The Optimise Health Blog

 Here in the UK many still practise the Christian tradition of Lent: the discipline of giving something up to consider living simply, frequently a food item and for health benefit. The idea is to mimic the 40 day fast undertaken by Jesus in the wilderness, when he was tested by the devil and tempted to prove he was ready to start his mission. In England we start by making pancakes on Shrove Tuesday - to use up the sweet stuff in the larder so we are not tempted to eat it again for the duration of lent and to fuel the fast. Today the focus may be more about the challenge of reining in appetite or curbing bad habits like smoking or eating treats to excess and less about Christs' 40 days and nights in the desert being stalked by satan. Interestingly most ancient traditions held in them the concept of feasts: I.E. celebrating a particular event or time of year with a party and food. This meant eating special luxuries or taking pleasure in rarer foods or harvest time...

I love seconds - helpings of dinner that is. I normally fill up on the main course, lots of meat and carbs and veg. I am not really a pudding person because I can't be bothered to make them. When my wife is away I will sometimes just eat large amounts of grilled steak, baked potato and peas. Once I got an offer on fillet steak and ate a pound of it at one sitting straight from the BBQ. In Yorkshire men are praised (mostly by older motherly figures) for finishing mammouth plates of food or chastised gently if they do not finish the plate - it can even be rude not to ask for seconds! So what makes us feel full? Well the body is pretty savvy and it lets the brain know when your stomach is getting stretched to filling point which in turn flips the switch in your brain to "full" The problem is that it takes 20 minutes for the message to be received and understood in the brain - in stone-age caveman circumstances, eating slowly and chewing a lot on tough tiger st...

I was brought up to finish my plate. Like many of the little chef generation I wanted the prized lolly for finishing my dinner. Where did this rule of "finish the plate" come from? I would hazard guess that it comes from my parents who growing up in post-war Britain when rationing was still in force and my father saw his first Banana when he was ten years old. At that stage food was scarce, high energy food was prized, expensive and considered a luxury treat; in fact any tasty food you got was worth eating, while anything else you got was probably just eaten because you were hungry. So if you didn't finish your plate something was seriously wrong or you were at the very least disrespecting the cook and provider of the meal. When I was at Uni we did a nutritional survey using ourselves as the guinea pigs. I found that I was eating 3x the recommended energy requirement per day (even finishing friends leftovers!) for a man of my age and size; at that time I coul...

So you want to lose weight. What is one of the hardest things about this? Being hungry of course. If you're used to eating a large volume of food your body will still crave it when you reduce the portion sizes you are eating; even though you fill up on a pint of water before each meal you will soon feel hungry again. So when you get hungry between your smaller portion meals what do you do? After exercising, drinking more water, distracting yourself (boredom or stress often provokes hunger) you should find a food you can fill up on which won't break the calorie bank. I chose carrots because they are easily available, cheap, tasty ( I like them fresh+raw from the fridge or better the allotment) and they have few calories compared to beer, cake, biscuits, bread, sweets or other things I might reach for. Carrots also have the added bonus of giving you a healthy skin tone which when surveyed makes your skin look more healthy than a tan or fake tan! You can...