Nourish your body

After last week’s in-depth post on eating real food, why dieting doesn’t work and what to do instead – I wanted to follow up with something simple and practical.

I love digging into the science, and I love mindset stuff – but it means little until you back it up with action. And I’m a huge fan of small, simple actions that will create change – because that’s how you get momentum.

One of the easiest ways of improving your diet is to swap certain items you use in cooking.

This process of swapping ingredients over can take a bit of trial and error, and some time to discover what will stick versus what feels like more hassle than it’s worth.

I don’t have much tolerance for things that taste like feet, so if I can tolerate a swap then the odds are you can too. Most of the ingredients I list below taste just as good as what you’re swapping them for – or in many cases, taste better!

I’m vegetarian but not vegan, so one or two of my swaps below won’t be suitable for vegans. Also my aim is not to become gluten-free, although the flours and breads I recommend are lower in gluten – which I believe is a good thing.

I haven’t included buying organic in the list below, but if you have a limited budget and would like to buy more organic fruit and vegetables – have a look at the Dirty Dozen and Clean 15. The Dirty Dozen are crops which absorb a greater amount of pesticides, so you should prioritise buying these organic. The Clean 15 are least affected by pesticides.

So, here are my top ten cupboard swaps. They are easy to find, you’ll have heard of most of them, and they taste good. A whole load of more obscure ingredients graced my kitchen cupboards for a while, but these are the ones I am still using a couple of years on!

The best thing is, once you have bought these ingredients, you will effortlessly cook healthier food – without even having to think about it.

1. Get rid of margarine and use butter

Since the 1970s people have been advised to cut back on butter and use margarine instead, as a heart-healthy replacement for butter. As studies had associated saturated fat with heart disease, butter – a saturated fat – was considered an unhealthy food.

It is now recognised that margarine is anything but healthy! The biggest problem is with margarine made using an older process known as hydrogenation, which hardens vegetable oils into margarine and forms unhealthy trans fats.

More modern margarines are made using a different process which doesn’t produce trans fats. However, margarine is still a highly processed product. It’s debatable whether the body even recognises it as food, and it is known to cause an inflammatory response.

On the other hand, butter is basically concentrated dairy fat – so it is a food close to its natural state. Butter is also more nutritious, especially if it is from grass-fed cows.

There is a huge amount of debate over whether we need to avoid saturated fat, and the association with heart disease is nowhere near as clear-cut as was previously thought. In addition, the cells in our body are made from saturated fat, and we certainly need to include it in our diets.

Whilst the debate over saturated fat rages on, it’s fair to say that no strong evidence supports claims that a high intake of saturated fat is directly responsible for heart disease. My take-out is that butter, and saturated fat in general, are nothing to be scared of.

Where to buy? If you want grass-fed butter, Kerrygold is the most readily available and you can find it in most supermarkets. Yeo Valley butter is organic and the cows are grass-fed for part of the year.

You might also want to get a butter dish (large enough to hold a full pat of butter) so that you can keep it outside of the fridge for easy spreading. I refrigerate butter when I first buy it, but I keep it in a dish once I start using it. I’ve never had any problems with butter going rancid.

2. Get rid of vegetable oils and use olive oil and coconut oil

In all likelihood, you have heard the following advice – vegetable oils contain beneficial polyunsaturated fats, and they have a high smoke point so they are good for high-heat frying. Rapeseed oil is often recommended for this purpose.

In fact, there are a number of problems with vegetable oils and I prefer to avoid them altogether, using mainly olive oil and coconut oil.

Extra virgin olive oil is essentially the juice of pressed olives, so it is minimally processed. Vegetable oils, on the other hand, are extracted at high temperatures using a process that involves toxic, petroleum-derived chemicals. This processing can significantly raise the oil’s concentration of harmful trans fats.

Vegetable oils are advertised as suitable for high-heat frying because of their high smoke point. In fact, suitability for high-heat frying should be determined by the oil’s resistance to oxidation rather than the smoke point.

Polyunsaturated vegetable oils are actually highly unstable, so when heated, they react with oxygen forming dangerous compounds and free radicals.

A monounsaturated oil such as olive oil is more stable for medium-heat cooking. If you want to cook on a really high heat, a saturated fat such as coconut oil (or butter, ghee or lard) may be the best choice.

Personally, I got rid of all the vegetable oils in our house except for sesame oil which I use occasionally if I want to cook a Chinese style meal. (Which to be fair, I don’t do often, so I really should check whether the oil is still fresh enough to keep…)

Where to buy? You can find a list of high-quality olive oils here. If some of the price points scare you, keep reading as there are more achievable options too, including Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference 500ml for £5.00. When it comes to coconut oil, you get much a better deal if you buy it online.

3. Keep your wheat flour but also get some spelt flour and buckwheat flour

Unless you want to go gluten-free, I’m not suggesting you ditch wheat flour altogether – but it is well worth adding in a couple of other flours.

