Sunday, May 17, 2009

SUGAR AND SPICE AND ALL THINGS NICE


Of late, my partner has been packing some extra weight, leading us to have a conversation about how she could slow down her horizontal growth. She was desperate to fit unto those snazzy outfits that hardly a month ago fitted like a glove. So, I happen to mention her love for sweet things and her total daily sugar intake. But as expected and which is quite normal for most people, she also takes offence when criticized. No one that's guilty of packing, likes to be accused of overdoing it in the food department especially if its absolutely true. 

With the huge varieties of fresh cream cakes, desserts, toffees, chocolates, sodas, chocolate chip cookies, etc and all those other sweet... "feel good food" on offer, who can blame anyone for always wanting to have a little more.


Besides the sweet things in life, there is also the salty "feel good foods", you know, those always available and easily accessible fast foods, like potato chips, french fries, those 40cm puffy pizza bases buried under a mountain of cheese and meats, along with its fellow toppings, and all those other related pastas. Not to mention the deep fried chicken, kebabs on a stick, flamed grilled ribs, spicy biryanis, hot curries and tasty samosas etc...

Yep, I know its easy to loose your cool and self control around all those deliciously edible offerings, especially if eating is your crutch, to suppress those other issues you are trying so hard to hide. But issues aside, I need to revisit the sugar intake story. She also loves coffee, black strong and sweet, and she has at least 4 cups per day. So I did the math, 3 teaspoons sugar per cup, 4 times per day, totals 12 teaspoons of sugar daily. After counting out and discovering that 25 teaspoons of sugar fulls a regular tea cup, I concluded that she consumes no less than 3 cups of sugar per week in fact almost 4. That is a serious amount of sugar but it excludes the sugar found in all those previously mentioned chocolates and confectioneries.

All the sugar she consumes aside, she is a very sweet girl, so I needed to do my utmost to help her to roll-back to that sexy shape she had, prior to becoming a "shape shifter". Together we decided that two cups of coffee per day would have to suffice to satisfy her caffeine addiction and that 3 sugars per cup would have to reduced to 2. So, once again I did the math, 2 sugars per day trice daily totals 4 teaspoons of sugar, extrapolated to less than 1 cup of sugar per week. Wow, what an improvement!

Anyway, this is how the other part of the sugar story goes. Our bodies needs sugar but any surplus sugar not use daily, cannot however be stored for later use in the form of sugar. Instead our bodies converts this surplus sugar into fat. Our bodies are very efficient at making and storing fat because it can convert the fat back to sugar when it needs to, however because most of us replenish our expended sugar daily, our bodies has no reason to convert stored fat to sugar instead it just takes the excess sugar consumed daily and stores that too.

Fat is not a bad thing, the body needs fat, all our vital organs are cushioned in fat but its the excess fat that becomes a problem. Our bodies systematically store fat as a subcutaneous layer almost evenly spread throughout the body, now having done this, and having run out of space to store more fat, it starts storing fat as a second layers then a third, then a fourth, then a fifth, etc... Resulting in your waistline going from, say 28cm to 29cm to 30cm to 32cm etc, and where it stops is entirely upto you. By reducing your sugar intake by half, and assuming this new sugar intake level is below what the body requires daily, it will then be encouraged to convert the stored fat to sugar. This process causes weight loss, resulting in the waistline going in the other direction. Happiness is....

Optimal health is your greatest asset in life, so try to avoid sugar. Refined sugar (white sugar) is one of the worst forms of sugar we can take, so rather substitute sugar for honey as its sweeter than sugar and you'll also end up using less. By the way, sugar is not the only food stuff stored as fat, even a large baked potato (carbohydrates) if eaten when the body already has stored surplus fat, will not make use of that baked potato for energy but convert it into fat and guess what... one large potato is in fact equivalent to a cup of sugar.

Anyway, I will be keeping tabs on Missie and look forward to a decrement in her horizontal dimensions. Meanwhile do go visit the blogs below.

nerdytoys.blogspot.com
humanfacets.blogspot.com
sightsofcapetown.blogspot.com

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