January schmanuary…

January is, we’re told, the most depressing month of the year. People think it’s because it’s cold, dark and damp that we’re all so blue. And, of course, it doesn’t help that we’re all staring at huge debts and bellies after the Christmas splurge. But I think it’s got a lot more to do with the fact that we’re all trying to diet – and diets set us up to fail, and there’s nothing like failure to make us feel lousy.

I actually quite like January – it is the month of my birthday and my husband’s birthday, too. So there’s a lot of celebrating going on. I started a few days before mine, with lunch at Galvin at Windows (top floor of the London Hilton) with one of my best friends who also has a January birthday.

On the birthday itself Steve and I ate out at Gymkhana. Amazing! Go there - and eat the rose scented knicker bocker glory! I did. And then, a few days later, I ate the lion’s share of Indian sweets at another celebratory dinner with family.

After that, I decided drastic measures were needed. I’d missed a day of the 5:2 – a friend had come round with a bottle of Chablis and a box of chocolates and Steve had produced halibut with roasted vegetables followed by a stinky cheese platter.

So, this weekend, I thought I’d go back to trying the Harcombe Diet – which promises exponential weight loss, while NOT counting calories.

The catch is that you cannot eat any processed food, any fruit, cheese, milk, or any carbs (except for 50g raw weight of brown rice daily) for the first five days. Sometimes three days will be enough to kick start the regime. This baptism of fire phase is supposed to root out and eliminate issues like candida that cause us to crave all the foods to which we are addicted and which make us overweight.

It is an interesting diet. I managed days 1 and 2 without straying from the rules beyond a few (forbidden) salted almonds each day.

I was pleased with myself. Zoe Harcombe, author of the diet, says: “your body will come up with all sorts of excuses why you need to eat certain things – you don’t!” I ignored all those cravings. But it was hard. Amazingly, when carbs are this limited, I find myself stomach churningly hungry even after a massive chicken and ham omelette, or a lamb and pea keema.

So it was that, today, I slipped – and started thinking about those chocolates that Mary brought me. “Just one little chocolate” my cravings told me. “Just one little chocolate”.

Instead I had two ultra thin rice cakes with butter – not on the “allowed” list but not sugar either.

Then I had another one.

Then I ate the last two chocolate mint crisps from Christmas. And quickly shovelled one of Mary’s soft centres into my mouth for afters.

So – I have failed a diet that is extraordinarily hard not to fail.

And now I will feel like January is a depressing month. And I will have to do a 5:2 day or two so I can wear my favourite new clothes for our next blow out for Steve’s birthday next week…
Ho Hum...

The bitter sweet truth about sugar

I’m fond of telling people I don’t have a sweet tooth – “Oh no, not me,” I say. “Give me something savoury like cheese any day...”

But when I told a nutritionist about my typical breakfast – yogurt, sweetened with honey, with a sliced banana or mixture of fresh berries on top, she raised an eyebrow. “That’s one big sugar fix!” she said.

I had to admit it – the yogurt on its own is too sour for me. And even the banana isn’t enough to stop me wincing.

I also need a sweet fix at the end of the working day – around 7.0 pm, I will start craving a glass of wine, or picking at any pastries lying around in the kitchen.

To stop these cravings I need to stabilise my blood sugar so it doesn’t dip and set me thinking about sweet things – but that’s easier said than done.

Although I can probably monitor my sugar consumption quite easily, as I tend to eat fresh home cooked foods, and rarely deliberately add sugar to anything (the big exception being the honey on my yogurt), temptations to eat processed high sugar foods are ever present.

Nutritionists say we should get no more than 10% of our daily calories from sugars of all types (from jam, honey, fruit, juices and other added sugars) – that’s around 50g (12 ½ teaspoons) of sugar a day. But the average UK citizen consumes 38 kg of sugar in a year – 26 teaspoons and 400 sugar calories a day according to the World Health Organisation. It’s in everything – start reading the labels.

Obesity researcher Zoe Harcombe says: ‘Try to buy a bread without sugar in it, or a soup, or a sauce/dressing or a ready meal. Check your vitamin tablets and even your sausages! Don’t be surprised to see some form of sugar (eg dextrose or fructose) on the list of ingredients. I can count on one hand the number of cereals without sugar. It has found its way into virtually every fake (processed) food on the market. Why? Because it's a cheap filler, it prolongs shelf life, and it appeals to the human sweet tooth. Forget that we're supposed to eat food for its nutritional content - sugar is added for any reason other than because it makes a product healthy.’