Spelt flour is made from spelt, an ancient form of wheat – which remains exactly as it was before wheat was selectively bred for better crops. It is lower in gluten, higher in protein, and more digestible than wheat flour. You can usually swap spelt flour for wheat flour, although it doesn’t work in every case.

Spelt flour is great for cakes, and I don’t think you can taste the difference at all (cakes tend to have their own stronger flavours). I make Yorkshire puddings with spelt flour, and again, you wouldn’t know (although my Yorkshireman grandad would be turning in his grave!)

You can bake bread with spelt flour – some people like the taste better, others aren’t as keen. I don’t mind the taste, but spelt flour absorbs more water so the middle of the bread can be claggy. When my dad makes spelt bread, I quite like it – but I never mastered the technique properly myself.

One recipe that just doesn’t work is the white sauce for macaroni cheese. Because spelt flour absorbs more water, the texture is just off – when I tried this a while ago it was completely vetoed by my kids.

Another good flour to have in your cupboard is buckwheat. It has as fairly neutral taste and you can use it for cooking pancakes. It is gluten-free, which means it won’t rise as well so baking with it can be tricky.

I also have rye flour in the house for feeding my sourdough starter (I bake the sourdough bread with wheat flour though). Rye flour has an acquired taste, so it’s not a great substitute for wheat flour (if you’ve had Pumpernickel bread, that is what rye flour tastes like).

Chickpea or Gram flour is a great option for Indian cooking and for specific recipes. It is particularly high in protein, which is great for keeping you feeling full.

A note on gluten. Much like whether saturated fat causes heart disease, gluten is a contentious topic in health circles. The conventional advice would be if you’re not coeliac, you don’t need to avoid gluten – but in fact, there is a lot of evidence for non-coeliac gluten intolerance.

If you try to cut out gluten for generic ‘health’ reasons without giving it much thought, you can end up buying foods that are less healthy overall. Gluten-free processed foods are lower in fibre and nutrients, with lots of additives to help get the desired texture without gluten. This trade-off is worth it for coeliacs, but the average person probably ends up worse off.

That said, I don’t think gluten is particularly good for anyone. It can cause an inflammatory response in the body, alongside various other effects. I am not attempting to go gluten-free, but every time I can switch normal wheat flour for a lower-gluten or gluten-free option, I consider that a win.

Where to buy? I buy Doves Farm spelt flour and buckwheat flour in Sainsbury’s, but these flours are not available in all supermarkets. You can easily get them online if your local supermarkets don’t carry them, although you may need to buy in bulk. I buy Doves Farm rye flour online. Chickpea/gram flour is widely available in supermarkets, usually in the World Foods section, or try an Asian supermarket (also a great place to buy coconut oil and coconut water – which are suddenly, miraculously, not overpriced!)

4. Ditch regular pasta and replace with spelt pasta

As someone who experiences issues with blood sugar levels, if I have a big bowl of pasta I can feel quite unwell afterwards, shaky and lightheaded with a gnawing feeling of hunger (although I’m fine if there is plenty of fat or protein alongside it). I don’t think carbs are something to be avoided at all costs, but they are definitely something to limit.

Spelt pasta is a good alternative to regular pasta as it’s higher in protein, as well as being lower in gluten and more easily digestible. Although it tastes slightly different, it’s really quite nice – and the fact my kids will readily eat it is testament to this fact.

I am also keen to try chickpea pasta, which is even higher in protein, although this is not as readily available and can be quite expensive.

Where to buy? I buy spelt spaghetti in Sainsbury’s, but it’s not available in all supermarkets. You can buy alternative pastas online, but you often have to buy them in bulk to get reasonable prices.

Ocado is a good place to go for more niche foods, and they have chickpea fusilli for £2. I share Ocado deliveries with my parents as it’s a bit more expensive to do a full shop there (not as expensive as I’d imagined, though). But it’s ideal for stocking up on certain items that you can’t buy locally, and which Amazon would make you jump through hoops to buy (often you either have to buy in bulk or through Amazon Pantry).

 5. Upgrade your bread to sourdough, spelt bread or homemade (breadmaker counts)

Modern bread and bread made using traditional methods are worlds apart. Years ago, I thought if I bought wholemeal bread then I was doing OK – but in fact, the difference between white and wholemeal is not as marked as you’d imagine.

The absolute best bread to eat for health is sourdough, and I have written a full post about it. I make my own sourdough bread in a breadmaker, and whilst it doesn’t taste as amazing as hand-baked sourdough, I’m very happy with it. I do have plans to make my own sourdough by hand, and I have the necessary equipment ready and waiting in my kitchen…

For my kids, I bake normal wheat bread in a breadmaker. I’d love to get more consistent with this, and we do often revert to buying sliced wholemeal bread – but I’m much happier making my own because it’s much lower in additives. I read a book about bread a while back, and there are some truly weird additives that go in.

You can also bake your own spelt bread. If you like the taste, it’s a great option. For all the reasons that spelt flour and spelt pasta are healthy options, spelt bread is also a healthier option – higher in protein, lower in gluten, more digestible.

