… where I am on holiday.

A new piece of research that may be not that surprising but is worth a read in my view. 

Documents recently discovered by a researcher from the University of San Fransico reveal that as long as 50 years ago the sugar industry was funding research to deliberately down play the role of sugar in heart disease.

Marion Nestle, a nutrition, food studies and public health professor at New York University, said the food industry continues to influence nutrition science, in an editorial published alongside the JAMA report.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/12/sugar-industry-paid-research-heart-disease-jama-report

At the same time, John Yudkin was being ridiculed by the scientific establishment for suggesting that it was not fat but sugar that was causing an increase in coronary heart disease. An increase that is continuing to this day but now accompanied by an explosion in Type 2 diabetes. Dietary fat does not cause diabetes, sugar does.

Every once in a while you deserve something special. Something indulgent. Something that isn’t about thinking about what it is but just thinking that it’s nice. You like it. Food is the same, I think. Every once in a while you should have something that is just simply nice. Indulgent. Sumptuous. Like chocolate pots!!!

This recipe courtesy of the righteous Jamie Oliver. The ingredients are simplicity itself. The best dark chocolate you can find. At least 70% cocoa but to make it paleo, I am using 85% here. Warning, the higher the cocoa content, the stiffer the final chocolate pot. 100% cocoa sets like concrete!

200g chocolate, half a pint of cream, 2 egg yolks, 20g butter, 3 tablespoons of brandy. In this picture I am also adding in almond butter to give an almond favour. I have used the brandy to thin the almond butter so it will stir in smoothly.

Then making it is easy too. Heat the cream to just below boiling. Break in the chocolate and stir until smooth. Beat in the egg yolks. Stir in the almond butter/brandy mix if you are using it or the brandy if not using the almond butter. Leave for 2 minutes to cool slightly before stirring in the butter to make it shiny. Pour into small serving dishes. You don’t need big portions so I use espresso cups. This amount will make six big servings (too big really) or 12 sensible servings. 

  
My raspberries are just starting to be ready so I added a few…

And I served it topped with cream…

Just to be clear, this recipe has nothing to do with losing weight. It has almost no sugar in, it is just about paleo, but mostly it is just nice. No it’s more than nice, it’s pretty close to divine! Enjoy, every once in a while 🙂

So here it is, the long awaited, much delayed Childhood Obesity Strategy:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/546588/Childhood_obesity_2016__2__acc.pdf

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The most risible section of this sorry excuse for a policy – it isn’t actually policy at all, and for reasons that aren’t appropriate for this blog, I know what a government policy looks like – is the section headed “Harnessing the best new technology” which says:

Public Health England will hold an annual digital technology ‘hackathon’, bringing together leading developers and programmers to produce innovative solutions to address childhood obesity.

What??? We are going to resolve a “public health emergency” (not my words – the Government’s) with a smart phone app? Well fuck me backwards!! If only we had thought of that five years ago we wouldn’t be in this sorry mess!!

If you really want to understand what’s behind this document, this sentence tells you all you need to know:

We are confident that our approach will reduce childhood obesity while respecting consumer choice, economic realities and, ultimately, our need to eat.

In other words, there’s nothing the government can do, it’s all your fault because you have no money (not our fault), you make bad choices (not our fault by the way) and you eat food (definitely Not Our Fault).

The Diabetes Times is covering the story in a measured way, but even so, you can’t escape that this 10 page (yes it is only ten pages long) document is a national embarrassment:

http://diabetestimes.co.uk/childhood-obesity-strategy-slammed-by-campaigners/

In a less measured response, poor old Jamie Oliver is in shock:

http://www.itv.com/news/2016-08-18/jamie-oliver-brands-governments-childhood-obesity-strategy-disappointing-and-underwhelming/

The Times seems to know exactly who to blame:

I seem to remember Jamie saying that, if the strategy didn’t deliver, he was going to get “a bit ninja”  UK Secretary for Health Declares Childhood Obesity a “national emergency” as Jamie Oliver Prepares to be “really upset”. 

Over to you Jamie…

So the end of another Whole10.  Melissa Hartwig will tell you it isn’t a weight loss programme and I have some sympathy for her view. However, it is. Here is my data from my 10 day Whole10 and the data is so clear. Anyway… 

Here are my results. The upper graph is my weight – pink line actual and white line trend. The 10 days started on 31 July and finished on 10 August. Total loss 3.8kg in 10 days. The bottom graph is my body fat %age measured twice a day. Top readings are morning bottom readings are evening before dinner. It’s the evening readings that are more accurate.

