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Writer's picturegfmeade7

CRASH TEST TUMMIES


These days I get asked as much about diet as I do about cooking and with obesity at such high levels for all ages now it is a subject under serious scrutiny. When I was a child everyone was more or less skinny and in school there might be one or two kids with a bit more weight on them but that would be about it. Most of us progressed to adulthood lean and mean, even in my twenties I was still only nine stone, in my forties it became ten and now in my late fifties I am eleven which I hope to be my peak. Adults in their twenties now have jumped that traditional twenty year wait to fully filled out. For me there is a climate crisis inside our bodies too.


In my case it helped running around a kitchen for twelve hours or more for a living, still being sportive and eating sporadically but since retiring at fifty I have had to be careful with the eat/exercise balance. The old theory of calories in and calories out is not as simple as it once was. I have been studying more the complexity of weight gain in order to explain to others when I get quizzed. Genes play a huge part in the weight equation. People can eat a normal diet with the average calories intake and remain the same and others doing the identical regime just expand without the same energy burn rate.


The treatment of crash dieting is well proven now to be ineffective and depriving yourself of nutrition and trying to run off the calories can also be futile for some. Everyone’s body has its own individual metabolism formula and it is a mixture of both genes inherited from your DNA and your lifestyle. One size does not fit all when it comes to the diet industry yet they would have you believe it is. The food industry is guilty too by lacing products with addictive sugar, salts and fats never mind all the additives. The advertising industry then makes sure we buy them. Finally a sedentary work and play lifestyle is the final ingredient in this recipe for a life of misery.

The stigma for obesity has to be one of the cruellest with the language used being most derogatory. The medical world is changing that now with morbidly being changed to serious and important ones like success and results being amended to responses and reactions. Science and technology have made operations more of an option and the drug companies know it’s a holy grail to crack this market and I just heard of another one of late that is meant to work better than what has gone before drug wise. It certainly is a difficult circle to square and time is not on our side.


The last forty years have been one big failed experiment on humanity for food, diet and indeed fashion, the authorities, scientists and free market commerce have let us down big time. The public are as bamboozled as ever with what to eat. Kids are now being fed the same misinformation on their phones as they had on the TV in previous generations.


There have never been so many allergies in both kids and adults; this is not by accident but by design. It is going to take another two generations to turn the obesity ship around in the right direction but it is too late. The question is, has the world got the appetite to do it and are multinational companies prepared to lose billions in profits to facilitate this sea change? How much pressure can humanity put on business and governments to make their cry for help heard? It has to be up there with the climate crisis in my opinion. When I talk to someone who has had to deal with obesity their wholes lives by unfortunately having had the reverse lottery of unlucky genes and societal circumstance dictate a torturous existence then you have to wonder where is the solution ever going to come from?

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