Tuesday 24 May 2011

Beachcamp Rule #4: Stick to savoury

A growing body of research is suggesting that sugar is actually more culpable for obesity and cardiovascular disease than saturated fats - a view I'd agree with. And what's worrying about this is how many savoury foods have sugar added to them - pizza, pasta sauces, curry and stir fry sauces, soups, dips, flavoured crisps - start reading ingredients lists and you'll realise it's added to most processed foods.

This means we are constantly eating sugar without necessarily realising and this means our pancreas is constantly being stimulated with sugar in our food to produce more insulin - the hormone that encourages fat storage. The more sugar you eat the greater the percentage of the calories you eat that will be stored as fat - which means sugar is banned on beachcamp!

A good rule to start with is to not eat anything that tastes sweet other than fruit, but to really stick to this rule I'm not going to eat any foods with more than 5g of sugars per 100g (shown on the label under the total carbohydrate levels) unless they are sweetened with fruit.

If you've got a sweet tooth this may sound too challenging - but just stick to it for a week and let yourself have a sugary reward at the end of the week - be it a slice of cake or bar of chocolate - in terms of weight loss being strict when it comes to sugar can really pay off.

But it's not just sugar you need to be wary of, refined 'white carbohydrates' can be almost as bad as sugar when it comes to provoking insulin production so for the duration of bootcamp I'll be avoiding all white rice, white pasta, white bread and anything made with refined flour (biscuits, crackers) etc. If you want to get in shape for summer it's got to be wholegrains all the way.
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