Most of us want to live healthier lives, lose a little bit (or a lot) of weight, and generally feel better about the food we put into our bodies.
After decades of portion control and counting
calories we still consume lots of empty calories and are becoming a nation of
fat people.
If we don’t seriously and effectively confront it, we may become a
nation of inert, unhealthy, unproductive fat people by the middle of the 21st century.
One does
not need a degree in science to understand why it happens. Diet fatigue and
diet failure happen for a reason. If you restrict how much we can eat you are
likely to end up with the following pattern. You take a break, and start again
later, take another break, start again later and so on.
Even if lose weight,
you will regain your weight or more, when you jump right back to eating “normal”
(pre-diet) size meals.
Weight loss industry today has done so much marketing today that everyone is running behind them madly. This industry will always be at a profit and the profit will increase day by day.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, in America today, we are surrounded by junk food, which is usually extremely high in added sugars. And even worse, this food is often easier to prepare and more accessible than healthy options, like fruits and vegetables.
ReplyDeleteIf we fail to change the course of the nation's obesity epidemic, the current generation of young people may be the first in American history to live shorter, less healthy lives than their parents.
ReplyDeleteGrowing up, I had a horrible education on food portions and the right things to eat. Yeah, my mom would nag me about calories and we never had any real snacks or condiments in the house. Everything was “lite” or reduced calories. I didn’t really understand how to eat right until I went abroad and realized just how big American portions are. If you grow up in a household that isn’t strict about eating healthy, it’s much more difficult to get the food discipline if it didn’t come from your parents. It takes time, but slowly reducing portions and writing down what you eat is what helped me.
ReplyDeleteThe side effect of technological advances and increased national wealth is that the food we consume looks less and less like what is actually grown and ‘clean’. As a result, parts of the world which are less economically advanced have less of these health issues because they are still eating the way the Western world did decades ago. It is the paradox of industrialization and the pros and cons which follow the modernization of food production.
ReplyDeleteThe side effect of technological advances and increased national wealth is that the food we consume looks less and less like what is actually grown and ‘clean’. As a result, parts of the world which are less economically advanced have less of these health issues because they are still eating the way the Western world did decades ago. It is the paradox of industrialization and the pros and cons which come with more technologically advanced food production.
ReplyDelete