20th January 2020
Weight loss

Mythbusting Monday: Does eating in a blindfold help you lose weight?

Has anyone seen my dinner? In my search for myths to bust, sometimes I run out of inspiration and have to take to Google to sleuth out the fads. It turns out that, in an episode of How to Lose Weight Well, they said, “Eating while blindfolded and in the dark can reduce calorie intake by 25%”. Excuse me, I have questions… Ok, so clearly, eating blindfolded AND in the dark (a rather belt and braces approach methinks) means you can’t see what you’re doing so there will be a lot of mess and yes, you’ll likely eat less if you manage one meal this way without giving up and turning the light on. But I don’t know about you, […]
13th June 2019
Orange

The Truth About Dieting

Hands up who’s been on a diet? Hands up who regained most of the weight they lost? It’s not that we have suddenly started to defy the laws of thermodynamics, such that eating fewer calories than your body needs can no longer result in weight loss although to be fair, post 40, it can feel like it! Diets work, whether it’s the cabbage soup diet or simply healthy eating but only while you are on them. What happens when the diet stops is critical. Have we, as a nation, succumbed to a population collapse of willpower? Do we give up and settle for a life of jam doughnuts and wine (I mean, I’m game!)? Or do we need to rethink […]
16th May 2019
Desserts

The language of dieting: How the way you talk about your health kick may be anything but healthy for your friends

It is both Mental Health Awareness Week (which this year has a body image focus) and peak Beach Body prep time, as the media starts its annual shaming of anyone who is not a size 6 or dieting to become so. We all know that to be beach body ready, you simply need to take your body, as it is, to the beach, probably with an ice cream in hand. However, if you are currently watching what you eat or engaging in a fitness regime (which is fine if you’re doing it healthily, for the right reasons) have you thought about the way you talk about your endeavours with others? In this piece, I’d like to help you to rethink […]
4th August 2017
Diet tracking

Diet trackers: friend or foe?

Diet trackers: friend or foe?   After being asked to fill in a 24 hour food diary for a nutrition conference and discovering I was consuming a lot more (albeit healthy) fat than I thought, I decided to download the diet and exercise tracker My Fitness Pal to monitor my eating and training for a few days.  While I found the process to be enlightening in some ways, I came across several pitfalls of My Fitness Pal in particular but also diet and fitness tracking in general.  Trackers can help you identify areas in which you can improve your diet and lifestyle but as you’ll see in this article, they can be highly misleading and may not be good for […]