Cycling. Health. Covid. Diet.

[sjpt]

but I wonder, how many people HAVE actually changed what they are eating?

One issue is how much a change in eating habits now will help if I get Covid19 in the next few months? Of course in the long term it might benefit us in other ways, but that is much less of a motivator.

In the cystic fibrosis case I mentioned earlier in the thread diet is a lifetime issue. Good diet established in childhood and maintained though life makes a vast difference to length and quality of life.

 

[Tarka]

Of all the TV chefs / cookery programs I've ever seen, not a single one does the washing up afterwards.

 

[pajtaz]

I have not changed my eating habits much due to coronavirus but ... I am trying to eat less of everything (except fruit). First, in general, we eat way too much food, way more than our bodies need daily. So in general I realized for a long time now that I am eating too quantity of much food on a daily basis so I have been trying to limit portions or skip big meals. Second, now due to coronavirus restrictions I am working from home and not commuting with ebike 36 km daily. That's about 1000 extra calories burned per day that are now not being burned. So I am actively trying to eat less food, typically smaller portions of breakfast and dinner, and replacing lunch with fruit.

I do find myself eating more fruit now than pre-coronavirus because the fruit is readily available on the table in dining room. Before I would have to select which fruit I want to eat that day and take it to work. Sometimes I would forget or, again, eat too much for lunch and work that I'm too full to eat fruit.

Another change is that we are making a bit more vegetable soups than usual. Again, in general I recognized that we are eating too much meat for breakfast or dinner so I am asking my wife to make more vegetable meals, and one of the easiest and tasty pure vegetable meals are soups. I also make a mean broccoli soup. We replace some meat meals with soups now.

I still try to go cycling several times per week at lowest PAS level so I am using more of my own power. I also started running and doing pushups, sit-ups, and pull-ups at home. That combined with less food, more fruit, more soups, is what helps during this time. However it should be like this all the time. We will continue to push to maintain this diet from now on.

 

[flecc]

Of all the TV chefs / cookery programs I've ever seen, not a single one does the washing up afterwards.

The norm in most professional kitchens is that washing up is done by entirely separate staff in a separate area, never in the kitchen where the cooking is done. Even the most junior commis chef would never do any washing up.

So it's not a chef function or skill.
.

 

[thirteen]

Why do you need to reduce your cholesterol levels? Try reading "The Great Cholesterol Con" and "Too Many Pills" for a more modern and informed view.

I don't.

I already reduced it 2 years ago on the advice of my GP.

At the time, I followed the advice of a trained medical professional, and took that advice, which took into account early deaths from heart diseases.

Are you saying that following that advice was wrong, and I should have bought a book and done nothing to reduce my cholesterol levels?

 

[zoros]

I've cut out milk on cereals and substrituted it with hazelnut milk instead. Mmmm delicious and NO fat. There is soya / almond / cashew etc etc so pick a flavour you like.

 

[nigelbb]

The norm in most professional kitchens is that washing up is done by entirely separate staff in a separate area, never in the kitchen where the cooking is done. Even the most junior commis chef would never do any washing up.

So it's not a chef function or skill.
.

When I was 16 I worked one summer as a pantry boy on the Fishguard->Rosslare ferry. While crockery & cutlery was washed up by me & the other pantry boy the chefs always washed up their own utensils & pans. I always assumed that it was so they could be sure it had been done properly. I'm sure things will have changed in the last 50 years eg we did all washing up by hand - no dishwasher.

 

[flecc]

When I was 16 I worked one summer as a pantry boy on the Fishguard->Rosslare ferry. While crockery & cutlery was washed up by me & the other pantry boy the chefs always washed up their own utensils & pans. I always assumed that it was so they could be sure it had been done properly. I'm sure things will have changed in the last 50 years eg we did all washing up by hand - no dishwasher.

On a ferry I can well understand the circumstances would be different. My knowledge of this is lifelong from my father always being in catering for hotels, clubs and restaurants.

All that was always manual and never by chefs, the machines are ok for front of house crockery but not for the kitchen "tinwash" where only manual is good enough to deal with baked on foodstuffs.
.

 

[GLJoe]

Why do you need to reduce your cholesterol levels? Try reading "The Great Cholesterol Con" and "Too Many Pills" for a more modern and informed view.

Books like that quite rightly point out the fallacy of relying on medication to 'treat' certain conditions (where in reality, they often just mask the symptoms and don't address the root cause of what caused the issue in the first place - and of course the drugs almost always have negative side effects as well!).

And yes, we all need cholesterol to thrive. However high blood cholesterol is often a proxy for excessive fat intake and/or a poor diet, and that's bad. So reducing blood cholesterol readings is usually a good thing.
But to be clear, its not good to do it with drugs like statins - you need to modify your diet.

 

[GLJoe]

One issue is how much a change in eating habits now will help if I get Covid19 in the next few months? Of course in the long term it might benefit us in other ways, but that is much less of a motivator.

You can change things like your blood lipid levels in 24hrs!
Many people with type 2 diabetes who radically change their diet can be 'cured' in a matter of a few weeks.
And a couple of weeks is also all it takes for non diabetic people to drastically increase their insulin sensitivity and start to see significant reductions in things like inflammatory conditions if you're having problems with certain foods. And your immune response capability is going to get stronger and stronger as this happens.

So yea ... its WELL worth making the change in eating habits right away, even if things like fat loss are going to take a good few months/years to become significant.

 

[thirteen]

Books like that quite rightly point out the fallacy of relying on medication to 'treat' certain conditions (where in reality, they often just mask the symptoms and don't address the root cause of what caused the issue in the first place - and of course the drugs almost always have negative side effects as well!).

