The end is in sight .. ;)

I am nearly finished my assignment. For those of you that don't know, I'm doing a Health Science degree part time and when I disappear from Blogdom, it's usually that I've just remembered an assignment that was supposed to be finished yesterday. I would have finished it today except for one little thing... no, two little things. 1. After breakfast I came over all queasy and nauseous, then headachey and then just generally achey, which has progressed to achey all over and queasy and really, really grumpy. I'm blaming dinner last night which was a mothers day 'knees up' at a certain Wild West style restaurant. We chose it for it's kid-friendliness and nice atmospheric bar out the back. It was only when I started to feel ill that I remembered they had been on the receiving end of some bad publicity for 're-cycling' their salads.. you know, people don't eat salads much so they would just re-use them.... (ack!). I'm blaming the restaurant, rather than, say, my pruffins, because my sister and I shared some food and we both shared with my niece. Today there are three people not feeling so flash... I know, you'd have to be psychic to figure that one out!

Secondly, today was the day for a meeting with my MP to grill .. uh.. 'query'.. him about his attitude to the TPA. I got myself there, hoping I would not have to make a quick exit to puke loudly in the toilets, and found myself in a room of people, none of whom knew anything about the meeting. A nice man finally got the MP on the phone and he didn't know what I was on about. Then, while I was standing there feeling a bit.... uncomfortable, the MP called back and said something like 'oh yeah, that's been rescheduled'. 'To when?' I asked, politely, hoping I wouldn't puke right then, and after much shuffling through the appointment diary it turns out that nobody knows and I'll have to call the secretary on Monday. I then had two hours to amuse myself before my scheduled ride. I headed to the library to look for a good German grammar, but there were none, so I headed over to the health section and was, yet again, amazed by the neverending influx of books that promise the answer. I grabbed a stack of them and monopolised a quiet corner to see what I could learn. I have read at least 400 health books and hardly ever come across anything new but I did discover an interesting book called Picture Perfect Weightloss. Being that I don't feel too sharp today, it was easy to get involved in a book that is full of shiny pictures. I do not really go for the strong anti-meat bias of the meals pictured, but the basic idea of the book is one that I think is of A1 importance for long term fatloss. It's very simple. Choose foods of lower energy density and you can eat more of them. You can eat half a bagel, or you can eat a whole small mellon, 2 punnets of strawberries, a pot of low-fat yogurt and a cup of soup. You see the idea? This energy density thing, also called 'volumetrics' is one of the most fundamental things to master because, once you know your stuff, you can either eat more or eat the same amount for less calories and your deprivation-meter doesn't even know you are doing it. The book has some very cool pictures that show a tiny portion of an energy dense food and then a large, tasty alternative that has equal or fewer calories. Knowing which foods are less energy dense allows you to positively utilise dietary displacement, which is a replacement of the higher calorie foods in your diet with more healthful ones. You don't have to mess around with deprivation or try to master up exhausting amounts of willpower and you don't have to think about cutting calories or even counting calories. The idea of volumetrics is that every person will nearly always eat a certain 'weight' of food per day, whether that food delivers 2000 calories or 6000. That is the point that you will automatically eat to in order to feel satisfied and, lets face it, fighting that 'I don't feel satisfied' urge is a pointless exercise. Far better to learn how to satisfy your appetite healthfully. As part of my assignment today I analysed two versions of one meal, which consisted of either:

Meal 1:
Fried Fish
Chips
Broccoli

Scoop of icecream
peaches in syrup

or
Meal 2:
Poached fish
Baked potato
Broccoli

Lowfat yogurt
peaches in juice

Similar meals and they had the same 'weight'. Meal 2 delivers a whopping 700 calories less than meal one and yet you would feel equally full with either. That is how it works.