Weight Loss Tips - Get Fresh and Feel the Force
62If your idea of a balanced diet is a cookie in each hand, it's clearly time to reset your dial. Plenty of people-whether seven-stone whips or seventeen-stone whoppers - are malnourished because they fail to eat sufficiently nutritious food. If you want to feel great and look incredible, you have to eat well, which means a varied diet with plenty of fresh stuff. Not exactly a shock revelation, I know, but stop griping. Put down those cookies and climb on board. Here are six sure-fire ways to increase your vitamin content:
- Eating seasonal - and local - food helps. Studies have confirmed what your heart already knows: that modern crop-breeding, accelerated growth, prolonged storage and long distance transport lower the nutritional value of food. So stand on your doorstep. Try to eat things from within a twenty-five-mile radius; if you're in a vast metropolis, make it forty miles and pamper yourself with the knowledge that you're doing the planet a favour too. A little investigation should yield a prodigious harvest - whether it's local cheese, fresh fish or orchard fruits -wherever you're based. Eating in this honest, grounded way may leave you feeling like a heroine in a Hardy novel, but let's be frank: fitting such Elysian bliss into a busy life is undoubtedly a challenge. I recently spent an entire weekend picking blackberries from nearby fields and turning them into bramble jelly; at ten o'clock on Sunday night, I realized we hadn't had any lunch and the kids' school uniforms were still trapped in the dirty-clothes basket nursing last week's grass stains. Clearly, we can't all know the family tree of the apples in our bowl. But we can make a stab at eating seasonally. Strawberries in December, as everyone knows, should be shot on sight. If your asparagus comes from Peru, and you don't, it's time to alter your feeding habits.
- Uncook! Go raw! You'll lose weight, for sure, since bite for bite vegetables and fruit generally have fewer calories than processed foods. They boast a high water content, are rich in fibre and haven't lost any of the vitamins and vitality that can be killed in cooking. What's more, research shows you may well live longer too. This is, of course, fabulous news for hopeless cooks across the land. The idea is that nothing should be heated beyond 118°F, the point at which vital enzymes and nutrients can be destroyed. As David Wolfe, America's leading raw-food guru, puts it: 'The psychedelic feeling of pure joy that one derives from eating high-quality raw foods cannot be compared to anything one has experienced before ... Inner cleanliness is an exquisite feeling! On top of this, raw plant food gives you superhuman powers!' Yes, all that from alfalfa sprouts!
- Have it handy. If you're a bit Bree, keep a selection of crunchy crudites ready-cut in iced water in the fridge. If you're a bit me, have an apple in your drawers. Keep fruit available, looking charming in a bowl, not exhausted beyond resuscitation in the bottom of the fridge.
- Buy good, green, fresh herbs, not dried ones - and house olive oil in an air-tight, darkened container to keep it vital and vibrant.
- "Think whole. In the past, I have always found hempy wholefood stores a mild turn-off. I only needed to stand in the aisle to be plagued with guilt. 'I'm not Amnesty enough,' my soul would yell. 'I didn't recycle the honey jar.' My leather shoes would step over the threshold and shout their provenance and price. 'We're dead cows!' they'd shriek. 'Expensive dead cows! 'Mercifully, I have since matured and got over the hump - partly because, thanks to the eco-revolution, the shops themselves have stepped out of the seventies. If you're not doing it already, it's well worth taking a regular weekly sweep around your local wholefood store to see what grabs your fancy-an aloe drink, perhaps, or a stick of unrefined liquorice. Whatever keeps you off factory food is fine by me.
- Know that calcium counts. Though dairy has long been the demon in the fridge for serial dieters, it turns out that calcium -one of milk's vital components - can help facilitate weight loss. In studies, people on a reduced-calorie diet who included some dairy foods lost significantly more weight than those who ate a low dairy diet containing the same number of calories. Research at the University of Tennessee found that when fat cells are exposed to a calcium-rich environment, they break down fat more swiftly than in calcium-depleted conditions. If you want to boost your calcium intake without resorting to the fat-fest of Cheddar, go for the brilliance of broccoli. It is high in vitamin C too, which helps foster calcium absorption. If you're in a hurry, consider taking a calcium supplement.
