Food Is Not The Enemy

Our relationship with food is primal and complex.

We need to eat to live, but modern convenience combined with sedentary jobs means we often eat more than we need or food which does not nourish us.

As children, our mothers and others often "loved" us with food, or we learned ways to satisfy emotional needs with food and if those habits continued into adulthood, we find ourselves eating not for hunger, but for other reasons.

If you have been 'dieting' for many years, you may be surprised at how quickly you regain weight after the 'diet' has ended and how you manage to gain a little more each time.

You have effectively been teaching your metabolism to become more efficient at fat storage.

For long-term, sustainable fat-loss that you can maintain once you reach a healthy weight range is most effective when you examine your relationship with food and make some changes about the way you think of food in your life and in your body.

You may be used to the following kind of thoughts:

• food is a temptation
  
• food means being out of control
• food means gaining weight
  
• food means wanting things I can't have
• food gives me comfort
  
• food me guilty
• food is the enemy.

Well stop right there!

Shifting your thinking around food will shift your experience of food.

Try these thoughts for a week and notice the difference you experience:

• food means energy
• food means strength
• food means having enough vitality to work
• food means not getting tired before the end
• food means I have what I need
• food means brainpower
• food means muscle
• food is my best friend

Working with a food diary, without making any changes to what you usually eat, gives you a more accurate map of what you're currently doing. Don't judge, just record.

When you really know where you are, you know what to do to get to where you want to be.

The Perfect Omlette

This omlette recipe is so versatile you can fill it with any veggies you like and eat it for breakfast, lunch or dinner (but not all in one day! ;)

Ingredients:
2 - 3 eggs, one yolk
1 - 2 cups in total of vegetables, chopped/diced to same size pieces
small sprinkling of grated cheese (optional)

Choose from mushrooms, celery, bok/pak choy, tomato, capsicum, coleslaw mix (yes it's great cooked!) spinach, zucchini, onion, or any other vegetable you can chop up and put in it.

Some tips and tricks for the perfect omlette, every time:

• Whisk or beat your egg mixture until there are bubbles sitting on top
• Make sure your pan, preferably non-stick with a spray of olive oil, is hot.
• Pre-cook the veggies as they won't cook through in the omlette.

Set vegetable aside, wipe the pan and re-spray with olive oil

Reduce the heat to medium and add the egg mixture to the pan.

Use your spatula to gently scrape the middle of the omlette, allowing the mixture to fill in the spaces.

Give the egg a couple of minutes to cook then add the veggie mix to one half of the omlette, sprinkle the cheese and flip the other side over to cover the veggies.

Turn off the heat, give it another couple of minutes and serve.

As Julia Childs, played by Meryl Streep, would say... "Bon appetite!"

Fresh Is Best

This article by Pauls Goodyer reviews The End Of Overeating by David Kessler, a former commissioner with the US Food and Drug Administration.

Kessler argues that there’s something going on in food manufacturing that’s conditioning us to overeat. He calls it hyper-palatability and, put simply, it’s the creation of moreish flavours in food that so stimulate the appetite that they override the body’s normal controls to stop eating.

Kessler, a Harvard trained doctor and lawyer - and former overeater - wanted to understand why he and so many other people had such trouble resisting foods high in fat, sugar and salt. His search for answers resulted in The End of Overeating, a book that looks at emerging research into food addiction and concludes that, for many of us, highly flavoured foods oversupplied with fat sugar and salt, are too easy to overeat.

If you find it difficult to resist the temptation of eating too much when you indulge in take-away or restaurant food, you may be surprised to learn how much more goes into these "foods" than the same thing prepared by you at home.

Fresh food really is the best for you, you know what's in it, you have control of what you add to it and learning to enjoy the natural flavours of food can be a delightful new taste sensation.

Eat well, live well, love well.