I went to the supermarket last week, grabbed what I wanted and got to the till. I emptied my basket and got to the front of the queue. Looking at my t-shirt the cashier saw I was a personal trainer and made a standard remark, ‘oh, I could do with your help.’ As with most of these instances I smile and say something polite, ‘no you don’t, exercise is bad for you, ha ha ha… (polite laughter)’
Without drawing breath the friendly cashier told me she’s started to eat ‘healthy.’ Now, I stopped advising people as to what eat or what not to eat in these situations when I realised that most people who ask me questions in these situations don’t really want to know the truth nor are they in the ‘right place’ to action it. I.e. they are still content to go down the same routes they always have done and either cut the fat out their diet (big mistake) or go to a slimming club (never really works, does it?).
Anyway, she looked in my basket and saw I had full fat organic yoghurt and said the immortal words ‘I wouldn’t of thought you’d be eating this’ aside from how unprofessional I thought she was, I actually asked why not. ‘Well,’ she told me, ‘we all know fat is bad for us, don’t we?’ I raised my eyebrows.
The next item through was an organic steak. ‘I’m not so sure about organic food.’ She said ‘I read an article in the daily mail the other day that said it was all a load of nonsense.’ I smiled politely again.
She scanned my green leafy salad, lemon and extra-virgin olive oil and told me that if I was making a salad I should take a look at the salad dressings in the produce section. ‘They are all fat free and are on offer at the moment.’
During our brief time together she told me about the diet she was following and how she can drink sugar-free diet coke, enjoys snacking on fat-free rice cakes, has healthy cereal bars for breakfast when she’s in a rush otherwise it’s special k, the plan she follows is great because she can save her points up for the weekend…
During our brief time together not once did I make a comment on her diet. I knew it wasn’t worth it. I did wish her luck and went on my way.
However, it did cross my mind as to how badly informed the general public are when it comes to health, weight loss and fitness.
I resisted the urge to tell her…
**Cutting fat from your diet is a sure-fire way getting fat. There is now an abundance of research to support this. The reason the government won’t u-turn on this is because it would mean losing face, upsetting a number of tax-generating industries and creating a huge void in public understanding. Dietary fat is important for cellular health, satiety, contains vitamins and increases the uptake of vitamins and minerals in the body. I agree the quality of fat is important – hence the reason I choose organic steak.
**The fat-free rice cakes she is consuming are nothing but refined starch with no fibre that will quite simply break down into sugar immediately in the body causing a massive spike in insulin causing you to store more fat and feel hungry almost straight away.
**Sugar-free diet coke is probably worse than the real thing and is full of chemicals. This will give your liver (a fat-burning organ) even more to do to try and detoxify your system and stop you from burning fat efficiently.
**The so-called healthy breakfast cereals and cereal bars are full of wheat that will leach vitamins and minerals from your body making you malnourished and hungry.
**The fat-free salad dressings she referred to are full of sugar not a good option.
Most people are fooled by so-called healthy foods. As a general rule if it has health claim on it it’s worth avoiding. You don’t see health claims on real healthy foods because they are difficult to engineer. The so-called healthy foods at first glance appear all good and well but if you flip it over and look at the ingredients generally they are full of sugar (or a sugar alternatives), salt and various unpronounceable ingredients.
You need to understand if you can’t pronounce it there is a good chance your body will not recognise it as food either. Try sticking to the basics and as a general rule if it didn’t swim, fly or run or if it didn’t grow out the ground be suspicious.
In reality, everything the cashier was buying was full of chemicals, sugar and refined ingredients. I am fairly confident when I re-visit the supermarket in a couple of weeks she will be in the same shape.
It’s not her fault the labels you find on foods are confusing. This combined with mass-marketing, conflicting opinions on nutrition and a lack of intuition makes her a victim.
Forget what you know (or think you know) and try eating naturally derived foods and watch the weight fall off.
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