The ultimate healthy option would be spelt sourdough bread, and spelt works really well for sourdough baking. This is the closest you’ll get to bread as it was made thousands of years ago. If I could only convince myself to like the taste, this is definitely what I would be eating.

Where to buy? I make my own sourdough bread and normal wheat bread in a breadmaker. If you can buy sourdough at your local supermarket, make sure it is real sourdough bread. (In a lot of cases, ‘sourdough’ bread is actually normal bread with some sourdough starter thrown in for flavour. Not the same thing!) If you’re lucky, you may be able to buy proper sourdough locally in a bakery or health food shop, although it doesn’t come cheap.

6. Keep your vinegar and also buy apple cider vinegar

There’s nothing wrong with normal vinegar, but apple cider vinegar has some great health benefits.

• Organic, unfiltered apple cider vinegar containing the ‘mother’ (the colony of beneficial bacteria that ferments the vinegar) contains proteins, enzymes and friendly bacteria
• Apple cider vinegar can kill many types of harmful bacteria
• It improves insulin sensitivity and lowers blood sugar, which is beneficial for everyone but particularly those with Type 2 Diabetes
• It has been shown to help people lose weight, by increasing satiety and helping you eat fewer calories (although the effects may be modest)
• It has even been shown to kill cancer cells and shrink tumours, although this was in test tubes and rats rather than human studies

It’s an impressive list, and some people choose to drink apple cider vinegar on an empty stomach to help strengthen stomach acid. I have tried this, both neat and diluted – but unfortunately it made me feel quite sick (and it could be harmful to tooth enamel if done regularly).

However, I love using apple cider vinegar in salad dressing. I think a great aim would be to have a salad or some raw vegetables with a dressing containing apple cider vinegar every day – some great combined health benefits, and really tasty (unlike drinking the stuff, whether neat or diluted).

Where to buy? I order a raw, unfiltered apple cider vinegar with the mother on Amazon.

7. Ditch cereal and have porridge, a milk alternative and homemade granola (or chopped nuts)

Cereal just isn’t the great start to the day that it’s made out to be. I have avoided high-sugar cereals for years, and focussed on the much lower-sugar Weetabix and cornflakes – but these are still pretty nutritionally empty.

Most days, my breakfast is peanut butter on toast, but I also sometimes eat porridge. Oats are full of fibre and protein, they’re filling, and you can add toppings to up the nutrition. I love adding homemade granola, but if I don’t have that to hand, chopped nuts will achieve a similar outcome.

I’m not vegan and I do drink milk (I use full-fat milk as it contains fat-soluble vitamins and is minimally processed, and the amount of fat it contains really isn’t harmful). However I don’t really think of it as something we’re supposed to eat – it’s meant for baby cows! And proteins in milk cause an inflammatory response.

I have milk in tea because I’ve yet to find an alternative that tastes ANY good, and I’m happy to use it in cooking. But I never drink a glass of milk, and if I’m making porridge I tend to use a milk substitute. (You could use water, but I do like the creaminess of some kind of milk.)

There are a few options – soya milk, almond milk and coconut are probably the most common. You can also get rice milk, oat milk, hemp milk… the possibilities are endless!

My favourite is soya milk and it’s the highest in protein, but it contains phytoestrogens which mimic oestrogen by binding to its receptors (albeit only weakly). Phytoestrogens can even be beneficial for menopausal women – but I avoid them because they could potentially worsen my PMS. (I need more progesterone, not more oestrogen!) So I’m happy to eat soya beans or fermented soya products such as tofu but I avoid soya milk, despite it being my preferred milk alternative.

I choose coconut milk because when you look at the ingredients list, coconut milk contains the most coconut milk and the least additives. Also, I quite like the taste. Hemp milk would be a good choice, but I find it quite bitter.

You can make your own nut milks, and I have tried this once with cashew nuts (the easiest to make as they aren’t very fibrous so don’t take a lot of straining). I was initially impressed, and then changed my mind and decided I didn’t like it! I think almond milk would taste better, and if I had the time and inclination, I might give that a go someday.

Where to buy? You can buy porridge, milk alternatives, nuts and other granola ingredients in any supermarket. Koko coconut milk is a good brand, and should be available in most supermarkets.

 8. Get milk chocolate out of the house and use 70% dark chocolate

I can’t say I never eat milk chocolate, but I try not to have it in the house. For a long time, I was convinced I didn’t like dark chocolate – but I’d say you only need to eat it for about a week before your taste buds switch over. I love it now, although I do find my preference reverses if I eat a lot of milk chocolate (so Easter, Halloween and Christmas!)

Dark chocolate is lower in sugar than milk chocolate, and it has a higher antioxidant and mineral content. It has a higher antioxidant content than blueberries, and can even be considered a health food – but only in small quantities. I buy Green & Blacks 70% cocoa, and I have 4 squares a day.

If you can handle it, the higher the cocoa content the better. You can get Green & Blacks 85% chocolate in most supermarkets. It’s a step too far for me, but strangely my kids will happily eat it. (Their favourite is milk chocolate, but basically if it’s chocolate – they’re in!)

