It certainly seems like summer is over now! I’ve packed away the garden furniture, turned our leftover home grown tomatoes into chutney (which is absolutely delicious by the way – tomato, red onion, chilli, paprika, cardamom) and mown the lawn for possibly the last time this year.
It’s been a tough weekend actually. My parent’s have been to visit, and as many readers will know from my recent blog series on dementia, sadly my Mum has Alzheimers. If you haven’t read those posts, please do take a look back at them in the members area. I expect everyone will know someone who has been affected by this awful disease, and if you haven’t, you almost certainly will in the future. The numbers are going up, and in my posts, I discuss the risks and how we can best mitigate them at the current time. There is a lot of promising research, but until we find a cure, certain lifestyle measures are the best we have. It’s one of the reasons that I am so passionate about healthy living, and why I look at all the science around habit changing. I want to minimise my own chance of developing dementia, and if I can help others in the process that would be fantastic. My Mum now has awful delusions, and is entirely dependent on my Dad for daily living. It’s so very sad.
My Mum has been fairly slim her whole life. She has typically avoided fatty foods, and was a good home cook. Dementia has been particularly devastating in this regard. She seems to crave sweet food, has no sense of what is healthy or not, and as a consequence is now a type 2 diabetic and has moved up about 6 dress sizes. The former version of herself would be horrified.
It’s essentially impossible to manage this dietary situation though. However, what might I advise patients who wish to lose some weight via their diets? Calorie counting, or ‘macro tracking’ can be popular, but hard to do. I’ve tried it myself using an app on my phone. I am nerdy, but logging every apple, slice of bread and so on got tedious pretty quickly for me!
The main reason I wanted to do it was to look at the composition of my diet, particularly protein. Typical advice might be to consume protein 1.6g / kg / day, but there is a lot of variance in this. How old a person is, how active they are, what are they trying to achieve through dietary modification will all affect the recommendation.
Another difficulty with calorie counting is in weighing portion sizes. People often underestimate the size or their portions, and overestimate the number of calories they are burning during the day, rendering the output a little meaningless.
You may have heart the expression ‘calories are not the same’. Strictly speaking this is not accurate, but the sentiment is correct. A calorie is a unit of measurement, the same as a degree Celsius. However the source of the calories are not the same, and will indeed have different effects on you. To further complicate things, those effects are very individual. For example, some people will find avocados really good for them, for others, it will spike their blood sugar and leave them feeling unwell. Some sources of calories will have more fibre than others, or different complexities of fibre.
I get asked every week which diet is best, and there is no simple answer. I get rather exasperated when I see people online claiming such and such a diet is better than another. It may be the case for them, but for sure it’s not for everyone. I tend therefore to advise the following:
Avoid processed and ultra-processed food (but accept it is virtually impossible to avoid it completely, so don’t give yourself too hard a time on this within reason).
The closer a food looks to its natural state, the better it is for you. Think ‘whole food’
Try to eat a range of foods with different colours.
Prioritise plant-based foods (I eat meat, but try to do so sparingly, and make sure it’s good quality when i do)