No Junk Food for Me, Please!

Yesterday was one of those days when I hate even the word diet and feel like eating anything as long as  it is "forbidden". So, how about a nice pizza?

I don't consider it "junk food". It's just food. Not the healthiest choice for sure, but since it's not in my daily menu,  I can indulge once in awhile.

In fact, what is junk food?

Ice cream? Cakes? Chocolate?  Ho, ho, you're on a dangerous ground. Who doesn't enjoy from time to time something sweet and delicious?

I have  other criteria to reject food as "junk" and fast food and candy do not  automatically qualify.

If the food label includes more than 5 ingredients or if that food contains colorants and other dubious chemicals, trans fat, hydrogenated fat, "artificial" stuff, corn syrup, added fructose, that food is out of my hands and my shopping basket with the speed of light. Including carbonated sweet drinks, colas, sodas, "natural" fruit beverages, whatever the names are.
I'm not happy either with food containing MSG or "taste enhancer". But I don't think that if I eat once or twice food with MSG I'll get fat or I'll have one of those headaches.

I avoid like plague the "addictive" foods. Those packaged snacks, chips, biscuits, cookies and sticks that once you start eating them you can't stop until you finish them. They might be tasty and attractive but they're usually empty calories with a lot of salt or sugar or substitutes and dubious fat stuff.
Only exception: from time to time, we have a pop-corn evening. Pop corn, as long as it's not too salty, and doesn't have artificial aroma and colors it's quite healthy (fibers, minerals a.s.o)

I hate foods which  contain sugar (or some other sweet stuff) and should not, since they're not desserts, like tomato sauces, salad dressings, mustard, beans a.s.o. I simply don't understand the American preferences. Why on earth pour over some nice colorful tasty crunchy veggie salad a sweet dressing? What's wrong with just a bit of lemon, pepper and olive oil?

These are "junk food" and are bad for your health and weight.

Before embarking on the journey from Fat to Fit, 

get rid of the "ballast": junk food.

Checklist

Oh, No!

• Clean your cupboards, fridge and storage rooms. Get rid of any packaged snacks, chips, other dubious foods, carbonated sweet drinks. Donate them or better, just throw them away. Now! 
• If your family loves you, they have to give up too junk food. Fight, if necessary, for your right to be healthier.
• When shopping,  read carefully the labels. If it's "junk" put it back in the shelf.
• Don't buy food if the label includes more ingredients than you can count on the fingers of one hand.
• Have a healthy snack with you, to help you get over "snacks and chips" addiction. A piece of fruit, a healthy bar snack, a sandwich with whole wheat bread or non gluten bread and a bit of cheese, a cucumber or a paprika pepper, or best, a handful of nuts. Have a bottle of mineral water with you, all the time.
• Keep a diet journal, to help you stick to your decision. 
• More than anything else, tell yourself "I don't need this or that junk, I can do without it, I'm smart enough to do better. I really need to get rid of these  pounds and feel better"

The Science Behind

Ultra-Processed Foods are the True Killers

Everyday we read about the evils of processed foods, but it’s really the ultra-processed food that we need to be concerned about.
Processed foods with 1 to 3 ingredients aren't likely to cause harm, it’s the products with 10 to 20+ that should cause alarm.
Michael Pollan and Michael Moss Give us an interesting tour of the grocery store in this video.

The truth about fats: bad and good

Trans fats  .... occur naturally in meat, but their main dietary source is packaged baked products such as cookies, cakes, breads, and crackers, as well as fast foods and some dairy products. Trans fats were artificially created in the laboratory to provide cheap alternatives to butter. Food chemists found that they could solidify vegetable oil by heating it in the presence of hydrogen. ...Thus, solid vegetable fats such as shortening and margarine came into being. Today, trans fats are found not only in solid foods such as these, but also in foods that contain “partially hydrogenated oil.”
Trans fats are even worse for you than saturated fats. Not only do they increase your LDL cholesterol, but they also reduce your beneficial HDL cholesterol. There is no safe level of trans fats.

Salt in Health and Disease — A Delicate Balance

...
In view of the association of a high salt intake with hypertension and cardiovascular and renal disease, many countries have introduced population-based recommendations and initiatives to reduce salt consumption. Beginning in the early 1970s, Finland implemented population-wide initiatives to reduce salt intake.71 Between 1979 and 2002, the average 24-hour urinary sodium excretion decreased from more than 5200 mg per day (13.0 g of sodium chloride) to less than 4000 mg per day (10.0 g of sodium chloride) in Finnish men and from nearly 4200 mg per day (10.5 g of sodium chloride) to less than 3000 mg per day (7.5 g of sodium chloride) in Finnish women. Along with this reduction in sodium intake, there has been a reduction of more than 10 mm Hg in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure and a corresponding decrease of 75 to 80% in the rate of death due to stroke and coronary heart disease.....