Where to buy? You can buy Green & Blacks 70% and 85% cocoa chocolate in any supermarket. You can also buy it in bulk online, but I don’t trust myself having bulk quantities of chocolate in the house!

9. Buy raw cacao powder for baking

I first bought raw cacao powder for the health benefits, as it’s incredibly high in antioxidants, magnesium and iron. Raw cacao powder has not been heat-treated so it retains a higher proportion of its antioxidants compared to regular cacao powder (although some of these will be lost when you bake a chocolate cake with it!)

Long after I had forgotten about the health benefits, I continued using raw cacao powder because cakes baked using it taste fantastic. I don’t like to bake with anything else!

Where to buy? I buy raw cacao powder on Amazon, as raw cacao powder tends to be expensive in supermarkets. It’s worth going for a large size as you get a better price and it keeps for ages.

 10. Get some sugar alternatives to use in place of sugar

I avoid artificial sweeteners as they disrupt your gut microbiome, and I never use Agave syrup as it’s very high in fructose.

Fructose needs to be converted by the liver, and consuming it in excess can contribute to various metabolic disorders. Fructose also doesn’t suppress appetite as much as glucose does, and could contribute to overeating.

Fructose in fruit, bound up with a load of fibre, is no problem at all – it’s only processed, isolated and concentrated sources of fructose that are a concern.

A couple of years ago there was a real push to swap sugar for alternative sweeteners – particularly honey and maple syrup. At the time I was very much on this bandwagon, but on reflection, I’m not sure the difference is that meaningful. The composition of honey and maple syrup are pretty similar to sugar, and your body processes them in the same way.

However, they do have an edge nutritionally. For example, honey and maple syrup are both rich in antioxidants, and honey doesn’t increase blood sugar levels quite as much as sugar. So, I like to have honey and maple syrup on hand and swap them for sugar when I can.

I also use Muscovado sugar and Rapadura sugar, which are less processed than white sugar and have a higher mineral content. Coconut sugar is another good alternative, but it really is expensive!

Regardless of what type of sugar or sweetener I use, I always reduce the quantity in sweet recipes by a quarter or a third (depending who I’m baking for). I think reducing the quantity of sugar or alternative sweeteners is the most helpful thing you can do.

Honey has a tendency to burn easily so I tend to use maple syrup for cooking, and honey for sweetening cold foods such as plain yogurt. You can replace sugar with maple syrup in most cake recipes, but if you are using olive oil in place of butter you do have to use sugar to give your baking some structure.

When buying maple syrup, make sure you go for pure maple syrup. Otherwise, you may be buying a sweetener with some maple syrup added for flavouring, which won’t have the same benefits.

Where to buy? You can buy honey and maple syrup in any supermarket, and health food shops have specific types of honey such as Manuka honey which has antibacterial and antimicrobial properties.

ASDA have an affordable brand of maple syrup, as it can be very expensive. You can buy Muscovado sugar in most supermarkets, and Rapadura sugar online. I still haven’t quite figured out the difference, although Rapadura is more gritty, so I suspect it is a little less processed.

I became interested in healthy eating when I was off work in 2015 with stress-related illness. Diet undoubtedly has a massive impact on our health and mental health. But if I’m honest, I think I was also looking for something positive I could do to take back control.

Either way, it was the start of a passion for healthy eating that has stayed with me ever since. I’m far from perfect and my diet isn’t stellar, but I’m always working on it.

Honestly though, it’s not solely about health and wellness. I also want to lose a couple of stone – to get back to how I looked before I had children.

I hate diet culture, and I feel strongly that our worth as women shouldn’t be dictated by how we look. I see gorgeous women at every size, and I don’t want to fit in any predefined box. I certainly don’t want to sit here hating my body for the fat it carries, wobbly bits or patches of cellulite.

Can you give zero f**** about what anyone tells you that you need to weigh and look like… accept your body… be grateful it created two children… and also want to be slimmer?

I say yes.

I wholeheartedly believe you can reject being told how your body should look, and accept your body as it is – whilst also favouring a certain aesthetic. Neghar Fonooni has argued this point eloquently, and you can follow her on Instagram.

An aside about body image and eating disorders

I am incredibly fortunate to have a healthy relationship with food, and with my body – I pretty much approach food and body weight like a man! (Although I do realise that men can also suffer from body image issue and eating disorders.)

I see food as giving sustenance and pleasure, and whilst I can look at my body critically and want it to look different, it’s not a big source of distress. I only wish I had such a balanced, healthy and pragmatic outlook in all areas of my life!

I understand that it really isn’t this simple for a lot of people. Growing up, I saw friends and classmates who hated their bodies or even suffered from eating disorders. I know how prevalent this is, and how complicated food and diet can become in this context.

If this is an issue for you, I would highly recommend Darya Rose’s website and blog Summer Tomato. Darya is both a scientist and a former dieter, so she has amazing understanding of the personal experience AND the science.

