The good, the bad, and the poison

Greetings my ginger family, and welcome to another instalment of me talking about stuff for your education and entertainment! Sorry it’s taken me a while to sit back down and get writing, I was absolutely riding the high, the last blog gave me! WOW was that popular, thanks so much for taking the time to read it, and I hope it was put to good use in order to get people off your backs or get you off your arse.

At the time of writing this, the tier system has been in full force for a little over a week now, and although it’s been mentioned in groups many, many times, I did feel it was worth mentioning again why we feel this is a much better approach to helping you improve your healthy eating habits. We all know logically that some foods are better for you then others, and I’ve heard many PTs pedal the narrative that “there’s no such thing as bad food” and “there’s room for everything in your diet”, well whoever is saying this is a bloody numpty. Some will even go as far to say, you MUST plan a cheat day in your client’s meal plan to help them stay on track. Get your story straight mate, it wouldn’t be called a cheat meal if there were no bad foods, and you really telling me, your happy with your clients gorging themselves on beer and donner kebabs? Chances are, if your PT is fine with you doing this, it’s because they want to do it themselves, so they’ve justified it to themselves that its fine to do! Well here at Ginger Fitness we say, “you’re a fucking idiot Mr hypothetical Personal Trainer”. Now I’m not saying I don’t eat shit foods every now and then, but these times are few and far between. If your having takeaway every night, it’s not a treat, it’s a habit, I can guarantee I enjoy it a lot more then someone who eats like that constantly, so don’t come at me with you like it too much. Show some fucking restraint you child, and we can help to do this by properly understanding which foods do have a negative effect, and what better options there are for us!

I’m going to flip the triangle and talk about the lower tiers, because although it’s the foods that are the worst for us, its also the stuff we probably crave the most, so let’s start by listing my absolute worst ingredients you will find in your food, and the reason you might find your favourite food all the way down in the depths of Ginger Fitness food triangle;

1. Sugar

Of course, sugar was going to go at the top of my worst ingredient foods, and by sugar I of course mean refined sugar. We are in the height of an obesity epidemic and diabetes is on the rise, some sources are showing almost 10% of the UK population is currently living with type 2 diabetes, an absolutely shocking statistic, and refined sugar is the main thing to blame! This little sugary white cunt is in almost everything we eat, and sends our blood sugars through the roof, requiring insulin to bring us back to base line. Well people have abused the food industry’s answer to cocaine for years, but the blame shouldn’t 100% be put on the people shoving it in their face by the bag full.

We are all familiar with the low-fat food revolution which I’ll quickly re-cap, sugar companies funded studies to show saturated fats was to blame for the raise in heart disease, turns out this was a lie, fat doesn’t make you fat, sugar is the thing to blame, but all the low-fat food products started popping up on the shelves. You know what happens when you take all the fat out of a product? It tastes like shit, so what do they put in to make it nicer? SUGAR! They won’t write high carb next to where it says low-fat though will they! So once again our blood sugars are through the roof, hyperglycaemia is on the horizon, and we may as well start kissing our toes goodbye!

2. Seed oils

I touched on what seed oils do to your eye sight (makes it progressively worse), let’s give you some more evidence as to why we need to keep this shite away from our bodies. Our fat cells are around 5% of a chemical called linoleic acid, or at least they should be! Seed and vegetable oils contain a lot of this nasty stuff, meaning the modern-day population finds their fat cells to be around 20% linoleic acid, this makes the fat cells hard a rigid, gluing the fat cell into place and making it virtually impossible to shift. Stuff like this is why I’m dead against just counting calories, you can eat a lot more clean food and lose weight. This was shown in a recent BBC documentary where 2 twins ate the same caloric intake, exactly the same macros, however one gained weight and on lost weight, no prizes for guessing which is which.

Seed oils were invented with much looser health regulations and absolutely wouldn’t pass by today’s standards, to name a few, Linoleic acid is linked to cardiovascular disease, causes arteries to harden (see above) and finally, plaque that builds up in your arteries has been found to be almost made up of Linoleic acid! This stuff really is poison, avoid like the plague!

