Diet Report 2: In Which Sugar Is Useless And Salt Is Delivered By Ninjas

Weekly Goals

This week my daily variations have been up and down like a yo yo. So I'm not sure what's in store for the weekly weigh in, guess it just means we'll all have to wait and see.

Of my goals for the last week I did quite well. I went over two days out of seven but on both occasions I had been out for a brisk walk at 3.5 mph so my net calories were lower than my gross intake, on one occasion by a considerable amount. As you can tell from the last sentence I achieved my walking quota and doubled it. I failed miserably to polish off the last of the Christmas beer, however, a lonely bottle of ale is waiting for me to inhale it at some time when I feel such consumption would be a good idea.

Has week two been a time for the iron to set into my soul and for my dieting to take a knock back as I hanker after forbidden provender? Well, no, almost the exact opposite in fact. I am finding large amounts of food after meeting my dietary requirements for the day tiresome and unnecessary. I am deeply enjoying the occasional dessert of fruit and cream. If something has a large number of frivolous calories I am minded not to buy it again (Sainsbury's Frozen Sweet & Sour Chicken with Egg Fried Rice, I'm looking at you).

(Don't) Give Me Some Sugar, Baby

By far the most marked difference between now and the beginning of the diet is my view of sugar. Before looking at what sugar, you know, actually does for/to you I regarded it as an inevitable component of tasty foods. I didn't have the world's sweetest tooth but I didn't actively dislike the stuff. I'm also not one of those people who believes that sugar is the devil. It is, however, utterly useless.

As everything we eat is likely to be carb-o-riffic anyhow chucking down pure carbs is a bit pointless. Particularly so when they're so fast burning they are more than likely going to overload your metabolism and end up getting turned into fat your body "helpfully" stores for "later". Obviously such a material has its uses, mountaineers for example, probably find it invaluable, but for the rest of us it's irrelevant, however it tastes.

For this reason I have started to groan with frustration whenever something contains any sugar at all. It's not much use to me, just a bunch of calorific nonsense that I'm going to have to account for and not be able to make up in cheese or cream later. I have started to find sugar boring.

And as for salt...

Beware The Salty Ninjas!

It's not salt per se that I object to, and I'm concentrating on losing weight not avoiding salt; one dietary mission at a time thanks. The thing is that when you're taking account of how much sodium is in everything you can't help but notice how bloody much of it there is when there surely doesn't need to be. It's like some looney salt arms race.

What I discovered in my researches is that the human body has no way to manufacture salt, apparently. That's why we quite like salty things because our body tells us that it needs salt to do stuff and the only way we can get any is to consume it. The only problem is that on a daily basis we only need a tiny amount of salt and the amount we end up eating because food ninjas secrete it in everything to have the marketing edge is way way more than it needs to be from a nutritional stand point.

Not that the people who make our food should be confused with people who care about our nutritional well being, of course. If they were then pure fat would be more readily available in a variety of forms without the addition of unnecessary sugar. Everything wouldn't come packed with salt. And many pointless foods made entirely of salted carbohydrate just wouldn't bother even existing.

You might take from this that I'm in a bit of a bad mood. Which is actually not true. My tongue is somewhat in my cheek (and has been checked for both salt and sugar before being allowed there). The points I raise are more a sort of amused look at how we have been exploited by people using our own biology to slip us rubbish in our foods. No wonder loads of people are fat, only nut cases like me go to the effort of breaking down our food into nutrient groups in order to see how much of what we're eating on a daily basis. Unfortunately, without that information our brains are always going to tell us to eat too much of the wrong stuff.

I'm off to finish my coffee (oh yes, caffeine, favourite remaining allowable vice) and contemplate some nice Saturday morning cheese on toast (full of salt of course but what isn't?).