Diet

Every morning I attempt to do well by the countless articles relevant to maintaining a healthy balanced diet. By the afternoon, all my good intention swirls down the throne due to a momentary lapse in judgment.

Processed sugar, the supposed poison, became something I habitually consumed to remedy the three-thirtyitis. Fine occasionally, but when I needed it every day, I began to think I had a problem.

At first I blamed boredom and a juiced up sweet tooth for my daily indulgence. This erroneous conclusion was purely based on the fact that I am one of those sorry sods who head to the gym at lunchtime to feel better about my dietary choices. And then make a bad choice because I went to the gym.

Continue reading "Confessions of a sugar junkie" »

When Cancer Council Australia published its recent estimate of the number of cancer cases in Australia linked to alcohol consumption, we didn’t expect the message to be popular.

But we have a responsibility to provide independent, evidence-based information about cancer risk, enabling Australians to make informed choices.

Many people may not want to know that something as popular as alcohol consumption increases their cancer risk – but that’s what the evidence says. And we believe everyone has a right to know about that evidence, whether it’s a “good news” story or not.

Continue reading "We don’t make stuff up, alcohol is a proven killer" »

The average guy with a few kilos to lose has no time for celebrity-endorsed weight–loss programs, according to Weight Watchers in the United States.

But he sure loves a good beer and a bit of joke at the expense of his mates, according to their new online advertising campaign (you can watch it in the video above).

You can tell a Weight Watchers “kind of guy” by one of three possible outfits.

Continue reading "Weight Watchers for men; actually more fun than beer" »

Butter is made by the simple act of churning cream.

Margarine is a fake food that originated in a laboratory as a result of food science. It commonly contains a lengthy list of ingredients, like hydrogenated vegetable oil and artificial colours and flavours, to control its taste, texture and colour. In fact, margarine is pumped full of artificial colouring agents so it looks yellow like butter (we’re so easily fooled).

There were once laws against dying artificial foods to look like natural foods. These days our governments are rarely bothered by chemically altered concoctions posing as food. We trust science now.

Continue reading "I can’t believe it’s not splutter" »

People are discovering that food costs are soaring, electricity and government charges including water charges are on the increase and many families are needing to find savings in the family budget.

If recent reports by the United Nations are any indication then the savings can come from this unexpected phenomenon.

The worlwide non-profit initiative to promote Meatless Mondays and Fishless Fridays is encouraging the voluntary rationing of certain foods. This is not new as rationing was common practice during both World Wars. 

Continue reading "Enough with all the meat eating all ready" »

Every single day for the past 3 years I have thought to myself, ‘I need to lose weight.’ That’s not an exaggeration. In fact I have thought it twice a day for the past 3 years.

For the record, I’m a size 12 woman, and I weigh, dare I say it, 66 kilograms. For the past 3 years I have trained with a personal trainer twice a week and played netball twice a week.

During the week I eat all the right things, on the weekend I might splurge and eat MacDonald’s and then feel extremely guilty afterwards. I’m fit, and I’m healthy. But my desire to lose weight is not to be healthy. I want to be thin. Really thin. And I don’t think I’m alone.

Continue reading "Dying to be thin" »

If you’re sick of swallowing all the political chatter from Jules and Tony take a break and chew on something meaningful out of America. And it’s not President Obama’s eloquent speech at the White House Ramadan dinner, where he defended plans for a mosque at Ground Zero. Rather, meet Paula Deen, the self-described ‘Queen of Southern Cooking’.

A woman that makes burgers using donuts as buns, lasagna sandwiches and single handedly butchers food to the point that she induces dry retching. The video above involving frozen cheesecake and a large pot of boiling oil should give you a sufficient introduction to Deen’s world.

As she says: “Just when you thought you couldn’t make cheesecake any better!”

Continue reading "US celebrity chef captures hearts, may also stop them" »

Why is it that when a health care professional informs a morbidly obese man that he should lose some weight, that mans first reaction is to cry ‘discrimination’? 

Where is the prejudice in this situation?  As a society we are practically drowning in information about the inextricable link between being overweight and being unhealthy. If you think three square meals a day can be purchased through a drive-thru window, and that exercise is getting up to change the channel when you’ve lost the remote, then that should remove your right to feel offended when you’re handed an ample helping of the truth. 

If someone who has spent the better part of a decade at medical school learning how to piece you back together if you break, tells you to drop a few kgs, they’re doing it for your own good. 