3. Flour

Whole grains such as flour are made up of 3 components; Germ, Bran and endosperm. In order to refine all these components into a fine white powder, there used to be an expensive milling process that meant bread was a luxury and only for the upper classes, whilst people with less money ate whole grain bread that was dark, dense and fibrous. Over the years the process evolved making it cheaper to refine and making bread available to everyone, and the bread revolution didn’t stop there. Millers soon realised that removing the bran and the germ greatly extended the grains shelf life, leaving behind and over processed carbohydrate with little to no nutritional value. Couple this with the low-fat revolution, highly processed bread with refined white flour became a staple in everyone’s diet, and the deterioration of the nation’s health was catapulted into the stratosphere. This has 3 main problems; refined flour raises blood sugar leading to metabolic disfunction, it is void of nutrients and is coupled with harmful additives, and then finally eating bread replaces heathier options from your diet, after all, why cook something healthy when you can just make a sandwich.

The high starch content of refined grain (which is also totally lacking in fibre) causes dramatic changes in your blood sugar, so not only are you going to make yourself ill, your now too knackered to exercise as a result of eating it, may as well sit on the sofa all night watching the Kardashians and slowly morphing into a gelatinous blob.

Recognise the term “enriched wheat flour”? Sounds attractive doesn’t it, well this process totally strips away nutrients cancelling out any “enriching” the packaging might claim has been done, this process makes use of several man-made chemicals such as Potassium bromate (damages thyroid), Chlorine gas (bleaching agent that induces diabetes), and benzoyl peroxide (bleaching agent used as acne cream). Time to bin the bread I reckon.

4. Alcohol

I’ve spoken about alcohol in great lengths, it lowers inhibitions, you aren’t going to stick to your diet if you drink, you’re less likely to exercise the next day, so basically can be the start of a massive downward spiral that is a one-way ticket to failure! I understand its part of our culture, and people aren’t going to be quick to give this one up as easily, I spoke in some length in the excuses blog about the need to drink, if you still want to get pissed once a week, that’s your decision, and I’m not going to tell you any different, but just like the others, I am going to tell you some negative effects it has on the body, anyone in sculpt and define, this may make for some sorry reading.

Consuming alcohol when your body is trying to recover from exercise is like tying your shoelaces together and trying to run a 10km race in PB time, it massively inhibits the functions of hormones that aid the recovery process, so if your lifting weights or trying to run PBs like a mad woman, and not getting anywhere, perhaps those innocent few drinks on a weekend are the reason why! And if you have any soft tissue injuries (which also includes atrophy in muscles from lifting weights), drinking alcohol will open the blood vessels and encourage swelling at the injury site. Alcohol also indirectly slows down the restoration of energy stores in your muscles, so if your arms or legs are getting tired quicker, once again, alcohol is the thing to blame. On top of this your quality of sleep deteriorates, and with poor sleep, muscle repair is further impaired, rehydration is impaired, and energy restoration impaired, so its all basically a recipe for disaster.

Now I must address the fact that alcohol is not shown to be in tier 5 (where it belongs), and this is purely due to the fact that it is such a large part of our culture. Be honest, how many of you would not have signed up or would lie about alcohol if we put a strict no drinking rule in place? It would make a significant difference, and so taking this into consideration, it has been moved up to avoid any sneakiness taking place, but please remember, it is on par with the other ingredients mentioned in this blog when talking about the ill effects to your health.

At the other end of the pyramid, we have lots of red meats which I imagine a lot of you have been told over the years is bad and we shouldn't over consume. Well you guessed it, this was also a lie told to us indirectly by sugar companies to keep the finger of blame pointed somewhere else. For example, the cells in our body are made up of our around 50% saturated fat, and if we want them to stay that way we must consume it, so steak is back on the menu boys! Our skin cells are included, and because your all so vain and care more about the outside of your body than the inside, try this on for size. When our cells drop below 50% saturated fat, they don't function properly, this means skin cells dry out, dry skin cells cause wrinkles, wrinkles make you look old! I'll spell it out for you, eat steak, look younger, its as simple as that!

There was a pattern with the bad ingredients I’ve listed, not only did they lack nutrition, they actually are detrimental to your health, now this might not seem a problem now, but trust me, ill health catches up with us all, and you’ll be wishing you paid more attention. As we move up the pyramid, the nutrients in the food become more abundant, and the poison in our food becomes less present, so let’s aim high, on both the triangle, and for our health goals, you can thank me later.

Big love,

Az