Fire crackers and prawn crackers - being mindful about food choices

It's Sunday and indeed the sun was out today so it wasn't too difficult getting early out of bed. I was going with a friend to Chinatown to see the Chinese New Year celebrations. On the way there I managed to find a suitable breakfast in Pret a Manger consisting of two boiled eggs, some spinach, a bag of nuts and a black cup of coffee.

After the parade we wanted to get a bit of lunch and I ordered some stir fried duck with spring onions and ginger along with some green tea. We also had some prawn crackers because it was a special day and we both felt we had been eating clean enough over the week to chose a snack that was less nutritious. 

I am telling you about my dietary choices of today because I wanted to share one of the strategies that has been working for me for a long time now: I eat clean enough to sustain my health (including my weight) but I also allow myself to eat other things occasionally as long as I am being mindful about my choices. This means that I don't feel bad about eating a bit outside of what I know is best for me as long as the detrimental effect is not too big and I don't do it too often. It's about finding the balance between what is good for you and not denying yourself things. It requires that you are honest with yourself, though, and don't talk yourself into something you will regret after. So when you are tempted you should think carefully about whether this choice is OK for you right now in relation to your overall state and your goals. Be mindful about it. If I had chosen a croissant and coffee with milk for breakfast I wouldn't have taken the prawn crackers. Not today anyway.

This is not as hard as it sounds. As you learn about nutrition and experience what the right foods do for your health and well-being, you will find yourself becoming very selective with what you eat outside your normal diet and perhaps end up abstaining from some foods altogether because they make you feel bad or keep you from reaching your goals. Remember, it's not helpful saying to yourself that you can never eat prawn crackers again, just say to yourself "I don't need those prawn crackers today. Perhaps next time." Try it. It really works. 

Anyway, I just wanted to share this with you and I really enjoyed both the prawn crackers and the fire crackers. Happy New Year :-)

Do not eat raw

A lot of vegetables actually contain small amounts of natural toxins to ward of insects and pests. If you eat a varied diet and don't overeat any particular vegetable it is very unlikely that you will be poisoned. Eating a couple of raw mushrooms while you cook or using spinach in a salad occasionally shouldn't be a problem, but if you eat them often it is suggested that you cook them.

Here is a list of some vegetables that you should cook before eating them. Don't stop eating them. Just follow the guidelines and keep using them because once the toxins have been removed they are really good for you!).


Bamboo shots
Contains cyanogenic glycosides which can lead to cyanide poisoning that can cause coma with seizures, apnea and cardiac arrest. Canned bamboo shots can be consumed without further cooking, but fresh bamboo shots should be cooked in slightly salted water for 8-10 minutes to remove the toxin. 

Beans and lentils
Most beans and lentils contain lectins which can cause an upset stomach. Fresh beans: Cook at least 10 minutes at high temperature. Dried beans and lentils: Soak at least 6 hours and then cook at least 10 minutes at high temperature. Canned beans and lentils: Can be consumed without further cooking. Lupini beans should soak at least 7 days, changing the water every day.

Mushrooms
Even the edible kinds of mushrooms contain toxins so it is always a good idea to cook them.

Rhubarb leaves
You can eat the stalk, but do not eat the leaves as they contain oxalic acid and anthraquinones that can cause severe poisoning and lead to fatal kidney damage.


More about the toxins in vegetables:
Food Science Network - University of Guelph, Canada

Why you should eat non-starchy vegetables

There are 3 macronutrients: Carbohydrate, Protein and Fat.

All vegetables are carbohydrates and carbohydrates turn into glucose. Protein also turns into glucose, but through a much longer process. Fats turn into fatty acids.

Here are two really important facts:

1. Glucose requires insulin to be stored as body fat. 
2. Fatty acids require glycerol-3-phosphate to be stored as body fat. 

In other words: If you avoid eating foods that contains glycerol-3-phosphate and foods that causes your insulin levels to increase, your body is unable to store body fat. As I said, pretty important facts.

You might have heard about glycaemic load (GL). GL is a measurements for how quickly the carbohydrate in a particular food will cause your blood sugar levels to rise, or how aggressive a food is.

Here is another important fact: Starchy vegetables are quite aggressive foods and they also contain glycerol-3-phosphate, that is, the two substances that the body needs to store body fat. That is a really good reason to avoid them, I think.

Let's focus on what we can eat instead: You can eat all the non-starchy vegetables that you want. It is not possible to over-eat non-starchy vegetables because they are so filling and you want to eat so many of them that you are too full for starch and sweeteners (more about those soon).

So, just in case you are still not convinced, here are some of the reasons for eating lots of non-starchy vegetables:

1. you avoid gaining more body fat
2. you heal your body fat metabolism so that it works to keep you slim
3. you reduce the risk of becoming insulin-resistant (type 2 diabetic)

You can read more about the two first points here, more about type 2 diabetes here and you can find a list over non-starchy vegetables in the Food list.