For the purposes of this blog post though, I am putting body image issues aside and looking at food and diet in a fairly practical manner. The question I want to answer is, how should we be eating, for both health and weight loss and maintenance?

Why dieting doesn’t work and what to do instead

How many people do you know who are perpetually on a diet, but never really look any different? Or they lose and gain the same stone of weight in an endless cycle? How many people do you know who have lost an impressive amount of weight, but then gained it back again six months later?

I think it’s fair to say dieting doesn’t work. Not in the long term.

The trouble is that restricting your calorie intake… makes you hungry! It takes a lot of willpower to continually resist the physical drive to eat, and willpower is finite.

At some point, you will lose your resolve – whether it’s due to stress, a bad day, or just temptation that occurs outside of your everyday routine. And then there’s always Easter, Halloween and Christmas to navigate…

Deprivation sets the stage for overindulgence, as you’re hungry, and you’re also lazer-focussed on what you can’t have. So you eventually crack and you eat the ‘bad’ foods, you feel guilty, and you absolve your ‘sins’ with another cycle of deprivation.

Then as soon as you eat again, the weight goes back on. Except that you have probably lost muscle mass in the interim, your metabolic rate has slowed down, and it actually becomes slightly easier to gain weight this time around. This is the cruel irony of yo-yo dieting.

Admittedly some diets are more effective than others. Many people find low-carb approaches or intermittent fasting easier because you don’t tend to be as hungry. There are also individual differences at play, so what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for the next.

Ultimately though, I believe diets per se are not helpful and DON’T work in the long term. On the other hand, changing your diet can work. But how do you do this in such a way that you can lose weight and keep it off permanently?

Just eat real food (and why there is no ‘best’ diet)

I have done a lot of reading on this topic over the past couple of years, and the answer I come back to every time is this: Just eat real food. That is, unprocessed food – cooked from scratch using real ingredients.

Your diet could include meat and fish, it could be Paleo or Primal, you could be pescatarian, vegetarian, or vegan. You can get so caught up in trying to work out whether we ‘should’ eat meat, fish, eggs, dairy, wheat, gluten, and on and on – but this can be a red herring. I’d argue that a high-quality diet that includes meat has MORE in common with a vegan diet than with a junk food diet.

Real food means food made from ingredients that you would recognise as food. Fruit and vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, animal proteins, whole grains, fats. You don’t even need to read ingredients lists because for the most part, you’re buying ingredients and assembling them into meals.

In many ways this seems really simple and straightforward advice, but it took me a long time to fully understand WHY this would matter. I readily understood that eating real food would have huge health benefits, but why would eating real food actually enable you to lose weight?

Hang on – what about calories in, calories out?

If you believe that calories in minus calories out is the formula determining our weight, what I’m writing is just not going to make sense to you. Surely if we eat the same number of calories from junk food or real food, we will take in the same number of calories. We might be healthier eating better-quality food, but we should weigh the same…

The problem with the calories in minus calories out theory is that our bodies make so many adjustments along the way – depending on what we eat, how much sleep we get, stress levels, how much we move, and how much muscle mass we have.

Technically, ultimately the equation holds true – except that the body is constantly compensating for the changes we make in our food intake or energy expenditure.

If we undereat and over-exercise, our bodies perceive this as starvation – our metabolic rate is lowered, we want to move less, we become fixated on food, we become hungry. And if we lose muscle mass, as dieters often do – our metabolic rate is lowered (because it takes more energy to sustain muscle than other types of body tissue).

Other factors completely outside of calorie intake and expenditure have a huge part to play. Sleep deprivation and stress both raise levels of cortisol, promoting both hunger and fat storage. So if you’re eating well, exercising regularly, doing everything right but you’re short on sleep – you may not achieve your weight-loss goals.

It’s becoming clear why weight loss is so hard!

(By the way, if you want practical, science-backed, nuanced and detailed information on all things diet and exercise, the Precision Nutrition blog is a fantastic resource. It’s primarily aimed at personal trainers, but I’m a fan because I love going in-depth.)

So if not calories, is it all about the macronutrients?

It’s true that different macronutrients are more or less satiating. Fats and proteins will fill you up for much longer, whereas carbohydrates can leave you hungry again quite quickly. So, what you actually eat (as opposed to the number of calories you eat) can determine how hungry you feel later, and therefore how much you have to rely on willpower.

In addition, our bodies monitor the nutritional content of what we are eating. If we’re still short on nutrients after a meal that met our calorie requirements, we will still be hungry. As a vegetarian I’ve never been much of a McDonald’s fan, but I have eaten – if not enjoyed – a few of their meals over the years. I never understood how I could feel hungrier afterwards than before I’d eaten anything!

So, there is definitely an argument to say eating a higher fat and protein diet, and keeping carbohydrates down, is the answer. Personally, I think it’s a pretty good answer. I have issues with blood sugar/insulin levels, and I feel terrible if I go high-carb and low-everything else, so this certainly rings true for me.

