We don’t do diets in our house. Or at least I didn’t think we did. Then I Googled ‘diets’ out of interest.
Crikey!
We have the 5:2 diet, Dukan diet, Paleo diet, Atkins diet, Alkaline diet, Cambridge diet, South Beach diet, Slimming World diet, Slim-Fast diet, LighterLife diet, WeightWatchers diet, Rosemary Conley diet and Jenny Craig diet and that’s just for starters
I then Googled ‘Eat what you want diet’. I was surprised to find page after page of differing ‘Eat What You Want Diets’!
Now I have nothing against diets. I’m sure for some people they are the right thing and possibly the only way they will lose weight.
However the people that seem to be on a never ending circle of diets do make me laugh. Because that’s the thing. They do one diet, lose some weight, start eating ‘normally’, put weight back on and then start another diet. And then there’s someone making a lot of money out of these people!
The funny thing is we eat what we want. No. Not the eat all what you want diet. We just eat what we want.
However, we hardly eat any processed food. We don’t eat ready meals… at all (even the microwave has been shut away in the loft!) and if we or the Kids want to have something to eat between meals it’s usually a piece of fruit, not a chocolate bar, bag of crisps or bag of sweets.
We saw a video that someone had posted on You tube. It was a talk by Michael Pollan. If you are interested in food and diet I recommend looking at some of the things he has written.
One of the things he says is “you can eat as much junk food as you want… as long as you make it yourself”
And it’s a really good train of thought. It’s easy to go and buy chips, pizza, burgers and southern fried chicken from the take-away, you could go every day. However to make these things at home requires time, effort, quite a bit of mess and subsequent cleaning up! Which is why we only have these things occasionally as a treat, even then chips are usually baked in the oven as opposed to deep-fried. Making them yourself also means you don’t get the hidden nasty ingredients in there.
The other thing that Michael Pollan mentions is the amount of sugar, salt, chemicals and hidden fats in processed foods and ready meals. Again something which we don’t really eat.
So it’s funny when you look at the different diets and see that the majority of them say to cut down on processed food and eat more fruit and vegetables.
Well that’s what we do and it’s also what Michael Pollan advocates (although I have given a very simplified version of his advice).
We enjoy food. We cook nearly everything we eat from scratch. We eat fruit. We eat vegetables.
We don’t eat ready meals and we don’t eat a lot of processed food.
We eat what we want… does that mean we’re on a diet? If we are we’ve been on it for over eight years and still enjoying it. Now that must be some diet!
Just please, please don’t give it a name… I would be mortified to Google diets again and find ‘The ‘Ome Made Diet’!