So what kind of food can you eat to achieve nearly 4kg fat (fat not weight) loss in 10 days? Here are a couple of typical dinners….

Turmeric roasted chicken, roast squash and salad with an oil and vinegar dressing. Below with the left over chicken I made a chicken, bacon and avocado salad with coleslaw with a tahini dressing. Delicious food. Natural, wholesome and filling.

Who needs diets? 

I am 3 days in to another Whole10 (that’s a 1/3rd of a Whole30). If you don’t know what a Whole30 is check out Dallas and Melissa Hartwig’s website. I am combining it with a bit of intermittent fasting i.e. skipping breakfast, but still working out at lunchtime before I eat. The objective is just to reset things and take off a few pounds of fat over 10 days. My body fat percentage was 8.3% this morning which was a bit of a surprise on the low side but let’s see where it goes from here.

Anyway the net effect of a skipping breakfast, a fasted workout and as basically as carb free a diet as you can get, is that I get home from the office at 18:30 really quite hungry. In fact very hungry!! Unable to reach for a glass of wine to provide some relief I have had to find some food, but the fridge is pretty bare given that I go into a Whole10/30 with as little as possible around in the way of food that is non-compliant. This is what I managed to find today…

Parma ham (ingredients pork, salt), coconut oil (ingredients coconut oil) and pumpkin seed butter (ingredients… You get the idea). 

I have tried eating pumpkin seed butter on its own before and found it “challenging” – it stuck my mouth shut. So I thought what if I eat it with coconut oil wrapped up in Parma ham? This was less about considering the flavours and more about considering whether the coconut oilwould provide enough lubrication to enable me to swallow the pumpkin seed butter. However the result was surprisingly good! I spread a rounded desert spoon of coconut oil on one end of a slice of the ham and then the same amount of pumpkin seed butter on top of it. I rolled the slice of ham (down its length) around the oil and butter to make a filled sausage shape and then sliced it into rounds (I got 3 rounds per sausage).

Enjoy your Parma ham, coconut and pumpkin seed snacks with a glass of water with lemon juice and be grateful there are only 7 days to go! 

Now that the summer is properly here in the UK, what could be more primal that cooking dinner outside over a wood fire? OK, I admit I cheated by starting it off inside on the hob, but hey! We aim for aim for 100% but if we achieve 80% primal-ness, that feels like a victory to me. 

Here is the cheating phase, browning the beef and frying off the vegetables..

As this is a goulash it needs plenty of red peppers plus sweet paprika and cayenne pepper too that also needs frying off a bit to take off the rawness of the spice. Then whatever herbs you have in the garden.

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme were in my garden (but I wasn’t going to Scarborough Fair). They all got wrapped up between two sticks of celery for easy removal later.

And in the pot with red wine and good strong homemade beef stock.

Then to make the fire on my outdoor cooking rig

And when the fire is going well, the goulash goes over it for 2 hours. Checking it hasn’t got too dry every 30 minutes.

And after about 2-3 hours the beef is perfectly tender and the spices have developed a deep flavour.

And here’s my pretty messy plate of goulash served with some salad leaves from the garden and soured cream. Outdoor cooking is simple and simply tastes better. Give it a go! 

People often fret that starting a programme of exercise is going to either involve joining a gym with contracts and fees and meatheads grunting and posing or buying lots of expensive equipment. Equipment that, most likely will rarely get used and simply take up room gathering dust. Mind you, dusting the equipment you don’t use is a form of exercise too.

I don’t subscribe to either of those views though as it is quite possible to put together a challenging, periodised, resistance exercise programme using only your own body weight as the resistance. Here’s a little programme I put together for a client new to exercise so that he could work out in between our sessions. Not an olympic bar, kettlebell, or indeed anything but his own weight, needed.

But of course, as time goes on, people get fitter and start to desire new challenges. There are only so many lunges and squats you can do. Actually you can do quite a lot of squats – I had a colleague once that ran a class called “A Thousand Squats”. It was just that. 1000 body weight squats in 45 mins. Try it if you like, but don’t blame me  if you can’t walk for a week after!

