Tangtastic!

A big thank you to Miss Haribo for last weeks fab blogs, I hope you all enjoyed them as much as I did. If anyone was in any doubt as to Miss Haribos geek status, I think those doubts can be laid to rest by her comprehensive referencing!! I had a marvelous week falling over in the snow ... but more about that later in the week.

It's always good to look at the latest research on nutrition and I thought the study on how calorie restriction induces bingeing in mice is particularly interesting. Whilst everything that applies to mice and rats in a lab isn't necessarily true for us humans, the results of alot of rodent studies have been found to be true for us also and anything that supports my ethos of not using calories to make your food decisions is always a good thing.

It often shocks people when I suggest that calories are redundant in weight control, but the type of food you eat has a huge impact on how much of it you store as fat. If I ate only 1000 calories of day, versus my usual 1800, but ate only Ben and Jerry's ice cream rather than my usual diet then I'm sure I would gain weight (although I'm not prepared to put myself through that diet to prove it!). Equally restricting calories to the point where you don't eat every time you are hungry invokes the bodies survival instinct and slows your metabolism reducing the rate at which you burn fat ... in essence your body is smarter than you are so listen to it and eat when it tells you to and not when it doesn't!

I also loved Miss Haribo's suggestion of using rewards to start good habits ... although be wary of rewarding yourself with food. Alot of people use food as a reward or a pick me up and this develops an altered relationship with food, that will leave you reaching for the cookie jar whenever you feel down and want a lift or feel you've worked particularly hard (either at the gym or at work!). I get my clients to treat themselves with relaxing treatments such as a massage or facial, or even with Grazia magazine in the case of Miss H!