Obesity

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Shift in Food Habits and Weight Gain

24.     The role assigned by Nature to food for fueling the body machine has changed for the worse. Food is now much more than the fuel that keeps us going. Our taste buds rule our eating habits. We look to be lavished with new and more exotic dishes to satiate our taste buds. The notion of cuisines, the idea that food is something to experiment with, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Every meal now is a culinary adventure, and nothing is more annoying for the modern housewife than to be able to constantly surprise and delight her demanding family with newer dishes and recipes.

25.     Comparing active lifestyles of our forefathers to our present day sedentary lifestyles, our energy consumption has dropped to a fraction of what it used to be. Wrongfully, our diets have shifted from natural and healthy whole foods in favour of energy-rich higher calorie unhealthy foods mostly from refined flour loaded with fat, sugar, salt and chemicals. This shift from healthy foods has led to growing waistlines and obesity – serious enough to be declared as a global pandemic (globesity) by the World Health Organisation.

26.     To regain lost health, we must eat the way Nature intended us to, as our forefathers. Our digestion, absorption, distribution and elimination processes have not changed in 100 years – only our food choices have adversely changed due to aggressive, misleading advertising and promotion of highly processed and refined junk foods by the food industry whose primary motif is simply to make profit.

27.     Remember that our food preferences, desires, cravings and loves are literally hardwired into our basic instincts for survival and safety. What we eat, directly or indirectly affects all our hormones and neurotransmitters, which in turn influences our energy levels, moods, food cravings, stress levels, sleep habits and inherited genetic traits.

28.     A diet high in fat, refined starches, sugar and salt leads to weight gain and increases the risk of obesity. Carrying excess weight does not just increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, infertility etc. etc; it is also associated with fatigue, low self-esteem and poor physical and mental performance. So choose your foods wisely. Avoid highly salted and sweetened processed foods which are also full of unhealthful chemical additives and devoid of protective nutritional factors. Good news is that the addictive taste for sugar and craving for salt is an acquired one, which means that with determination it can be replaced by a new health-giving habit.