I am still in the race to make weight at the moment. A 700 gram point in time loss on the scales, but, perhaps more surprisingly, a full 1 kg average loss over the week. Very encouraging. My hard work in this area appears to be paying off. Can I win the race? I guess time will tell. With about two and a half weeks to go, I am getting close, without being terribly confident. Perhaps I just don't want to jinx myself.
I did try a 1 day trial of a pre match day diet that my Dietician gave me this week. It was relatively straightforward and left me with a good amount of energy the next day. I will dive into it a little more deeply in a future post, but, suffice to say, it was remarkably effective in terms of dropping weight in a single day. In the 24 hours between weighing myself, the difference in my weight was a 1.8kg drop! That is not a drop that would stick so to speak and it would be just targeting a point in time, pre-competition weigh in, but, pretty amazing really. Not something I would do all the time, as it was not nutritionally sound in the long run. But, there was nothing wrong with it for a single day and it would be suitable the day before competing. I am going to give it another try next week and will perhaps dive more deeply into it here then.
Turning to a bit of nutritionally based social commentary now. I have long believed that particularly western societies have been allowing themselves to be poisoned and slowly killed by the pervasive nature of unhealthy foods and their profit hungry manufacturers. Food is not even the word I use to describe that class of consumable item these days. The documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead coined the phrase that I use now, 'food like products'. Let's face it, what natural food comes in the shape of a pringle? But, for me at least, there is more to it than that. Like cigarettes or excessive alcohol (let's face it excessive anything!), eating these things is very, very bad for us. There's just no good to it. To the point of being so bad that it can lead to health conditions associated with being overweight or obese that kill us. How is it that we allow these artificial food like products to be so pervasive?
An interesting article on a blog I have never heard of came across my path this week via someone that trains where I do. It's worth a read and you can do so here - LINKY. The article illustrates quite well what we are confronted with every time we walk into the supermarket. Aisle after aisle of food like products that have had millions of dollars between them spent on making us want to buy them, over and over again. None of them nutritious or good for us in any way. I don't drink or smoke. Never have. My biggest problem in terms of my health has always been, like many I suspect, my weakness towards food like products that I know are bad for me. I have paid the price with years of being overweight and/or obese. Years of being genuinely more than unhappy, sad, grumpy and generally less than what I could have been. This from a supposedly educated man, who, in demographic terms should be at the top of the spectrum. That's one big point isn't it. We're supposedly pretty smart, or at least we like to think so. So why is it that we do it to ourselves?
A sad reality of what this scenario can mean when magnified to an extreme level was made clear to me last year when I travelled to the Northern Territory on a work trip. I was fortunate enough to travel to Bathurst Island. There I visited one of the Indigenous communities that has staff from my work in it that my work area is responsible for supporting. There are various government programs in place within the community. One of which is called the Community Store. Part of a broader initiative to provide a supermarket like store for the local community. A positive, harmless initiative on the surface of it. But, what I saw was a knock on effect that I would not have ever expected.
Ponder this for a moment. When confronted with a supermarket full of healthy foods interspersed with food like products, none of which you have been exposed to whilst growing up, what do you think might happen? From what I understand, what did happen was that the local people didn't know what to do with things like vegetables, cans or any other of foods that might make up a consistently healthy diet. It was not in the frame of their experiences. They were out of context for the people. As a result, they chose to take advantage easily accessible prepackaged food like products. What does this scenario add up to? Chronic diabetes.
There is a specialist renal unit on the island, servicing a population of around 1,500 people. The kidney issues created through poor diet choices and the resulting diabetes are so problematic that it is a necessity for the highly specialised services to be hosted on the island. Subsequent programs around making healthy food choices, how to prepare the foods available in the community store and a more appropriate range of products are now in place. The food like products are still there, but, they are less prevalent and their product placement is such that they are inherently less appealing. But, seriously, is that not just an appalling example of our consumption driven, self indulgent madness! That's before I even dive into the self righteousness of our cane toad like cultural insertion of our values into the very same community that this also represents. However, that is an entirely different thread of social commentary...
So what is my point? I'm mad that we accept the consumerism based on our own greed that deems it acceptable to mass produce products that are simply just not any good for us. So detrimental to our health that we are regularly confronted by statistics telling us how overweight and obese we are in our self proclaimed successful society. It bugs me ok....I got sucked in....did you? I declare here and now that I will not be sucked in again. Not to the point where I backslide into obesity. I'm not perfect and will eat food like products from time to time in the future I am sure. But damned if I won't be putting in a great deal of thought into what I buy and fuel my body with from here on out. I am choosing food. Real food. What about you?
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