Kath Dalmeny of Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, adds that ‘studies show that a processed, junk food diet is right up there with smoking and alcohol as a danger to our health.’

And Professor Robert Lustig, professor of clinical paediatrics at the University of California, and an expert in childhood obesity, says that sugar is behind the obesity epidemic and the huge rise in conditions such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s that are together killing more than 35 million people every year.

According to Professor Lustig sugar programmes us to eat more – by switching off the satiety hormone leptin that tells us we’re full. There’s even a biological reason why it does this – because when we were hunter-gatherers we needed to binge on sweet fruit at harvest time when there was an abundance of it, and that made up for the lack of fruit through winter.

But sugar in processed food is an anti-nutrient because it takes nutrients to digest it, and gives us nothing in return, says Zoe Harcombe. ‘Whereas we need fat and would eventually die without any fat in our diet, we need only 1tsp of sugar in our blood at any time and even a large apple will give us five times as much as that.’

The problem is that it’s hard to give sugar up – and that makes it very easy for marketing people to persuade us to eat more of it, never mind what it does to our health.

‘We all have an innate love of sugar and that’s what helped us seek out fruit when we lived as primitive hunter-gatherers,’ says Kath Dalmeny. ‘But now we’re surrounded by sugary foods – with sweet “treats” popping up to tempt us in the most unexpected aisles of the supermarket.

‘Never go shopping on an empty stomach – when you’re most likely to succumb to these sweet treats,’ Kath warns.

Sugar – in particular fructose -- gets stored as fat by the body when we cannot use it all up, and most of us are eating far more than we can use in energy.

I am going to start by swapping my honey for Xylitol – which is completely sugar free  - and my banana for berries, which aren’t so sweet... I’ve tried it before and it’s great. BUT, even then, I will still be pandering to my desire for something sweet, and nutritionists say I should be giving up on all sweet additives. Only then will I start to enjoy the natural flavours and sweetness of food.

Do healthy people really need to take statins?

A study this week has suggested we should all take cholesterol lowering statins once we hit the age of 50 – to reduce our risk of a heart attack. The research looked at individual trials (mostly funded by the drug companies who make statins, according to Zoe Harcombe, my favourite expert on this subject) and concluded that even when healthy people take statins, there is a lower risk of heart disease. 

But, as Dr John Briffa points out , a total of 500 healthy people have to take statins that they do not need for five years before one extra life is saved.  That would be fine if taking a statin was no different from eating a smartie every day – but it’s not. 

Zoe Harcombe explains: ‘These drugs work by slowing down the body’s production of cholesterol – and anything that stops the body doing something it is designed to do is serious and has side effects.  Muscle aches and pains are common, sometimes to the point of disability, and memory loss is also a big problem for a lot of patients. The drug works by blocking a key liver enzyme (HMG-CoA reductase) but also stops the production of CoQ10 – the body’s energy spark plug. This explains the muscle damage, and can be fatal as the heart has a significant need for CoQ10 – ironic!’

More to the point, though, do we really need to lower our body’s cholesterol production?

The British Heart Foundation says that high cholesterol is just one factor in heart disease – the trouble starts when a lot of these factors come together: smoking, obesity, hypertension and high cholesterol. Smoking is top of the list of heart risks. Cholesterol on its own is far less of a worry – and a red herring if your diet is healthy (ie free of processed foods and trans-fats). As Zoe says: ‘The body is designed to make cholesterol. If a woman gets pregnant, the body makes more cholesterol because we need a lot of cholesterol to make a healthy baby. If we have an operation or injury the body will make more cholesterol because we need cholesterol to repair the damaged cells. If we are ill or stressed or compromised in any way our body will make more cholesterol – fat and cholesterol are the major tool kits that the body has. It’s why our bodies make them. This debate boils down to one question – do you think that we would have evolved and survived over 3.5 million years with a design fault that meant our bodies are trying to kill us? Or, could it be that – given that the first medical description of a heart attack was in 1926 – this modern disease is caused by modern substances: processed food, stress, chemicals and smoking?’