Although it has been difficult to separate salt need from salt preference, current levels of salt consumption exceed salt need and are associated with adverse clinical outcomes. High salt intake is associated with high blood pressure and increased rates of cardiovascular disease.

Is fructose bad for you?

When fructose is joined to glucose, it makes sucrose. Sucrose is abundant in sugar cane, sugar beets, corn, and other plants. When extracted and refined, sucrose makes table sugar. In the 1800s and early 1900s, the average American took in about 15 grams of fructose (about half an ounce), mostly from eating fruits and vegetables. Today we average 55 grams per day (73 grams for adolescents). The increase in fructose intake is worrisome, says Lustig, because it suspiciously parallels increases in obesity, diabetes, and a new condition called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease that now affects up to one-third of Americans. ...

Virtually every cell in the body can use glucose for energy. In contrast, only liver cells break down fructose. What happens to fructose inside liver cells is complicated. One of the end products is triglyceride, a form of fat. Uric acid and free radicals are also formed.

None of this is good. Triglycerides can build up in liver cells and damage liver function. Triglycerides released into the bloodstream can contribute to the growth of fat-filled plaque inside artery walls. Free radicals (also called reactive oxygen species) can damage cell structures, enzymes, and even genes. Uric acid can turn off production of nitric oxide, a substance that helps protect artery walls from damage. Another effect of high fructose intake is insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes.

Are sugar substitutes worse than the real thing?

CNN: Okay - so would I be better off eating one small piece of candy made with real sugar, or a larger portion that is sugar-free?
Dr. Jampolis: Honestly I don’t think there is a correct answer.  In my opinion, if you consume it after a meal (not on an empty stomach), I would go by preference.  If you really enjoy a piece of chocolate with real sugar, having a small amount is fine. If you like the taste of sugar-free cherry candy, that’s OK.  As long as we consume things in moderation, I don’t think either option is harmful.

When we start talking about beverages (soda versus diet soda) it becomes more of an issue. Sugar-sweetened beverages can contribute hundreds of extra calories to the diet that we don’t fully compensate for. And many experts, including myself, feel that it significantly contributes to weight gain, especially metabolically toxic weight gain and metabolic abnormalities.

Are E numbers really bad for you?

Despite what you might think, when you research them in detail you find that most E numbers are good for you....
Well, let's start with a short explanation of what E numbers are. E stands for Europe, and the E number code relates to a set of EU rules about which foods can contain them and how much you should be able to consume in a day. For instance E284 boric acid can only be used in caviar, and E252 potassium nitrate (used in bacon and salami) has an acceptable level of daily intake (ADI) of 0-3.7% mg/Kg body weight. Many E numbers are very familiar and important to good food and nutrition: for instance E300 is vitamin C, E101 is vitamin B2, E948 is oxygen and E160c is paprika....

But what about the bad E numbers? E621 monosodium glutamate is anecdotally blamed for an extraordinary range of symptoms, but in fact if you grate parmesan on your pasta you are likely to be adding more glutamate to your meal than you'd ever find in an MSG-laden ready meal. There's a group of food colours called the 'Southampton Six' that have a small but proven association with hyperactivity in children, and which you might want to avoid. Sulphur dioxide (E220) can exacerbate asthma, although without it wine usually tastes foul and in any case it's been used in pretty much every bottle of wine produced since Roman times. ...

Food colours and hyperactivity

Research funded by the FSA has suggested that consumption of mixes of certain artificial food colours and the preservative sodium benzoate could be linked to increased hyperactivity in some children.
It is important to remember that hyperactivity is also associated with many other factors in addition to certain additives, so dietary advice may help manage hyperactive behaviour but may not be the total solution. Other factors include premature birth, genetics and upbringing.

The artificial colours are:
sunset yellow FCF (E110)
quinoline yellow (E104)
carmoisine (E122)
allura red (E129)
tartrazine (E102)
ponceau 4R (E124)

European Union. The list of authorised food additives and their conditions of use

Walk, Just Walk

It's Sunday, it's late morning and it''s raining a lot but my feet are telling me they feel like walking in the nearby beautiful park. Walking in the rain? Why not, I have an umbrella. The fresh hot coffee afterwards makes me already smile.

When I started the difficult road from fat to fit, I was in an extremely bad shape and was sure I didn't had the time or mindset or anything in my power to exercise.
Plus, I was convinced exercising is useless in a diet. Just eat less a.s.o.
Plus, I find jogging, aerobic and other "extreme" fitness chores even now boring. Sorry folks, I can't help it.

