WHEN DID MY FOOD START KILLING ME? 1st April 2017

It is no joke.

When I was having a good think about this I asked myself, when was it that our food changed? When did the manufacturers think they could mess around with good food and then sell us an adulterated form of it? 60s, 70s, all the writings on say it changed in the early 1970s with the low fat theory. That is when the upward curve started for obesity and metabolic diseases like Diabetes. So my thinking started to take me back and with 80 years in which to go that is a long way.

My first worries about food were during the second world war. I was four as it broke out and very shortly found myself in a boarding school while my parent were on war duties. I was always hungry. The food did not sustain us and we looked for anything to eat. I rememberer being in a school play and in one scene some were at a dinner table eating a meal. They had one thin slice of bread to represented the food each had to eat and the rest of us just drooled watching them eat it. But the bread we had then was said to be adulterated with chalk, don’t know the truth. Margarine was like axel grease, not that I knew what that was. Meat was small and mostly fat and gristle. I think that this was where manufacturers began to find out what could be done to food.

After the war we returned to what is now termed ‘real food’. A meal was meat or fish and two veg, potato and a garden vegetable. A pudding was homemade on the whole like jam tart and custard, steamed suet pudding. I remember breakfast cereals at this time, quite plain like Shredded Wheat. Sugar remain rationed for a long time and in the late forties, early fifties, my last days at school, sweets were like a very small bar of chocolate or 2 oz of boiled sweets per week. I entered adulthood always keen to get food and wanting as much sweet stuff as I could get. I think I can see a problem emerging here. But I was a keen athlete and swimmer most of my young life, I think that helped me stay slim. 

By 1960 I was a young married woman. The food I cooked food for the family it was mostly traditional as I had been taught to make at school and home. I baked cakes and biscuits, bread and made jam. I found it cheaper than buying ready mades. So ready mades were becoming more in evidence in peoples homes. Unfortunately at this time my marriage fell apart and I was left on my own. Although money was tight I still tried to cook a meal for myself. During this time I took a job as a waitress in a seaside hotel. Here I rememberer my first pre-cooked or dried food. It was awful but part of my wages. This must have been the precursor of processed food other than biscuits bread etc. The daily dinner that only had to be rehydrated.

And so I ate my way through the 60s, 70s, 80, 90s and into the 2000s eating what we all have been eating, utter rubbish. It has got sweeter and sweeter, sugar and wheat flour added to everything. I have gone through several metabolic or autoimmune problems none of which have been solved by operations or drugs. Then I had a sign which made me think the worst had befallen me. It hadn’t but it frightened me. I started searching for an answer.

At this time last year I had been reading books and articles, and watching video lectures etc. about eating Low Carbohydrates High Fat for 3 to 4 months. I was preparing myself to eat a different way. On the 17th  of April I started and within two weeks I felt better. Bar eating three rolls on my annual holiday that threw me right back into my illness, I have continued to eat LCHF and damned glad I am too. No, not all is right but I am so much better and able to lead a normal life again. I lost some weight but not a lot and yes, I could do with a little more off. But health is my most important factor in all this.

Here are some of the books I read on my Kindle. Some are freebies I downloaded whenever I saw them. I wish I could afford a lot more. The videos and articles are too numerous to mention. I think that one should continue to research and read everything one can on the subject because it keeps in mind why one is eating LCHF, what ever that may be.