Diet

Yes, I'm going to preplan what I eat!

A couple of years ago I converted to anticarbohydratism (nice word, just made it up!), though I confess to many lapses. Let me elaborate. Sugar is the work of the devil. Excessive sugar triggers excessive insulin releases that process it into your fat stores with immense efficiency but with various debilitating consequences.

Makes sense really because in our evolutionary past we had only occasional access to concentrated sugar (e.g. fruit & honey) and when it came along it made sense to store it away as fast as possible for future use - the energy made available is far in excess of the body's immediate need.

Over the last 2 or 3 generations, the world's sugar intake has sky rocketed and hence we now have the world wide obesity epidemic (1st, 2nd and 3rd worlds). They put sugar in everything. It's absolutely criminal. Just like the tobacco industry, the food industry is only interested in making money and sugar is the magic ingredient that makes us eat their produce. But the food and tobacco industries are killing us at the same time. Why does our society allow the production of death-inducing tobacco products? Because our governments are too capitalist, too spineless to put a stop to either of them. Sugar and tobacco are addictive; lucky for those industries. Unlucky for the rest of us.

Processed sugar is one thing, but carbohydrates in general are just plain bad for us (at current socially accepted quantities). Grain and corn farming is producing such vast amounts that it's become a staple of our diet. But we are not "designed" to cope with it. The advent of farming since about 20,000 years ago is but a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms and our bodies have not evolved to work with these levels of carbohydrate intake. Modern medicine and drug development is hugely focussed on trying to fix our bodies to combat the poison. It would be a lot cheaper and better for the world to stop poisoning itself so we could focus our considerable medical resources and know-how on non-self inflicted ailments. Actually, this is not the only self inflicted disease. Purposeful killing and maiming being another human deviancy! We need to fix that too. 

Anyway, rant over. I actually think that the human race will fix all this in the nick of time (and global warming while we're at it) before it all goes belly up, but it'll be a close run thing. I'm an optimist.

So, my diet will be low in carbohydrates and will consist of foods that are more equitably matched with its processing capability.

For a short-term, aggressive low-carb diet you'd try and keep carb intake to below 50g per day. A consistent low-carber would want to keep it below 100g per day. I'm not going to be that good. I aim for 150g carbs per day which is still half the "official" recommendation (which is, obviously, wrong). For people who don't watch their carbs at all, it's not difficult to hit 500g and beyond per day ... but you get fat. Including calories I can sum up my target:

When I go for long cycle rides ashore I'll have to increase this. If I find my weight changing up or down I'll need to adjust. While sailing is not exactly sedentary, it's usually not vigorous exercise.

My daily staple diet will consist of:

Notice anything missing? Yep, no bread, no fruit, no dairy, no alcohol and (apart from what's in the cans) no meat & root veg. The advantage of the above is that I require no fridge and I can get well stocked up with all but the last item so that I don't have to go to the supermarket every day!

I have an additional motive for not including dairy and meat (much) in my diet: I don't like what we're doing with animal farming. Another story.

At least this is what I'll eat when on my own (which will be most of the time). In company I'll have whatever everybody else is eating and drinking within reason, so all bets are off then! I'll want to relax and feel unrestrained when socialising. I'm not obsessive about my diet!