But it’s not the full story.

If eating fewer carbohydrates and more fats and proteins can be helpful for losing body fat, can we flip that on its head and say excessive carbohydrate intake is what’s causing the obesity crisis? It turns out that no single macronutrient is the problem here.

When looking at ancestral diets and what modern-day tribes eat, the example of the Hadza is often cited. The Hadza are foragers who live in Tanzania and their diet still consists mainly of wild foods such as baobab, honey, large game and tubers. During the wet season their diet is particularly high in carbohydrates. And their metabolic health is impeccable.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the Inuit who live in Arctic regions and subsist on high amounts of meat and fish such as whale meat and blubber. Again, these people are healthy and don’t suffer from the chronic illnesses we do in the Western world.

At first glance, these diets could not be more different. But the thing they have in common is they are based on real food, not junk food.

Why eating real food will win every time

In optimal conditions, our appetite should be self-regulating. If we choose high-quality, nutritious food, eat until we’re full, stay active – walk, run, dance, do household chores, lift weights – find ways to minimise and mitigate the effects of stress, and get enough sleep, all should be well.

So why is obesity at its highest ever levels? What is going wrong here?

The answer is that we’re eating processed, hyperpalatable foods which completely override the natural feedback loops in our brain that should tell us when to stop.

Even the advertising tells us this. ‘Once you pop, you can’t stop.’ There is a breakfast cereal called Krave, and endless snack foods claim to be irresistible.

There is a fantastic book on this topic – The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make us Overeat by Stephan Guyenet. Stephan’s approach is a little different to the mainstream, as he argues that it’s not one particular macronutrient that is driving obesity up.

In fact, it is irresistible combinations of fat and sugar – or fat, sugar and salt – or fat, sugar, salt and crunch – that send our brains into overdrive. These foods have been deliberately engineered to give us huge hits of pleasure, which drives us to eat more of them. Hunger and satiety, our normal regulatory mechanisms, are completely drowned out and overridden.

We didn’t evolve in the presence of these types of food – and we evolved in intermittent food scarcity. Our brains are designed to detect when something has a lot of calories and will keep us alive. Fat and sugar are powerful signals to our brains that this food is something we need more of. The pleasure systems are activated to ensure we take in as much as possible.

In the environment we evolved in, these hyperpalatable, send-your-brain-crazy food combinations were not really available. And when humans did have the opportunity to gorge on something high in fat or sugar, they were likely to face a food shortage the following week.

Our brains that worked so well at keeping us alive in times of scarcity don’t fare so well in the face of an abundance of hyperpalatable processed food. When you’re experiencing full-on fat-sugar-salt-crunch pleasure, the systems normally in charge of hunger, eating, adequate nutrition and fullness don’t stand a chance.

If I ever doubt this, hand me a large bag of Kettle Chips and see what happens.

Why your body wants to defend its current weight

It’s difficult enough trying to eat a healthy diet, lose fat and maintain a lower weight when we’re surrounded by appealing, convenient, processed foods. However just to make things harder, there is another piece of the jigsaw puzzle to consider: the lipostat.

This is a complex topic and I don’t think I can do it justice here, but I would highly recommend reading The Hungry Brain in order to understand this better.

In very simple terms, your body has its own idea of what weight you should be – and it will fight hard to maintain that, even in people who are overweight and obese.

The lipostat is like a thermostat for body fat levels. Much like you set your desired temperature on a thermostat and the central heating system adjusts accordingly – your body will make adjustments to maintain the level of body fat it ‘thinks’ is appropriate.

These adjustments could be in the form of driving your hunger and cravings up, lowering your metabolic rate, or lowering your desire to be active. Physical activity, among other things, changes the lipostat settings – enabling your body to accept a lower level of body fat.

All things considered, if you want to lose body fat and keep it off – you have to do it by stealth.

How can we outsmart our brains for weight loss?

After reading this, you could be forgiven for feeling the outlook for sustainable weight loss was a little bleak. However, you can outsmart your hungry brain if you take the right actions. Here is my summary of the recommendations Stephan Guyenet gives in The Hungry Brain.

