Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Fed Up

I just watched the documentary Fed Up.  It was really good.  You should go watch it on Netflix.  I got a lot of insight into my own relationship with food and to why I'm hungry all the time.



They talked about responsibility for weight.  Fat people are perceived as slow or lazy.  All we have to do  to lose weight is take in fewer calories than we burn.  What's so hard about that?  Turns out everything is hard about that.  

The problem lies in sugar.  We put sugar in everything.  According to the movie, sugar is eight times more addictive than cocaine.  We're marketed foods with sugar from a very young age.  Here's one from my childhood.


This is an example of flavored sugar water being portrayed as a health drink.  An 8 oz glass of Sunny D contains 63 calories and 13.8 grams of sugar.  The top two ingredients are water and high fructose corn syrup. The label then says contains less than 2% of the following: Concentrated Juices: (Orange, Tangerine, Apple, Lime, Grapefruit).  Less than 2% juice?  That's ridiculous.  It's no better for you than the purple stuff.

This kind of advertising is being directed at us ALL THE TIME.  I switched over to TV and in the first commercial break saw two commercials that directly benefit from us being addicted to shitty food.  The first was a cholesterol drug and the second was a fast food commercial.  I've been socialized to be addicted to sugar since I was a kid.

They talked about different foods affect you differently.  For instance, if I eat 100 calories of almonds, the fiber slows the digestion and I absorb the nutrients more slowly.  If I have a 100 calorie glass of soda (or purple stuff), it goes straight to my liver.  My pancreas sends insulin over to help deal with the spiking blood sugar.  My body needs to store all this energy, and how does the body store energy?  Fat.  All that energy is stored, so I'm hungry again.  The more sugar I eat, the worse my body gets at processing that sugar.  And bam, I've got diabetes.

The food companies are interested in making money.  We're bombarded by their marketing all the time.  Every time I check out at ANY STORE, seriously any store there's a bunch of candy I can buy.  IKEA and Aldi are two places I will never be able to resist the checkout aisle candy.  I hate those places.

This movie really made me worried for my daughter.  She's only six months old now, but I don't want her to have the same twisted relationship with food I do.  

So what can I do?

I ordered The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Cookbook today.  It's a little bit fad-diet-esque and trips up my bullshit detector a little, but the alternative is to sit on my fat ass and blame food companies for my weight (which I am doing by writing this post, by the way).

I'll be going through this book and figuring out exactly how to cut the sugar out of my diet.  Stay tuned.


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