And yes, we all need cholesterol to thrive. However high blood cholesterol is often a proxy for excessive fat intake and/or a poor diet, and that's bad. So reducing blood cholesterol readings is usually a good thing.
But to be clear, its not good to do it with drugs like statins - you need to modify your diet.

That's exactly what I did.

The "threat," from my GP was that unless I could get my total and LDL levels to below the NHS stated figured of 5.0 and 3.0 respectively, she would be prescribing statins.

My levels were 7.6 total, 4.5 LDL.

I achieved it within 6 months, hence the 2.5 stone weight loss as a by-product.

Cutting out dairy was a big part of that.

 

[GLJoe]

In the cystic fibrosis case I mentioned earlier in the thread diet is a lifetime issue. Good diet established in childhood and maintained though life makes a vast difference to length and quality of life.

I totally agree, but I think the important thing here is that its not just for people with chronic illnesses such as cystic fibrosis. Doesn't a good diet make a vast difference to the length and quality of life of pretty much everybody?

It would seem that one of the problems with our modern society and all its medical advances, is that while overall life expectancy has in general been rising, the quality of life in the last decades hasn't! Medicine has become very good at stopping you dying, but not really making you healthy (or even curing the underlying problems!). The cynical out there will point out that the maximum profit for the pharmaceutical companies is when they lock you in to a lifetime of needing to rely on their medication. They don't really want you to be 'cured'. Just kept alive as long as possible.

 

[GLJoe]

That's exactly what I did.
The "threat," from my GP was that unless I could get my total and LDL levels to below the NHS stated figured of 5.0 and 3.0 respectively, she would be prescribing statins.
My levels were 7.6 total, 4.5 LDL.
I achieved it within 6 months, hence the 2.5 stone weight loss as a by-product.
Cutting out dairy was a big part of that.

Awesome!
You mentioned in a previous post that you'd also had other health benefits from cutting out dairy? care to share ??

 

[GLJoe]

I see a fair bit of talk about the exercise side of things, but not so much on the diet aspect...

To follow up on this, I subscribe to a number of health related podcasts and youtube channels, and to be honest, they've all singing from the same hymn sheet and telling everyone how important it is to protect yourself from Coronovirus by eating healthily, however the mainstream media has still seemed to be fairly quiet about discussing the elephant in the room.
However a couple of days ago Dr. Aseem Malhotra did speak in an article in the Telegraph, and the BBC did do a very brief interview with him

A summary of the points:

'Poor diet is responsible for more death than physical activity, smoking and alchohol COMBINED'
'Specifically, 11 million deaths per year due to bad diet'
'obesity, type 2 diabetes etc ... all routed in bad diet'
'You can reverse, send into remission or massively improve those risk factors within the space of just a few weeks'
'>50% of UK diet unhealthy food .... nutrient deficient ... highly processed ...'

'Government needs to add guideline to Eat Real Food and protect the NHS ..'
'10 fold more likely to die of Covid19 if you're obese' (and this is for under 60s)

And I guess its worth reminding that the definition of Obese is a BMI of 30 or more. Plus, its not going to be a binary thing. i.e. the '10 times more likely to die of Covid19' isn't going to suddenly disappear to nothing if you're still carrying excess fat, but are under the BMI of 30 !

I am actually quite annoyed with a lot of the mainstream news media (what a surprise) that in the with a large proportion of stories about someone who has sadly died of Covid, they usually post a picture of that person taken years previously, when they were much slimmer and looked far healthier! Anyone else noticed that?

Good to see that news piece, but if its so important (as the stats seem to indicate) then why isn't more noise being made about the whole health issue?

Anybody got any theories? Conspiracy based or otherwise
I wonder what David Icke has to say about it .....

 

[flecc]

Good to see that news piece, but if its so important (as the stats seem to indicate) then why isn't more noise being made about the whole health issue?

Because people take no notice.

The mistake we've made as a society is the widespread provision of instant access fast foods and prepared processed ready meals etc.

The outcome is a society that lives on those and watches a few specialists cooking on TV for entertainment, rather than as inspiration for their own sustenance.
.

 

[nigelbb]

Because people take no notice.

The mistake we've made as a society is the widespread provision of instant access fast foods and prepared processed ready meals etc.

The outcome is a society that lives on those and watches a few specialists cooking on TV for entertainment, rather than as inspiration for their own sustenance.
.

Don't forget how ridiculously cheap food is now. Forty or fifty years ago food was relatively a much higher proportion of the household budget (& housing cost a much smaller proportion).

 

[GLJoe]

Don't forget how ridiculously cheap food is now.

Indeed.
So wouldn't a 'junk food tax' be a sensible thing?

So it might be say £5 for a small bag of crisps, and maybe £20 for a big mac?

Or perhaps also subsidise the healthy nutritious foods?
If you had a head of broccoli costing 20p and a pound of butter £20, that should make a few people reconsider their diets

 

[thirteen]

Awesome!
You mentioned in a previous post that you'd also had other health benefits from cutting out dairy? care to share ??

Most could be attributed to the weight loss. However better digestion and not suffering mild IBS symptoms can be directly attributed to cutting out dairy.

I know this from switching back onto dairy for short periods and seeing symptoms recur.

 

[MeganYterr]

I just gained weight during COVID, because I hate working out in my house. I haven't cycled in months...

 

[WheezyRider]

I just gained weight during COVID, because I hate working out in my house. I haven't cycled in months...

Yes, I know what you mean, I haven't been swimming since February and due to ill health, I've had times when I haven't even been able to cycle for a couple of months. Making myself exercise for the sake of it is such a drag. Exercising to get somewhere, like on a bike is a completely different thing.

To avoid putting on weight the best solution I've found is a kind of 5:2 diet. Not as extreme as the maximum 500 calorie recommended for two days,but just eat less and no treats on those two days. I've also given up breakfast cereals, just a load of sugar and processed crap.