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nutrition education

What is diet culture

If it Quacks like a Diet…guess what? It’s Diet Culture

What is that annoying voice telling you not to have any cookies before dinner? Judging your current pants size… comparing your size to your very active cousin. No, it’s not your mother, despite her comments can be a part of the problem too, but it’s diet culture. The dieting and weight loss industry in the USA alone is worth around $72 billion and yet over 80% of diets fail!

Dieting and weight shaming is everywhere and was especially hard-hitting from the advent of lockdowns in 2020. Queue the social media posts and challenges suggesting that we needed to “use this time to become better” by learning new languages, skills, starting a business and losing weight. How rude! Living a healthy lifestyle is important, but not defined by the number of a scale. And, with everything that has happened last year and this one, you’d think we would have learnt to address people and health much differently.

Body image is often impacted by dieting and weight cycling. Women in a larger body sits on a bed with a mirror in background.
Photo by Anete Lusina on Pexels.com

I’m personally a fan of snuggling up at home, watching my favourite shows and enjoying a giant bowl of popcorn and too many Oreos to count. Lockdowns and the anxiety that came with it made many of us seek more comfort in these small things. While 2020 was an unexpectedly strange and tough year for all of us, just like years before, our problems don’t just go away because someone tells us they should.

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Should I avoid Carbs?

I always found it confusing when people said stuff like, “oh I have to cut down on bread to lose weight”. From a scientific perspective, bread is not super-charged with anything to cause weight gain. It’s definitely not like the magic bean that Jack had. If anything, bread is one of the most affordable staple foods capable of providing energy and micronutrients that you may not otherwise be getting. So, why do people think it’s making us fat? What about other starchy foods and sweet carbs? Today, we’ll talk a bit about the role of carbohydrates in global diets and hopefully, you’ll be able to determine if it’s the cause of weight gain.

Carbohydrates are one of the macronutrient trio which supplies energy to the body. CHO, or Carbs are a diverse set of molecules which are derived from organic monomers (units) such as glucose, fructose and galactose. Plants are the most diverse sources of carbohydrates because they use carbon dioxide and water to create carbs for energy and structure. Carbohydrates can range from the simplest sweet sugars like those found in fruits, to long, branched chains which taste starchy, such as those in potatoes, ground provisions and starchy foods. 

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