1. Fix your food environment. Make the foods you want to eat visible and accessible. Make sure the foods you don’t want to eat are either out of sight, or not there in the first place. This is one of the biggest, simplest things you can do to tip the odds in your favour. (You can also prep food healthy ahead, or save leftovers for your next day’s lunch – as you’ll probably eat what’s easy. When eating out, you can look at the menu ahead of time and choose healthy options, away from the pressure and temptation you would face in the moment.)
2. Manage your appetite. This tells your brain that you are not, in fact, starving. Choose foods that send strong satiety signals without being overly calorie-dense. This tends to include simple foods that are close to their natural state, and moderately palatable (appealing, but not so delicious that you will keep on eating long beyond what you need). Stephan suggests fresh fruit, vegetables, potatoes, meats, seafood, eggs, yogurt, whole grains, beans, lentils.
3. Beware of food reward. Chocolate, pizza, chips, crisps – you know the foods that you find it hard to get enough of. It’s not that you can never have these foods, but you probably need to keep them to a minimum if you want to lose body fat. Also avoid things that are inherently habit-forming such as alcohol and caffeine, which drive you to consume more of them (and bring a whole lot of calories along for the ride). Caffeinated drinks don’t have to be a problem if you don’t add sugar, but alcohol is always calorie-dense.
4. Make sleep a priority. You can find my tips for getting more sleep here, and however important you think sleep is – it’s more important than that! In terms of food and weight gain, lack of sleep increases hunger, cravings, and impulsive behaviour. And high levels of cortisol encourage fat storage. It is a recipe for weight gain.
5. Move your body. Regular physical activity can help manage your appetite and weight in at least two ways. Firstly, it increases the amount of calories you use (studies have shown that people generally don’t go on to eat enough calories to compensate for those expended during exercise – although it varies). Secondly, physical activity may help maintain the lipostat in the brain, encouraging your body to be comfortable with lower levels of body fat. (I have previously written about metabolic conditioning as a way to get great results whilst spending less time exercising.)
6. Manage stress. Much like sleep deprivation, stress can really undermine efforts to lose weight and sustain a healthy weight. If you are a stress eater, you can look to replace stress eating with more helpful coping mechanisms – find other things which make you feel better in that moment. It can be helpful to identify stressors and make practical plans to improve situations that are stressful. And you can practice mindfulness meditation, which I have personally found incredibly helpful.

Where to from here?

So, it comes down to this: Just eat real food – make that the easy option, get the other stuff out of your environment as much as possible. Don’t diet, don’t make anything forbidden, don’t let your brain think you’re starving! Stay active, prioritise sleep, manage stress.

This is fairly simple and intuitive advice – but I don’t think it’s easy to implement. I don’t say that to be discouraging, but because I think it’s better to recognise that the system is stacked against you.

You’re surrounded by junk food, and junk food advertising. Subway is wafting bread smells out onto the street. On every street corner, you can find food that is appetising, cheap and convenient. Entire industries are built around fuelling and satisfying your desire for hedonic pleasure from food.

The alternative, at least to start with, is simply harder. You may lack time, money, expertise in cooking, or all of the above. You may set out with the best of intentions to buy whole foods and cook from scratch, but life is hard, and stressful, and of course at times you fall back on what’s easy.

All you can do is take it one step at a time, and go easy on yourself when it doesn’t go to plan. It’s not about success versus failure, it’s about learning a new way to eat, and a new way to live.

If you think about a few examples of learning something new – learning to walk, learning to ice skate, learning a new language, learning to drive, learning a new skill for work. In any of those examples, have you ever seen anyone instantly download the skill into their brain, and execute it perfectly from that moment on?

No?

In that case, please don’t set out to overhaul your diet and lifestyle and expect to get it right first time! Or second, third, fourth, fifth, tenth, twentieth, fiftieth time. Just take steps in the right direction and don’t chastise yourself for mistakes.

And I’ll be right there on the journey with you, making the same efforts, the same mistakes, and trying again.

I have a confession to make, and it may not sound like much if you’re not in the artisan sourdough bakers community but… I make sourdough in a breadmaker. I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to even be able to do this!

I first started making sourdough because I wanted to eat more healthily. I saw a lot online about giving up bread and reasons you might want to, but I just couldn’t imagine life without bread.

I wondered if there was a compromise. Were some types of bread more digestible? Lower in gluten? Less processed? Less likely to spike blood sugar? More nutrient-dense?

I experimented with spelt bread, which ticked a few of those boxes but I never quite fell in love with the taste. A bit of googling later and… I discovered sourdough.

I remember being at work one night and nervously ordering a starter online (a live colony of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria). I had little idea what I was doing, but I was determined to learn.

Well, I followed some instructions online and baked a heavy, dark, deeply sour monster. I gave it to my dad, the only person who liked it! Then I decided in my wisdom to change the type of flour my starter lived on. And promptly killed it.

I’ve revisited sourdough baking since, and my second starter is still going strong. And, I learned how to make it in my breadmaker.

It isn’t as pretty as hand-baked artisan loaves with the much sought-after open crumb structure. But you know what? I’m still baking sourdough, and it’s still much better for me than any bread I could buy.

BENEFITS OF SOURDOUGH

There are many things wrong with modern, mass-produced bread, and there are people who benefit from cutting it out altogether – including coeliacs and those with non-coeliac gluten sensitivity.

For my part, I just knew I wanted to eat something healthier than the loaves you can buy in the supermarket.

Enter sourdough, which is fermented with wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria naturally present in flour. Naturally leavened bread, the way it was made since Neolithic times.

This long, slow fermentation makes a huge difference to digestibility. The lactic acid bacteria acidify the dough and transform the taste, nutritional value and digestibility of the bread.

Gliadin, one of the proteins in gluten, is broken down, meaning that even some coeliacs can tolerate sourdough (although it’s not gluten-free).

