Hello there,
Welcome back to K&T blog, how was your week?
We hope you had a good one and we also hope that your eyes are still fixed on getting your health back in order. On our side we had a good week, our cardio and resistance training remained consistent. Nutrition was better than previous weeks apart from increased starch (home baked bread) in some evenings, now we can see and feel the bad effects of this habit :), and we knew well enough that starch at night is a bad idea when you are tying to lose weight . Losing weight and getting fit is a continuous and infinite journey, once you stop and revert back to old ways, you gain the weight back, simple and straight forward. It is better to accept it and make it a lifestyle, that way it gets easier as it becomes a part of who you are. “It’s not what you do once in a while, it’s what you do day in and day out that makes the difference.” – Jenny Craig.
This week we talk about dessert, can you imagine having a dessert at every meal? this would be paradise if you have a sweet tooth, but would also be a disaster if you are trying to lose some weight. Desserts are distinguishable from other types of dishes due to their high sugar content, the sweetness in desserts delights us so much because they activates the reward system and releases dopamine (the feel good hormone). Sugar is one of the main ingredients in desserts, and since it is so prevalent in processed foods, it is possible that having a diet full of processed foods could mean having desserts at every meal.
Sugar is made up of two molecules, glucose and fructose, combined they are chemically called Sucrose. Glucose is what the body needs to survive, it is “the energy of life”, it is so important to the body that every food item we eat is eventually converted to glucose to be used by the body. It is worth noting that when we say “blood sugar level”, we are actually referring to “blood glucose level” because it is the molecule that is in the blood for use as energy.
The other molecule, fructose, is the sweetest of the two, it is what we like so much in our desserts. Fructose is termed “Fruit sugar” , it naturally occurs in fruits, vegetable and honey. Even through Fructose is one of the two molecules of sugar, it cannot be used by the body as is and has to be converted into glucose for it to be used. A lot (maybe a lot more) of Fructose is found in our diet in fruits but mainly in the form of High-Fructose corn syrup in processed foods, and we know that too much of a thing is not so good.
Highly processed foods have what is called “Added Sugars“, these are extra sugars added to foods in addition to the naturally occurring sugars in food, and they are added in almost all processed foods (even in burger patties and sauces). They can be identified in ingredient labels as plain “sugar” or names ending with “ose” such as dextrose and maltose, but honestly it can be difficult to spot them because sugar has 56 names . When you have highly processed foods at every meal whereby every food item has added sugars, a combination of those sugars culminates in a dish of dessert, which is spread among the food items. And if you add a formal dessert at the end your meal, then it means having 2 desserts in one sitting.
That’s it for this week, having dessert at every meal does not help with managing our weight and health. If eating a diet high in processed foods means the possibility of having desserts all day and every day, perhaps a new perception on our diet is needed. Stephen R. Covey said “To change ourselves effectively, we first have to change our Perceptions “, what if we start to view processed foods as desserts? Maybe we will start to eat real food at meal times and eat processed foods sometimes, like we do with desserts.
Until next week, Stay blessed.
Kat & Tshepi
Kat & Tshepi 