As already said, packaged and processed foods contain a lot of sugar – avoiding eating that will help keep you slim, or help you lose weight.
The US has an additional problem – HFCS – this stuff is particularly evil for the human body, and seems to be in almost every processed food sold in the US, due to the ability to buy laws there.
Cutting out sugar is really really hard. Particularly in tea and coffee. One trick I used is to have a rubber band around my wrist – and any time I wanted something with sugar, I snapped it against the inside of my wrist. Ouch! It helped associate the desire for sugar with pain. Worked for me, anyway.
I lost 10 Kg recently, down to a BMI of 23.5, after 7 years of (over) eating my wife’s fantastic cooking daily. I’ve found the way to do it is to eat less. All the rest is just talk and rationalization in terms of losing fat from your body.
My biggest motivation (other than slowly turning into a fatter guy than I like to see In the mirror) was that I’ve been wearing the same set of custom made motorcycling leathers since 1998 and I could barely get them on. They’ve been maintained and repaired for 25 years, and are only the second set I’ve needed for street riding in my lifetime. They still look fine, they’d cost at least $2000 to replace and new ones take years to break in. So I lost weight instead and now they fit well again.
Problem solved, and I can also carry 25 minutes more fuel in the plane before reaching the plane’s gross weight 
Cutting out sugar is really really hard
That surprises me. I went from 3 sugars in tea to zero in a week or two, and many others have too. The average British builder has 6 sugars in his tea One does it gradually.
I lost 10 Kg recently, down to a BMI of 23.5, after 7 years of eating my wife’s fantastic cooking. I’ve found the way to do it is to eat less.
Impressive!
For sure; every other way is way down the list. Exercise does dramatically improve quality of life (mobility, energy, etc) in both short term and equally importantly in one’s later years, but you don’t immediately lose weight through it (unless grossly obese but then everything is hard), partly because muscle weighs more than fat.
The thing few realise is that changing what one eats drives a different kind of gut bacteria (the above video mentions that) and the result is that eating differently affects one’s weight out of proportion to the weight of food consumed. Weight gained via junk is very hard to get rid of. For example if you eat 200g a day of some junk (e.g. a Mars bar) your weight will go up way more than if you ate 200g of plant matter of the same “calorie value” (which will have a negative effect on weight). I find this very clear by monitoring weight daily.
Today’s cakes come in massive slices – probably 3x heavier than say 30 years ago. One of those a week sets you back so far that it will take a crazy reduction in normal food intake (and smoking helps, to depress appetite) to keep weight even.
Meat is similar though not as bad as sweets. I eat no red meat but eat fish on trips (because decent veg is hard to get when travelling; commercial catering doesn’t really go for that because people don’t value that kind of food) and always put on 1-2kg over a week, which then takes several weeks to get rid of.
The mushrooms?
I was on a course the other week where it was argued that we should stop looking at weight as a modifiable risk factor for health, as so few people were capable of losing it!
Peter wrote:
Guess what the overwhelming winning answer was?
Looks like a yummy breakfast to me, except perhaps the green stuff in the background, LOL !!
Actually the winner was the tomatoes
I would have expected the mushrooms too.
I was on a course the other week where it was argued that we should stop looking at weight as a modifiable risk factor for health, as so few people were capable of losing it!
I find that unbelievable. From the purely “keep it to PC and avoid hassle” POV of a GP who cannot tell a patient that most of his/her issues are due to them being 150kg, it makes sense, but is totally perverted.
Why people can’t lose weight easily is another debate. A lot of it is peer group acceptance and encouragement. I’ve been told that if one in the group loses a lot of weight, they also lose most of their friends, although I suspect that’s highly “gender dependent” But there are other factors e.g. you need a partner buy-in because nobody will cook two different meals.
Actually you can lose weight easily, by eating plant matter instead of the junk. The reason why weight loss is hard is because people are unwilling or unable to make that substitution, and if you just eat less you go hungry and raid the larder/fridge/whatever. Once it is made, it is easy. Dropping meat and dairy makes it easier still – shitake mushrooms are a great meat substitute.
I would have guessed dropping the boudin noir. Black pudding is not to everyone’s taste. A bit like marmite.
The bangers?
The tomatoes are about all I would have wanted from that plate.
The context of the quote was somewhat specific: knee replacement surgery. The argument went that if you force people to try to lose weight before surgery, for the majority of people this either means never having surgery, or waiting and usually putting more weight on before the surgeon gives in – if joints collapse beyond a certain degree then surgery becomes more complex and you can’t recover function so you have to make a ‘now or never’ decision. Patients with severe arthritis tend to sit around in real pain until their surgery, which can’t be conducive to weight loss… So why not just crack on?
That’s not the same as arguing that GPs should not be involved in promoting healthy lifestyles because it’s futile, though even there I would ask about cost-effectiveness. If the NHS budget / your health insurance is being spent on paying GPs to spend lots of time nagging people about their weight, I think it’s reasonable to ask whether it works and whether it’s good value for money. My own view is that the funds might be better spent on town planners and schools.