Lactic acids also help to break down phytic acid, making the bread more digestible. And 12 hours of sourdough fermentation reduces FODMAP compounds (thought to cause IBS) down to levels of 10% and below.

For me, I love the taste of sourdough and it really fills me up. My blood sugar levels can be all over the place, but two slices of sourdough with peanut butter will keep me full until lunchtime.

BUT the stuff you can buy in supermarkets is just standard bread made with commercial yeast, with a bit of sourdough starter for taste. That’s all I can get in my area, so if I want real sourdough, I have to make it myself.

LOOKING AFTER A SOURDOUGH STARTER

A starter is made up of flour and water colonised by wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria. It allows you to ferment flour and water to make bread, and this fermentation makes the bread rise – in place of commercial yeast.

Although it’s possible to make your own starter, there are so many factors in sourdough baking and if it doesn’t work, you won’t know if it’s the starter or something else. For that reason, I would recommend buying a live starter that you can be confident in.

I bought my organic rye flour starter at Hobbs House Bakery and it’s working really well for me, and still going strong. Rye flour starters are more stable, so it’s a good place to start.

EQUIPMENT: You will need 2x 1 litre kilner jars.

FLOUR: You will need organic wholemeal rye flour (to feed the starter), organic white flour and organic wholemeal flour to bake with.

You don’t need to use strong bread flour, which is higher in gluten. But organic flour contains more nutrients which the sourdough will feed off, so this is highly recommended.

WATER: Chlorine can kill wild yeast, but I’ve read that you CAN use water straight from the tap, just let it breathe first. Don’t use cooled boiled water or mineral water as they are deoxygenated.

Use warm water when you’re baking, and cold water when you’re about to put your starter in the fridge (where it will live, in a fairly inert state, in-between baking. Feed it about once a week.)

Keep your starter in a 1 litre kilner jar, which will give it room to grow. Keep the rubber seal off though, so that oxygen can get in.

REFRESHING YOUR STARTER: A few hours before you want to bake (try 6 hours), take 250g of starter out of the fridge. Add 75g flour, 75g warm water = 400g starter. Keep this out on your worktop until you’re ready to bake.

Feeding the starter will wake it up. It will rise and become bubbly and stronger smelling.

In the summer, make sure your starter doesn’t become too warm. Keep it in a cool corner of the kitchen.

If your starter has sat in the fridge for a good few days, you might need to give it two feeds in succession before baking. If you get into a routine of baking every 2-3 days this may not be necessary.

After a few hours, your starter is ready to bake with. You will need 300g in your bread recipe.

AFTER BAKING: Keep 100g of starter in your kilner jar. Add 75g flour, 75g cold water = 250g starter. Keep this in your fridge until next time you bake (if you don’t bake within a week, add some more flour and water and pop it back in the fridge).

If you find that adding 50% flour and 50% water gives you a mixture that is too thick, just add a few drops of water until you have the right consistency. You’ll soon get the hang of this.

It’s very useful to have two identical kilner jars. Occasionally you’ll want to give your jar a clean, and it’s easier to put the starter in another jar. Also, you can weigh your starter more easily. Put the empty jar on some digital scales, set them to zero, then put your jar of starter onto the scales.

These instructions are based on the research and experimentation that I did when I first started baking with sourdough. My jumping off point was the instructions that came with my sourdough starter, but I also read a lot online, watched some videos, and tried different things. I’m no expert, but this has worked for me and should be a good starting point.

HOW TO BAKE SOURDOUGH BREAD IN A BREADMAKER

I have so much respect to those who bake beautiful bread by hand with love. BUT if you’re tired, busy, overworked, maybe you’ve got young kids – hand baking sourdough may be out of your reach right now. Perfectionism serves no one, so I’m all for finding an easier way.

If you already own a breadmaker with a dough or pizza cycle + a bake only cycle, you can bake a basic loaf, you want to try something healthier and you like dense, chewy bread – THIS is for you!

The recipe I use is adapted from the Hobbs House Bakery sourdough bread recipe (which is not designed for a breadmaker). I was also inspired by this blog post.

If you want to bake a loaf of bread as soon as you get up in the morning, make the bread before you go to bed. So, you’ll need to feed the sourdough a few hours before this.

You will need:

• 230g warm water (filtered or let it stand for 20 mins so chlorine can evaporate)
• 460g organic flour (I use 50/50 wholemeal and white, but a good starting point is 300g white and 160g wholemeal. Over time, increase the wholemeal until you find the sweet spot)
• 10g salt

Add water, then flour, sourdough and salt to the breadmaker pan. Mix for 10 minutes on the dough cycle. Don’t mix for any longer than 10 minutes, as wild yeast is delicate.

Take the paddle out of the breadmaker, and leave the mixture overnight to prove. Timings will depend on the temperature and other factors. I find it’s more like 8hrs than 12hrs. If you leave it too long it will collapse back down.

In the morning bake for 1hr, then cool on a wire rack.

The bread keeps for a few days, and just gets better and chewier. It tastes great with peanut butter!