With diets, quality is more important

The most common fitness goal, by a wide margin, is weight loss.  In fact, the vast majority of clients I have worked with have been more concerned with their physical appearance than their overall health. 

This is not necessarily a bad thing; most of the lifestyle changes we need to make in order to radically improve our physical appearance are the exact same ones we need to develop in order to enjoy better health, immunity from disease and ultimately, longevity.

For instance, diet modification is one of the first things most of us resort to when we need to lose weight.

This is a great approach because ultimately, losing weight boils down to consuming fewer calories than you expend. Therefore, cutting down on your calorie intake is a logical first step in the battle against excess body fat.

That is, of course, the easy part, the hard part is trying to figure out which foods to cut out and which ones to keep.

A great many of us, will immediately single out and remove an entire food group, often carbohydrates, from their diets.

This not right because in the absence of a balanced diet, your body will quickly get malnourished affecting your metabolism and energy levels, which will most likely prevent you from achieving your goal safely and in a sustainable manner.

Others resort to portion reduction, which is a viable strategy, but one that may trigger an obsession with the quantity rather than the quality of the food that you consume.

The third, and the best option in my opinion, is to begin by reducing the amount of processed foods in your diet with a view to eliminating such foods from your diet altogether.

I acknowledge that over-eating and poor food choices contribute to the growing levels of obesity and malnutrition in society today, but my argument is that these problems have their roots in the way our food is produced, processed and packaged.

Just two generations ago, my own grandmother hardly ate anything processed, with the exception of table sugar and salt.

Much of her food was eaten fresh from the farm, where it was grown without pesticides.

Fast forward to my generation and more than two thirds of the food we eat comes out of a packet, bottle or tin, having been thoroughly processed to enhance its flavour, alter its colour and extend its shelf life.

The chemicals used to process our food have a major impact on our overall health as well as our eating habits.

It is a fact that processed food is on average much more appetising than fresh food, and this is because many processed foodstuffs have chemicals added to them to enhance their flavour and keep you coming back for more.  Such chemicals include monosodium glutamate (MSG) and high fructose corn syrup.

Addicted to food

Many health professionals have come out to criticise the extensive use of these substances in processed food stuffs, arguing that they interfere with normal appetite functions, contributing to weight gain because they are essentially addictive yet they have no particular nutritional purpose.

This could be the reason why you find yourself reaching constantly into a bag of crisps and not being able to stop yourself even after you feel you have had enough.

Or why it so much easier to drink two litres of carbonated soft drinks in a day than it is to drink two litres of pure water.

Further evidence that the consumption of processed food stuffs contribute to obesity comes in the form of the demographics. In the developed world, the very poor are more likely to be obese than the middle and upper classes.

This is because fresh produce is far more expensive and time consuming to prepare than the processed stuff. And these people are paying a heavy price in terms of poor health and alarming obesity rates.

In the developing world, including here in Kenya, there has been a dramatic expansion of the middle class notably evident in the growing mall culture and the expansion of supermarkets. Here, it is the middle class who are the major consumers of processed food.

Take a walk around Nairobi’s malls and you will find food courts bustling with activity.

If you look closely, you will also notice that more often than not, both the children and their parents tend to be obese.

The effects of this heavy consumption of processed foods is already being felt in our health system, where lifestyle diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes now occupy more bed spaces in our hospitals than communicable diseases. 

Now, the only way to keep from finding ourselves in the same position as the developed world is to preserve and hand down to the next generation our traditional foods and cooking methods.

We must cut down on processed food if we are to win the war against obesity.

Although it may necessitate a little more planning and organisation to eat healthy, cutting out the additives, flavour enhancers and preservatives, will help you keep cancer at bay, your weight in check and your body in great functional shape for a better quality of life.

Eat fresh produce today, will you!

Raymond is a fitness consultant. Join the conversation on Facebook; search raymondonyango.com.