The Full Diet

Highlights

perhaps you eat cereal and toast for breakfast, a sandwich and juice for lunch and pasta for dinner – a diet often considered completely normal – you will have consumed a large amount of sugar that day, maybe the equivalent of more than 40 teaspoons. For context: the body needs the equivalent of 1 teaspoon in the blood at any one time to function well.

This means that the more bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, crackers, cereal, crisps and biscuits that you eat, the more sugar will end up in your blood and the more insulin will be sweeping, all the time, to store that sugar as fat. The result is that you gain weight.

Margarine, which, until the mid-twentieth century, had been mandated by law in certain US states to be dyed pink or other offputting colours to indicate it was an unnatural food, now became the ‘healthy’ choice.

there is a limit to how much thick, creamy Greek yogurt you can eat because it is a food containing natural fats, so it makes you feel full.

sugar makes us fat; naturally occurring fats in meat, fish, olive oil, dairy, nuts and seeds do not.

we are eating food with long lists of ingredients, which are so far removed from what has been eaten through most of human history that sometimes it is not clear to your body whether you are actually eating food at all.

Disturbed, poor-quality sleep results in high insulin levels the next day – in other words, it puts you in fat-storing mode.

Poor sleep also results in hunger hormones running high,

low-calorie dieting puts you in an unrelenting fight with your body’s biochemistry. When it’s a question of willpower versus hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, your biology will win every time.

Two foods, with the same calorie content. But an egg is an egg and a diet yogurt is nineteen ingredients combined by food engineers to tick the ‘low-calorie’ box that shoppers are looking for.

Protein-rich, fullness-boosting foods include eggs; meat; fish and shellfish; nuts and seeds; dairy, including milk, cream, Greek or natural yogurt and cheese; tofu, legumes and beans, such as chickpeas and lentils.

you also produce insulin when you eat protein, so too much protein will similarly lead to weight gain.

we can reframe foods like sandwiches, breakfast cereal, pasta, biscuits, cakes and pastries – as Hunger in a Packet.

Today, we can easily fall into the habit of continually eating, snacking and grazing, but the human body was simply not designed to deal with constantly incoming food.

This break from having to digest and metabolize incoming food gives the body an opportunity to carry out other essential functions, such as reducing levels of inflammation, making new brain connections and repairing and maintaining the body.

It’s not possible to outrun a bad diet.

First, the energy stored in your muscles (300 calories-worth) will be used, then your liver fuel (1,000 calories). Once you have used up this stored energy, you will then start to use your third fuel tank, body fat, where most of the excess sugar from the biscuits has ended up. But getting through the first 1,300 calories could mean exercising for a few hours, which isn’t realistic for most of us.

a vicious cycle has developed. Eating a high-sugar diet leads to insulin resistance. Insulin resistance leads to high insulin levels. High insulin levels promote fat storage and weight gain. Weight gain increases levels of inflammation in the body, which drives even more insulin resistance.

exercise reduces insulin resistance, breaking you free from this vicious cycle.

The link between exercise and weight loss is the melting away of insulin resistance. Along with choosing low-sugar foods and having an Eating Window, exercise supports you to reduce your insulin levels.

Cortisol causes weight gain because it makes the body resistant to insulin. This makes insulin levels shoot up to try to overcome the body’s resistance to it.

if you are sleep deprived, insulin (the fat controller) will run high the next day and you will be in fat-storage mode.

In one research study, after just one night of inadequate sleep, the group who had slept for four hours ate 22 per cent more food the next day compared to the group who had slept for eight hours.

in the 1970s, about 7 per cent of the country were, by medical definition, classified as obese. This figure has quadrupled in a generation – today obesity affects more than one in four adults with a further 36 per cent classified as overweight. Taken together, two-thirds of us now have a weight problem. Yet almost everyone in those 1970s photographs was lean.

Something has profoundly changed. And it isn’t our genes.

On the whole, eating took place at a table, usually with other people.

Eating usually happened at set, defined mealtimes. We then waited until the next meal to eat again, affording us Eating Window micro-closures

slim appearance was not down to home chefs, personal trainers, specialist knowledge or unusual resources. Rather, they were regular everyday people who simply lived in a food landscape that suited their genes.

In fact, research suggests that sweet taste might be even more alluring than cocaine, with laboratory rats choosing to drink sweetened water over a hit of intravenous cocaine when given a choice between the two.

laboratory rats trained to expect an electric shock in association with eating UPF like cake and chocolate nevertheless kept on eating it despite the threat of the shock.

We know, however, that UPF is in fact ‘inconvenience’ food: eating it results in weight gain and type 2 diabetes, as well as the daily discomfort of bloating, headaches, lack of energy and low mood. It’s inconvenient to worry about what to wear and where to shop for clothes. It’s inconvenient to be nervous about social occasions. It’s inconvenient to feel low and lacking in confidence. It’s inconvenient to be uneasy around certain people who might make unkind comments. And it’s inconvenient to use your precious time on doctors’ appointments and pharmacy visits.

These ingredients are not the right fuel for your body. They are synthetic, industrially produced chemicals masquerading as food, which cause weight gain and health problems and which do not support your body to run in top condition. Be kind to yourself. You deserve better.

the 140 teaspoons of sugar a week that would become the normal way of eating.

‘Your words become your actions; your actions become your habits; your habits become your values; your values become your destiny.’

For many of us, childhood upsets were soothed with food – a tantrum consoled with a bag of sweets, a fall from the swings made better by an ice cream.

might have taught you to respond to sadness or stress by eating.

The foods that we learn to soothe ourselves with are usually sugary and ultra-processed. They make us feel better because they elicit a rush of the brain chemical (neurotransmitter) dopamine in the brain’s reward centre.

if you eat an average-sized portion of boiled potatoes (about 150g), the effect on your blood sugar levels will be the equivalent of 9 teaspoons of sugar.