Category: Nutrition
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The benefits of binge eating
The reason you binge eat is because you get a benefit from it. Dietitian Lucy Carey explains how this works. The exam was a week away. I had been studying for this for months, I was only going to get one shot at passing it, and the pass rate was 80%. Boy oh boy was…
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Designed to fail
“Weight Watchers definitely works though, because I lost weight when I did it,” she earnestly told me. “And then what happened?” I asked her, although I already knew the answer. It was the same answer every yo-yo dieting client has ever given me. “Well, I did put the weight back on but that’s only because…
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I bombed my med school interview. It saved my life.
I stood at the back of Burger Fuel on Queen St, staring at the menu on the board behind the counter. My eyes darted across the different items on offer too fast to actually read anything. Frantic. Desperate. The queue was getting shorter and I still didn’t know what to order. Heat crept up my…
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Vegetable oils: a food industry wet dream
Looking back at my childhood, there are a great many things I am thankful for. From running barefoot in the grass and climbing tress, to carting my baby sister around on my hip and dressing my little brother up like a pixie. And one thing I’m very thankful for is butter. My parents aren’t always…
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Investigating ‘science’
It’s sort of the hot thing to bandy about words like ‘experts’, ‘science’ and ‘evidence’ right now. Throwing one of those words in your sentence is meant to make people take you seriously. Citing a study has become the holy jackhammer of “See? I know what I’m talking about!”. But research can be corrput, biased,…
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Chew your smoothies
“Don’t worry, you’ll be back to having your healthy smoothies in no time,” the midwife said to me. Say what now? I was pregnant with my first baby and throwing up several times a day. I had just told the midwife that sucking on Gingernut biscuits in the morning was helping a little bit. Apparently…
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Outsmart food marketing: read your labels
“I eat that high protein Milo cereal stuff.” “Well I buy him Nutri-Grain because it’s got 4 health stars.” “I just use those porridge sachet things. They’re really low in fat.” And that’s just breakfast cereals. I’ve met countless clients who are incredibly misled by food marketing. And it’s amazing to watch their eyes widen…
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Breastfed babies can be fat… and perfectly healthy
I was invited to speak to my local group of Plunket nurses a few years back. I didn’t prepare anything specially for them, I simply rocked up and held a question-and-answer session. They were a fun bunch of ladies and I had a great time. But I left the session chewing my lip, worried about…
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Stop praising weight loss
Weight loss is a hard thing to achieve. Period. So when you see someone who’s transformed their body I understand there’s a pull there to say, “Wow, you look great, that’s amazing that you’ve lost 10 kilos!” But I think we’re dangerously missing the mark by praising weight loss. I personally know of a couple…
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Why you should stop making New Years resolutions
When I was 19, my older brother bet me that I couldn’t go three months without consuming added sugar. My stubborn adolescent self began the challenge immediately. For the next three months, I watched wistfully as my family ate perfectly ordinary things like spaghetti and cheese toasties (added sugar in the spaghetti), my mum’s homemade…