So when you feel you have reached a plateau in your body weight training gains are exhausted,  is the only option an olympic bar and a set of bumper plates (Eleiko of course)? Surely not! You simply make the body weight exercises more challenging. Here is my very effective body weight gym that I use for my clients. two very simple bits of equipment that will vastly extend the range of exercise you can do and developing full body, functional fitness. That ab wheel, properly used, is a killer!!

Have fun with your own body and get fit while you do it!! You’re welcome 😉

After a brief pause as I got over the shock of Brexit, which is now being used by the food industry to try stop the sugar tax (they will try any trick to addict people to sugar as they need to replace the ones that die), 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/10/halt-sugar-tax-introduction-urges-food-drink-industry-
I thought it would be worthwhile revisiting my ribs recipe as I did it at the weekend and reminded myself how good it was!

Just before anyone points it out, yes I know that the recipe has sugar in it from the home made preserve that goes in the barbeque sauce, but you don’t eat a lot and you aren’t going to eat ribs all day every day so in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal. Relax 🙂 

Apart from the racks of ribs, that’s your ingredients: any home made chutney (this one was a 2013 apple and thyme) , salt, vinegar and oil (extra virgin rape seed). 

Make the sauce by whizzing up the chutney, oil and vingar in a blender to make a smooth paste that is not too runny. You will need about 100ml of oil and 50ml of vinegar but it’s a bit trial and error as it depends on your chutney. I salt the ribs well on both sides and then cover in the sauce. Cover with foil and cook quite slowly for at least 2 hours, maybe 3. When the meat is soft and starting to come away from the bone uncover and turn the heat up to a normal roasting temperature for a final hour. This will dry out the sauce a bit and brown the ribs. Check it frequently so you don’t over do it!! 

This is what they will look like before browning…

This is what they look like after…

Serve with salad from the garden and home made coleslaw, and a big stack of napkins – it’s going to be messy! 

Enjoy!! 

Its not often that I get excited by something happening in the House of Lords, the upper house of the UK Parliament but I did today!

The Daily Telegraph reports that Lord McColl, emeritus professor of surgery at Guys Hospital in London, has been speaking about the obesity calamity in the UK and has warned that advice to avoid fat was ‘false and misleading’ and was fuelling the obesity epidemic.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/06/09/low-fat-diets-and-exercise-are-pointless-for-losing-weight-warns/

(the Telegraph only lets you read a limited number of articles a week)

He makes the point, that I make to my clients all the time, that when farmers want to fatten animals, they feed them carbohydrate. They do not feed them fat. As a small boy, I used to go on holiday to France. In those days they still put pictures of farmers force feeding geese with a funnel to make the delicacy fois gras (fat liver) on postcards. Its pretty grotesque and a very odd thing to put on a postcard. Anyway, the idea is to hugely over-fatten the animal and in particular its liver, and the liver is then very soft like pate. The food they use to accomplish this massive over-fattening? Corn. I see people eating popped corn as a “healthy” alternative to crisps and wonder how their liver is faring under the onslaught.

If you want to be put off fois gras for ever…

As the noble Lord points out, fat has other functions in the diet apart from providing energy. It slows down digestion and by encouraging leptin release it regulates the appetite. I suspect that fat also has a role in governing our mood as years ago, when I was trying to lose weight on a ridiculous low fat diet, I was as miserable as sin.

I feel the case against the current dietary guidelines is gaining momentum. After 40 years of making us fatter and sicker it is time for them to be thrown in the bin and for the establishment that has peddled the myths to apologise.

Research presented at the Europen Obesity Summit (yes, we now have them) suggests that abdominal adiposity, or a beer belly or rather a carbohydrate belly, is a significant indicator for prostate cancer. Something no man or partner of a man wants to experience.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/02/prostate-cancer-four-inches-extra-on-a-mans-waistline-increases/
(The Telegraph only lets you view a limited number of articles per week)

It really rams home the message that fat is not an inert tissue. It doesn’t just sit in the body doing nothing. It sends messages, it secretes hormones, it is part of you as much as your calf muscle or eyeball. Just the same way as you wouldn’t want an eyeball on your kneecap, you don’t want fat sitting around your middle. Insulin deposits fat around your middle and you produce insulin in response to eating carbohydrates.

Thought experiment: if; somehow, as well as depositing fat around your middle, insulin also caused you to grow an eyeball on your kneecap, would you continue to eat highly processed fast carbohydrates? 

We should cut another risk factor for developing another unpleasant disease suffered at some point by one in eight men and cut the belly fat. We will look better too.