Then I've stumbled upon some interesting and useful science items on www and started my new life.
To make a long story short, you don't need extreme fitness (although if you do it, bravo for you).
Just walking for at least half an hour can help a lot.
But you have to do it every day. No use walking only in weekends.

Walking every day is not an easy thing to do in the beginning if you are a computer or TV freak, if you have a very busy office life or if you have quite a lot of excess fat (a nice way to say you're really too fat to move easily). You need outside help.
What really helped  me to keep moving, besides science, has been the South Beach Diet Forum.
Very supportive, excellent ideas and a lot of advice.

Just walking might be boring, if you don't have some friends to walk with. Here comes technology to the rescue. Try any mobile device with music, audio books or radio programmes.
Investing in an Omron Pedometer has been one of my best ideas so far. I've started very low, less than 2000 steps a day and increased the number from week to week.

In my experience walking is good for your feet and brain but it's not enough for your body.  You need more to feel fit and wit.
A bit of gymnastics will come naturally. Simple exercises like cycling now and then on a static bicycle, some exercises with small weights. Any kind of physical activity will do, in fact, including dancing, cleaning your house, shopping, gardening etc.
A sport, any sport, will do wonders for your body.
I've  been lucky that I and my husband are nuts about swimming. Must have been ducks in a previous life. We've enrolled in a swimming club (not easy to find and quite expensive in Bucharest but cheaper than doctors and medicine).
From time to time we  manage to find some pond, lake or sea to swim a whole day long.

A few days ago, I've analyzed the data in my daily journal.
Such a journal is extremely useful for your diet. Besides controlling better what you eat and drink, it's good to look from time to time at historic data. They can tell a lot, even  if you don't  have the basic knowledge of statistics and Excel.
For example, my journal  shows that the best recipe to put a pound on is to eat a bit more for several days while exercising too little or at all.

Checklist

• Start walking. Start with 20 minutes every other day and increase this from week to week. 
• Try to find a community of people helping each other to become fit to support you: a forum on www, some  friends, relatives, a club, a team.
• Put technology to work and invest in a mobile device with music or audio books or radio.
• Invest also in a pedometer (step counter) device. 
• Find other opportunities of physical activity, even if this means just cleaning your house or shopping.
• Try to find a sport you can afford and enjoy.
• Aim for at least 90 minutes daily of physical activity.
• Eat less 2-3 days a week (less than 1600 kcal but no less than 1200 kcal), eat good food like veggies, beans, fresh lean meats, fish, eggs, a bit of cheese, 1-2 portions of fruit a day, yogurt or kefir, some vegetable oil like sunflower and olive oils, nuts, whole grains. 
• No need to ruin yourself with fancy or exotic dishes. Stick to your local market and the traditional recipes.
• On days you eat or drink more than you'd need to (like a party or some emotional burst for ex.)  try to exercise a lot more. Dance, swim, walk as much as possible a.s.o. A couple of days will do the trick and bring you back on the path.
• Keep a "diet journal".

The Science behind it


Is diet or exercise more important in combating obesity?

"Diet and exercise has the same importance if you are trying to lose weight.
Research shows physical exercise on its own or diet on its own is not an effective weight
loss strategy, they need to be combined. Weight loss will only be achieved if energy input
(food and drink) is lower than the total energy expenditure ( activity of daily life and physical
activity). Research shows that to lose weight you need to exercise more than 60-90
minutes/day at moderate intensity if energy ( food and drink) intake is not modified."

Epigenetic Changes to Fat Cells Following Exercise

The cells of the body contain DNA, which contains genes. We inherit our genes and they cannot be changed. The genes, however, have 'methyl groups' attached which affect what is known as 'gene expression' -- whether the genes are activated or deactivated. The methyl groups can be influenced in various ways, through exercise, diet and lifestyle, in a process known as 'DNA methylation'. This is epigenetics, a relatively new research field that in recent years has attracted more and more attention.

All Fat Is Not Bad: Study Shows Exercise Creates "Good Fat"

"Our work provides greater motivation than ever to get out there and exercise," Stanford
said.
These studies suggest that even if you're not losing weight, exercise is still training your fat
to be more metabolically active; even if you don't see the results on the scale, you are still
improving your overall metabolism and therefore your health.

Long, Low Intensity Exercise May Have More Health Benefits Relative to Short, Intense Workouts

Standing and walking for longer stretches improves insulin sensitivity and blood lipid levels more than an hour of intense exercise each day does, but only if the calories spent in both forms of exercise are similar.