So much conflicting advice...

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I have just been reading The 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet by Michael Mosley, the latest in a long line of assorted dieting books I have read over the years.  I think I've probably read most varieties of the different diet plans which have come and gone, including low calorie/low fat/low carbohydrate, along with the other side of the dieting equation such as eat like the French, eat fat, etc.  This latest book has left me feeling very fed up (no pun intended!) and rather deflated.  The advice available to would-be dieters these days is so varied, and runs from one extreme to the other.  How on earth are we supposed to decide just which plan ~ if any ~ we should be following?

If you have come here from my Lavender and Pearls blog, then you will be all too aware of my dieting trials and tribulations over the years.  I've made many half-hearted attempts to shed some of this excess weight (and boy do I have a shed-load of the stuff to shift!), but frankly my interest has soon waned.  I've ended up feeling inadequate and despondent, ashamed and embarrassed, both by my size and my seeming lack of will-power to do something about it.  I now find myself back at the same place I was in over two years ago; I've travelled full-circle yet again.

For far to many years now my diet (i.e. the foods I usually eat, rather than a slimming plan) has, in all honesty, been extremely dire.  It's a subject that is almost constantly on my mind, in one form or another, and the bottom line is that I have to do something to rectify this situation before it's too late.  I turned 55 back in June and am the heaviest I have ever been in my whole life.  It's too much, I can't carry on like this and expect to live a reasonably healthy life well into old age.

The mad thing is that when I was growing up during the 1960s and 1970s, I ate a far better diet than I have done since I married my ex-husband back in 1980.  He was an extremely picky eater.  The only vegetables he ate were carrots and potatoes; he ate very little fruit and no meat or fish other chicken breast.  He did eat a lot of peanut butter and milk, though, which I guess contributed to his stature of 6'4", with a 46" chest!  I admit that I became very lazy during the two years we were married, and just didn't bother making different things for myself.  We both had a sweet tooth, so biscuits, cakes, desserts, etc, were always on the menu ~ shop-bought, of course, not homemade.

As a child and teenager, though, we had "proper" dinners at home, usually with a pudding of some description each day, along with a traditional roast on Sundays.  We ate meat, fish, potatoes, vegetables and fruit.  There were cereals and toast for breakfast, or perhaps a boiled egg with toast fingers, and often a traditional English fried breakfast at the weekend.  For tea, or at lunchtime if  we were were having our main meal in the evening, there would probably be sandwiches ~ cheese, ham, tuna or egg ~ or perhaps baked beans, tinned sardines or scrambled eggs on toast.  There would almost always be a piece of cake as well, usually homemade.

So after reading this latest "revolutionary" diet book, I have found myself looking back at those childhood meals, and also to the meals I ate when staying with my Grandma on holidays as a youngster.  The more I think about it, the less doubt there is in my mind that food, the way we ate, in fact meals in general, really was different back then.  I don't remember eating any ready-meals until I was in my early teens; Mum mostly cooked from scratch and Grandma always did, apart from the occasional treat of fish-and-chips for tea.

You may be surprised to know that my Grandma didn't have a fridge when I was a child, everything was kept in her pantry.  It was really cool in there, a large walk-in cupboard beneath her stairs.  She kept bottles of milk in a bucket of cold water and walked to the village shops at least every other day or so to buy fresh food.  Meat came from the butcher, wet fish from the fish and chip shop, bread from the village baker, vegetables and fruit from the greengrocer.  There was a little supermarket of sorts where Grandma bought tinned goods, packet foods such as flour, sugar, etc, and various household sundries.

Meals didn't consist of the large portions that they do these days, either, but I can't recall ever leaving the table still feeling hungry.  We didn't eat until we were unable to move, we simply ate enough to satisfy our hunger.  At Grandma's house we usually had four meals: breakfast, the main meal at midday, tea and a light supper before bedtime.  There wasn't much eating between meals then, either, and if we did complain about being hungry we would most likely have been given a piece of fruit.  It's not that we never had sweets, chocolate, shop-bought biscuits or ice-cream, but they were regarded as occasional treats.  Almost everything else we ate was homemade, from scratch, including cakes and puddings.

I imagine that most of you from my generation or older grew up eating in a similar way; our parents and grandparents would almost certainly have eaten those kinds of meals.  It was real food, not low fat/low carbohydrate/full of man-made additives.  I suspect that that is the simple answer to what seems to have gone wrong with our eating habits now.  What so many of us eat these days is far removed from good, basic, wholesome ingredients.  It surely can't be possible to sustain and nourish our bodies on such a diet, nor our minds either, for that matter.

I too have overloaded my body with too much "non-food" year-upon-year-upon-year, and in the process have become ever fatter and so terribly unhealthy ~ and unhappy, too.  Perhaps my comfort-eating may also be partly due to lack of proper nourishment, I certainly think it's a possibility.  All this seems to be in the minds of many other folk, too, and there are now lots of links on search engines to some interesting websites and blogs.

The upshot of all this, then, is that I have decided the time has come to ditch all the "diet" books and the latest conflicting advice in favour of cooking from scratch as much as possible, using good old-fashioned basic ingredients.  I am not saying that cooking from scratch will magically melt away my excess weight; I know that I need to take a long, hard, honest look at my overall eating patterns as well.  Still, I want to feed my body and mind with good wholesome nourishing food ~ and I think it will be good for my soul too.

I have plenty of great cookery books full of ideas, recipes and inspiration to help me in my quest.  I also have my Grandma's lovely, battered old notebook containing some of her own handwritten recipes, as well as the books that came with her cookers when she got new ones.  It's not so easy for me to simply pop into town each day for fresh ingredients like Grandma did, but I do have the convenience of a freezer which makes it simpler to buy meat and fish on a weekly (or even longer) basis.  I also think that proper, full, menu-planning is a good idea, rather than the half-hearted attempts I usually make.....then don't follow anyway!

I thought I might share my culinary adventures with you...I haven't felt this excited about cooking for a very long time :-)