Healthy foods vs. easy foods

I ate a chocolate bar last night. Instead of picking up the bunch of grapes I had purchased, I opted for the delights of a Cadbury Double-Decker.

Yesterday I had a slice of cake and shoved the two apples in the fruit bowl to the back of the kitchen counter so I couldn’t see them quite so well.

The day before I opted for a takeaway, convenient and delicious, whilst the salad I had every intention of eating turned brown in my fridge.

Why do I do this? Why do I choose to feed myself with food that doesn’t nourish me? Why do I put up with the discomfort of being pounds heavier than I am comfortable with? Why do I resist being active and instead sit on my sofa and watch the telly?

Why do I do this when all around me in my social media timeline feeds, the newspapers, magazines, daytime telly programmes, and on the news, I am told of the dangers of being overweight. I am sold this eating plan and that diet and this promise and that nirvana of how to get a perfect body – and I still make choices that are the exact opposite.

There are thousands of nutritionists out there in the world selling their health advice. Even your average GP – whose medical training will at best have included probably 2 hours on the topic of ‘nutrition’ - will lecture about the need to eat a balanced and moderate diet. We all know this, and yet in the US and UK – and indeed many other Western European countries – the number of obese people as a proportion of the population is at its highest. In fact, obesity is one of the main co-morbidity factors in our society’s death rate and is thought to be one of the key factors for cancer development in the body.

Was it the rise of manufactured and processed food? Is it the industrialisation of food production on a massive scale? Is it just a biological brain-stem instinct dating back to when we were apes and it made total sense to gorge on any good stuff you came across because lean times were always just around the corner?

I’m asking these questions now because I know of someone who is on her third round of cancer treatment and only now is she seriously considering how she needs to nourish her body. The diet plans and the food regimes in order to ‘starve’ her cancer, as one guru, ex-cancer-sufferer refers to it as are rigorous in the extreme. They are complicated and precise and require a considerable amount of attention to work through and even more willpower and discipline to follow. They strike me as being the ‘SAS’ version of eating plans! But this person is doing them – and good for her I say. 

You see, this is what got me thinking about all those questions up there; because this person, in the midst of her sadness at losing her health, is asking these questions too and the heartbreaking aspect of this is that she knows she should have been asking them much earlier in her life, probably.

So why do I act against my own health and well-being? It’s a topic that I have decided to explore in more detail in my latest book - "Your Life in Their Hands – Where Does the Responsibility Lie?: Exploring the Partnership Between You and Your Doctor – and the Relationship You Have with Yourself"

Are you taking responsibility for your health or expecting the medical profession to take responsibility for your health and wellbeing?

Buy the book now: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Your-Life-Their-Hands-Responsibility/dp/B09LWGXYTH/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=your+life+in+their+hands+B09LWGXYTH&qid=1637316491&sr=8-1