happens - if we have too much glucose in our blood and our cells have all they need for now, thank you very much, the excess doesn't get wasted, it gets converted into fat for storage. It gets "waisted" instead.
We also use some fats to make hormones. We need a certain amount of cholesterol for this, but our bodies can make all we need, we don't need to eat cholesterol to have enough. Our bodies break down old red blood cells and recycle the old haemoglobin into bile salts. From there we make cholesterol. Cholesterol ONLY comes from animal sources. So when you see a bottle of olive oil labelled "cholesterol-free" then the manufacturer is trying to treat you like an idiot. ALL vegetable-source oils are cholesterol-free. Almost all are monosaturates or polyunsaturates - good oils. Coconut oil and cocoa butter are exceptions. Also a tip - the more saturated a fat is, the higher its melting point. In other words, if it's liquid at fairly cool room temperatures, it's likely to be better for you.
The body will happily burn any kind of fat. But some fats get put in places which can make us sick. That's why we should substitute mono- or poly-unsaturated fats for the unhealthy kind.
Protein - it's what our muscles are made of. Also it's what the muscles of animals are made of, which is why we eat meat (unless we're vegetarian). There are also some non-animal sources of protein, but they're not so rich. You can also get protein in eggs and milk.
We can burn protein and convert it to glucose. People who starve themselves are often burning their own body muscles purely to keep their cells alive. This process also causes a build up of ketones in the body as a by-product, which is why a lot of dieters have bad breath. You can smell the ketones on them.
Other body processes work best when they have various minerals and vitamins in trace amounts. We need iron to make enough haemoglobin, for example. Without it we get anaemic and very tired because not enough oxygen is getting to our cells.
So in a healthy diet, we need a balance. In a weight-reducing diet, or the diet of anyone who wants to get back to the sort of diet our bodies are designed for, we substitute back to the more primitive foods. Brown rice. Lots of seed foods (beans, lentils, grains). Not too many nuts because you can easily get your daily allowance of oils that way. If the carbs you eat contain more cellulose, it just goes through you as fibre and doesn't get converted to glucose. But it still makes you feel full. That's why a lot of health foods for fibre include the stuff we usually throw away - bran, for example.
And the oils - while we might eat a certain amount of fat in our meat, back in the days when we hunted our meat, the animals also had to work harder. They weren't cosseted, fed and fattened up the way they are on our farms today. Animals in past millennia would have been leaner. Less animal fat to ingest, and also a lifestyle where we burnt up most of it anyway.
In Australia we can buy kangaroo meat. It's very rich in iron and is amazingly lean. You can't cosset a kangaroo, they're just too active.
Anyway, that's the quick lesson in diet and how our bodies use our food.
Armed with this, it's easier to understand the importance of those nutrition labels on our food.
Marg
We were talking about how when I diet, I go crazy and start into a cooking frenzy. I don't necessarily eat it all, I cook to feed other people.
Tonight husband was packing away the side of lamb I bought, and found some offcuts, chunks of meat. He then mentioned how he was craving a lamb stew, without the tomatoes I've been putting in everything lately. So I rose to the challenge and searched my recipe books, depending on time I'll be making that stew tomorrow.
Tonight I did a potato dauphinois with roast lamb and other roast vegetables. To make space in the freezer for husband I made strawberry sauce with frozen strawberries from last year's shopping bargains. The strawberries will take up less space in jars in the cupboard than in punnets in the freezer.
Food - I can't stop. But tonight when I got hungry, I just had another serve of my breakfast muesli.
I'm highly motivated to continue dieting but I have to keep remembering to take my vitamins.
The diet - it's a month now, and I've lost 5 Kg. That's the fastest and most consistent weight loss I've had for decades. I really think the Reductil is the only reason this is working so well. True, I have to cut back ridiculously with food, but I'm still trying to keep some sort of balance. A dietician would want me to eat more bread, potatoes, pasta etc but I know my body, and I think the food pyramid is skewed too much towards carbs.
Now for the science lesson.
Our bodies need a range of things from our food. Carbohydrates, protein, fat, various trace minerals and vitamins. We evolved to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle & diet, where we'd get occasional big lumps of meat plus a steady trickle of harvested food such as berries, seeds, roots, leaves, plants, small critturs. We also would have got a lot of exercise getting our food.
Now in modern times our food is easier to get. We also don't have to eat it raw or whole. Our grains are husked and polished, often ground, bleached, sifted, added to, mixed with a lot of other highly refined and processed stuff until it bears little resemblance to the food our digestive systems were designed to handle.
Think about sugar - it's so easy to get now, it's in almost everything we buy that's processed. But in the wild, sugar is IN other things. It has other components to it chemically, or it has to be physically extracted with effort. It's not so readily available.
Food groups.
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/C/Carbohydrates.html
Carbohydrates are called that because chemically they all have the same proportion of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Water is H2O. Carbohydrates have always got hydrogen and oxygen in water-like proportions. There are also the same number of carbon atoms as oxygen atoms.