The above is based on Jonathan Bailor's brilliant book "The Smarter Science of Slim: What the Actual Experts Have Proven About Weight Loss, Health, and Fitness" (2012). Here is the link to www.thesmarterscienceofslim.com - it's never too later to reverse the damage to your body.

Fat metabolism and hormones - why we get fat

Without food we die. But we also die if we eat too much of the wrong food. Not easy being a human. Particularly when our bodies have not evolved at the same speed as our technical and creative skills. Today we can buy all sorts of processed food that are really (and I mean *really*) bad for us.

This also means that a lot of different people (most of them trying to make money of you) will tell you, what you should and shouldn't eat and how you can lose the body fat you accumulate eating the wrong kind of food. Typically they will tell you to eat less and exercise more. But this is treating the symptoms, not the cause. And does it really work?

Like me you have probably been taught that the amount of body fat is determined by how many calories you eat and how much you exercise. Because the law of thermodynamics says so! But this is actually wrong. It is our hormones that determine whether we store or burn body fat. And we can improve our hormones by eating the right kind of food and plenty of it. 

I'll repeat that because it is really important: Your body does not count calories but reacts to hormonal signals. If the hormone levels are off and/or your body is unable to respond appropriately to the hormonal signals then you will gain body fat.

The human body is not a machine (or a temple!) but a complicated and delicate organism with a multitude of interconnected systems designed to keep equilibrium. One of those amazing systems is our internal calorie controller: the fat metabolism system which automatically balances out what we take in and what we burn off to keep us at our set-point weight (metabolic homeostasis).

The hormone insulin is responsible for getting energy into our cells. Without insulin the body cannot utilise the energy from the food you ingest. This is the problem for type 1 diabetics. Their body is unable to produce insulin and without insulin injections they would starve to death no matter how much they eat because their body is not able to access the energy.

In a normal functioning body insulin is activated as part of the digestion process to communicate to our body that energy is on its way and that we therefore do not need to use any stored energy in form of body fat. When we have finished eating the insulin disappears from the blood stream again telling the body that if it needs more energy, it will have to use the stored energy, i.e. burn body fat.

Quit the sugar

Basically you should avoid sugar, sweeteners and starch (anything turning into something that ends on -ose). Our bodies do not need it and a surplus of these removes our ability to burn fat. Think about it: For about 99.8% of our evolutionary history we did not eat any starch or sweeteners. We have evolved to eat non-starchy vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, legumes, seafood and meat.

If we reduce the intake of insulin-triggering food and drinks we remove the hormonal clog and lower our set-point weight because there is no insulin to communicate to the body that it should store body fat. Let me repeat that, because it is so beautifully simple: If you avoid food and drinks that trigger insulin your body will be able to respond properly to hormonal signals, your set-point weight will be lowered and you will *automatically* burn more body fat.

When we eat sugar our blood sugar level shoots up and extremely high amounts of insulin are triggered. If we eat starches and sweets regularly these abnormal high levels of hormones makes the fat metabolism system think that abnormal high levels of body fat are normal. This leads to a raised set-point weight, the body's homeostasis is set too high. It also makes our fat metabolism system unable to respond properly to the hormonal signals because the gauge is off. And if the insulin stays in the blood the body never gets told that it needs to burn body fat, again because the fat metabolism only looks at hormones - not calories. We then say there is a metabolic dysregulation or a hormonal clog. It is this clog that we want to remove so that we can burn body fat.


Read more: "The Smarter Science of Slim: What the Actual Experts Have Proven About Weight Loss, Health, and Fitness", "Escape the diet trap" and "Why we get fat and what to do about it" 

Sugar makes you fat

Without food we die. But we also die if we eat too much of the wrong food. Not easy being a human. Particularly when our bodies have not evolved at the same speed as our technical and creative skills. Today we can buy all sorts of processed food that are really (and I mean *really*) bad for us.

This also means that a lot of different people (most of them trying to make money of you) will tell you, what you should and shouldn't eat and how you can lose the body fat you accumulate eating the wrong kind of food. Typically they will tell you to eat less and exercise more. But this is treating the symptoms, not the cause. And does it really work?

Like me you have probably been taught that the amount of body fat is determined by how many calories you eat and how much you exercise. Because the law of thermodynamics says so! But this is actually wrong. It is our hormones that determine whether we store or burn body fat. And we can improve our hormones by eating the right kind of food and plenty of it.

Basically you should avoid sugar, sweeteners and starch. Our bodies do not need it and a surplus of these removes our ability to burn fat. Think about it: For about 99.8% of our evolutionary history we did not eat any starch or sweeteners. We have evolved to eat non-starchy vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, legumes, seafood and meat.

If you need to add some sweetness there are other sweeteners you can use instead of sugar.

The above is based on "The Smarter Science of Slim: What the Actual Experts Have Proven About Weight Loss, Health, and Fitness", "Escape the diet trap" and "Why we get fat and what to do about it"