Thought Picnic: To the gym for a Jim?

Sweet tooth dilemma

I cannot deny I have always had a sweet tooth, a characteristic of which has gone to war against my dentition from decades ago. Whilst I count myself more a tea-drinker than a coffee-quaffer, the beverages have required sweetening and milk.

Then I started changing elements of my diet out of concerns for my health at first and to address some fears of body dysmorphia that might accompany a certain age. I have thankfully never been fat, but I am a bit troubled about things getting out of control, like bundles of unexplained tissue at the back of the neck and a tummy ballooning into an embarrassment.

My medication can change the physiology that some people can be susceptible to lipodystrophy where fat deposits show up in parts of the body to cause discomfort and possible deformities.

Figures and numbers

Maybe if I spent a bit more time in the gym and took up swimming as I have always wanted to, I could bring that and the other under control. When I had cancer some 8 years ago, I lost a quarter of my body weight, having had a 32” waist for as long as I could remember, I was down to about 28” that my doctor in discussing the change to my physique wanted me to gain back all that I had lost and a little more.

I have never been comfortable to gaining back all of it, I would rather I was 10% to 15% short of my peak weight. Besides, I have too much of a head for the numbers in checking the Body Mass Index (BMI) or making metric comparisons between height and weight where I imagine you are fit if your weight in kilograms is less than 100 units taken from your height. So, the comparison for a typical height of 6 feet which is 183cm should carry a weight of 83kg or less.

I guess that thinking, especially for males, belies a predilection to physical attraction defined as slim, slender or skinny, which would put the weight at lower than 75kg. On matters of body dysmorphia, one can suddenly be quite fickle, for both oneself and others.

Changes to diet

On my diet, I started with taking the Maggi essence out of my cooking completely, I am good enough in the kitchen to make tasty food without enhancing it with additives. Though it is not what I would get from eating out. One radical change was when I stopped putting sugar in my tea and consequently stopped having it in my coffee too.

It was not an act of the will of determination, I just decided to try it and then concluded, it was doing me no harm. It has not knocked the kilograms off the scale, but I am a bit happier for it. My next activity has been reducing salt in my diet too. Along with this change, I rarely take fizzy drinks, drink more water and where I make yoghurt shakes, I use honey as the sweetener.

To the gym for a Jim?

I probably can shed a lot of weight by doing more exercise, my three months in Edinburgh involved walking to my office, sometimes up to 2 kilometres each way, even if I could get a bus. I thought it was good exercise.

However, the struggle remains to maintain a fitter body into my 50s without getting obsessed with the way I look. This blog shows I am a bit concerned, I just don’t want it to take over my life. That is my fear of body dysmorphic disorder.

Pink Slime: What you can eat may not be food

Raising the Yuck Factor

I cannot say I am one to be overtaken by food scares that fill our headlines from day to day but I do worry when the way our food is derived departs from as it were standard procedures to concoctions that make Frankenstein plasticine play.

In all honesty, I should be unconcerned with the uproar about “pink slime” because I never use minced beef in my cooking and rarely ever eat meals that have minced beef as part of the ingredients.

“Pink Slime” or to give its it more fanciful name - Lean Finely Textured Beef – plumbs the depths of sick-making yuck that could have you filling sick-bags with more than the contents of your stomach.

Taking science beyond food

As the story goes, some food industry genius thought after beef was cut off the bone there was still too much being discarded and he came up with the process of heating the beef trimmings in centrifuges to separate the fat from the meat, the exposing the product to ammonium gas to kill bacteria and this is mixed with ground beef in what Beef Products Inc. (hardly reminiscent of your dear grandma’s kitchen in name or purpose) might have called the triumph of economics and science over waste.

Reading this is stomach churning enough for my somewhat rigid constitution but what makes it alarming is the way the food industry has subsumed the regulators who trot out the idea that this whole thing is safe.

I will however contend that just because the processing of food is safe does not mean it is fit for purpose; the safety of processing must not just be demonstrated but it must be seen to not to take the Yuck Factor to the point of chronic emesis.

These unnatural things

Indeed, one must commend Jamie Oliver [1] for exposing this atrocious travesty that takes the nutritious and edible out of food leaving it just barely amenable to mastication with our digestive systems struggling to derive any nutrients before the muck is passed out our bodies made more susceptible to unknown attacks having not evolved to the chemistry necessary to process this stuff.

It is bad enough to learn that beef is treated with carbon monoxide [2] to prevent its natural browning due to rancidity or to note the rise of Frankenstein Sugars [3], but nothing prepared me for when I read that beef from a cow apparently suffering from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy [4] (BSE) or “Mad Cow’s Disease” ended up in 8 states and the Island of Guam [5].

What is real?

There is no reason to touch the topic of Mechanically Recovered Meat [6] if you have not filled three sick bags already, but when you realise that sausages and chicken nuggets from conveyor-belt mass-market and cheap outlets do not lend themselves to traditional methods your begin to wonder what else is sacred about our food.

This is not to say that there is no need to find ways to improve quality and yield for food products be they plant or animal derived but the tampering with natural processes to do with colour, texture, taste and unnatural derivations has to be more tightly regulated and probably stopped, besides, with the certificates of food-worthiness given by food agencies we are left to better trust our instincts than allow for these compromised agencies in cahoots with the Food Industrial Complex to certify products stray dogs might well sniff at.

Debunking Myths

According to Snopes.com [7], McDonald’s stopped using mechanically recovered meat in Chicken McNuggets in 2003. When I feel better, I might be tempted to try it again.

Sources

[1] BBC News - Could 'pink slime' be rebranded?

[2] Akin Akintayo: The beauty of the dead cow

[3] Akin Akintayo: The rise of the Frankenstein Sugars

[4] Bovine spongiform encephalopathy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[5] Akin Akintayo: Cult of the Mad Cow

[6] Mechanically separated meat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[7] snopes.com: Pink Slime and Mechanically Separated Chicken