Pure glucose is C6-H12-O6. If you juggle the atoms around a bit you can get, with the same formula, fructose (fruit sugar) and galactose (milk sugar). More complex sugars are built from blocks of these sugars. Sugars are soluble in water.
More complexity again comes when sugars are joined into long chains and other structures composed of many sugars. These are the starches and they are insoluble in water. Plants make glucose but store it as starch. Think of a potato plant - it makes glucose through photosynthesis, but stores what it makes in the large tubers under the ground. We dig these up, cook them and eat them. Classic comfort food, because our bodies an fairly easily digest them - we break down the longer molecules into water-soluble sugars and eventually into glucose, which our cells use as an energy source.
Not all carbs can be so easily broken down - not in human stomachs, anyway. Cellulose, which is the fibrous stuff used to keep cell walls in plants rigid, is still strictly a carb, but our bodies can't digest it. Horses can, but not too efficiently (which is why their poop is still so full of undigested straw). Cows and sheep do it better, because they have extra stomachs loaded with friendly bacteria to do a lot of the digestion for them. Various animals have all developed interesting ways to help them digest cellulose. I won't go into detail, a lot of these are gross.
Glucose that trickles in from a sustained-release kind of supply keeps our bodies ticking over at a fairly steady rate. However, eating sweet things especially if we binge on them is giving our bodies a sudden sugar 'hit' which then causes the pancreas to respond by releasing a lot of insulin, which we use to help our cells access the glucose. If the pancreas learns to over-react, eventually the cells get too accustomed to high insulin levels and it stops working so well. We then need to secrete more of it to get the same result. Eventually it can stop working entirely, or the pancreas can stop producing insulin, and then we have diabetes Type II.
We also get our energy from fat. All oils are fats too. It's just a matter of what temperature they are, as to whether they're liquid or not. Make it cold enough, all oils will solidify. Fat produces a different kind of energy, it's more concentrated. In really cold countries the diet is often high in fat because it keeps them going better, often on less food. Eventually, the fat gets broken down into glucose and our cells can then use it. And the reverse happens - if we have too much glucose in our blood and our cells have all they need for now, thank you very much, the excess doesn't get wasted, it gets converted into fat for storage. It gets "waisted" instead.
We also use some fats to make hormones. We need a certain amount of cholesterol for this, but our bodies can make all we need, we don't need to eat cholesterol to have enough. Our bodies break down old red blood cells and recycle the old haemoglobin into bile salts. From there we make cholesterol. Cholesterol ONLY comes from animal sources. So when you see a bottle of olive oil labelled "cholesterol-free" then the manufacturer is trying to treat you like an idiot. ALL vegetable-source oils are cholesterol-free. Almost all are monosaturates or polyunsaturates - good oils. Coconut oil and cocoa butter are exceptions. Also a tip - the more saturated a fat is, the higher its melting point. In other words, if it's liquid at fairly cool room temperatures, it's likely to be better for you.
The body will happily burn any kind of fat. But some fats get put in places which can make us sick. That's why we should substitute mono- or poly-unsaturated fats for the unhealthy kind.
Protein - it's what our muscles are made of. Also it's what the muscles of animals are made of, which is why we eat meat (unless we're vegetarian). There are also some non-animal sources of protein, but they're not so rich. You can also get protein in eggs and milk.
We can burn protein and convert it to glucose. People who starve themselves are often burning their own body muscles purely to keep their cells alive. This process also causes a build up of ketones in the body as a by-product, which is why a lot of dieters have bad breath. You can smell the ketones on them.
Other body processes work best when they have various minerals and vitamins in trace amounts. We need iron to make enough haemoglobin, for example. Without it we get anaemic and very tired because not enough oxygen is getting to our cells.
So in a healthy diet, we need a balance. In a weight-reducing diet, or the diet of anyone who wants to get back to the sort of diet our bodies are designed for, we substitute back to the more primitive foods. Brown rice. Lots of seed foods (beans, lentils, grains). Not too many nuts because you can easily get your daily allowance of oils that way. If the carbs you eat contain more cellulose, it just goes through you as fibre and doesn't get converted to glucose. But it still makes you feel full. That's why a lot of health foods for fibre include the stuff we usually throw away - bran, for example.
And the oils - while we might eat a certain amount of fat in our meat, back in the days when we hunted our meat, the animals also had to work harder. They weren't cosseted, fed and fattened up the way they are on our farms today. Animals in past millennia would have been leaner. Less animal fat to ingest, and also a lifestyle where we burnt up most of it anyway.
In Australia we can buy kangaroo meat. It's very rich in iron and is amazingly lean. You can't cosset a kangaroo, they're just too active.
Anyway, that's the quick lesson in diet and how our bodies use our food.
Armed with this, it's easier to understand the importance of those nutrition labels on our food.
Marg