Continue reading "Overweight people should just get over the criticism" »

It’s finally happened. I never thought I would encounter a form of junk food which repulsed me. But on a holiday to the US last month I was confronted by a foodstuff so disgusting, so evil both in design and execution, so incredibly, inedibly putrid that my entire value system has been shocked to its core.

Despite generally having a healthy diet, and spending hours flitting about the kitchen knocking up all sorts of effeminate dishes, such as a deeply suss saffron risotto with home-made chicken stock, or pesto with basil gathered from the garden in a poncy basket, I’ve long held a perverse enthusiasm for eating crap.

The crapper the better. Dodgy kebabs, late-night chiko rolls, shallow-fried at home out of the box hidden in the back of the freezer, even those mysterious Hot Pizza Heroes from the local servo, turbo-charged before microwaving with the addition of extra cheese and half a handful of jalapeños.

Continue reading "Breakfast from hell on the highway to heart disease" »

How times change. When I started working in an office a little over 20 years ago, you could still smoke at your desk. In fact, when you were shown the stationary cabinet on your first day in a new job you could kit yourself out with a stapler and sticky-tape dispenser as well as an ashtray.

In those days, ‘smoking or non-smoking?’ was an everyday question when checking in for an airline flight’, you watched the Benson & Hedges World Series Cup over summer and the Winfield Cup over winter and the back cover of almost every women’s magazine carried an ad featuring an attractive blonde, a beach, acres of cheesecloth and a packet Alpine.

At about the same time blokes would go to the beach in the middle of the day, shirtless and hatless, while women would lay for hours baking themselves to a golden brown while occasionally basting themselves with coconut oil. Sun protection was not standard work issue for workers out of doors and sunshirts and sensible hats had the same sartorial appeal as sandals with long socks.

Continue reading "Sip, slop, slap: let’s stop drinking like it’s 1969" »

ALMOST 70 per cent of men say that a woman’s face is much more important than her breasts, legs or figure, a Punch survey of male attitudes on female body image has found.

And almost two-thirds of men believe that women spend far too much time worrying about their appearance, and should spend less time fretting about what men think - because you are all much hotter than you think you are.

The Punch has today assembled this special package of pieces about female body image through the eyes of blokes. Much of it is framed around our 100-man survey, but also includes columnist Joe Hildebrand talking about his love of fat chicks and former Zoo Weekly online editor Chris Deal’s essay on why men are as dumb as you probably suspect they are.

Continue reading "Guys talk about female body image" »

Are you gonna take me home tonight? 
Ah down beside that red firelight? 
Are you gonna let it all hang out? 
Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin’ world go round. - Queen, 1978

My name’s Joe Hildebrand and I like fat chicks.* My best friend Byron likes fat chicks. My other best friend Matt likes fat chicks. My other best friend Darrin is actually fat himself. Even Queen likes fat chicks, and they’re all gay.

Yet fat chicks seem to think that nobody likes them at all.

Continue reading "Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin’ world go round" »

A little known fact I like to trot out at feminist rallies and family gatherings is that I use to work for the esteemed gentlemen’s periodical, Zoo Weekly magazine. Officially my title was Online Editor, but unofficially it was You Tube surfer and talker to the hottest chicks planet earth has ever produced.

Sadly my tenure at the Encyclopaedia Tit-tanica was brief, and a decision that to the male ego sounds like the frothy rantings of a mad man. In bloke-speak the phrase “I quit a job at Zoo Weekly” roughly translates to “I’m a frightful shirtlifter, pass the amyl and pump up the Right Said Fred”.

But after I’ve stopped trying to use my penis for a brain, not only is the fleshy mirage of life at a lad’s mag revealed, but so too are a few finer points of the deluded male mind.

Continue reading "Men: we really are as dumb as you think" »

These are the raw numbers for the female body image survey.

1. Which of these physical qualities do you value most highly in a woman?

A.) Pretty face 68
B.) Great breasts 8
C.) Nice legs 8
D.) Perfect fat-free figure 16

Continue reading "This girl looks normal: The 100 man body image survey" »

Hi.  My name is Ashlee.  I’m a 24 year old Australian woman. I have a relatively successful media career for my age, given the current economic climate. I currently live and work in Indonesia. I have always tried to give back to the communities in which I live through volunteering and I don’t have a criminal record. I do have a gym membership though. I’m doing OK. Oh, but I forgot to add, I am fat.

Actually, I should say obese, according to my BMI. 

And apparently this makes me some kind of social pariah who should be the target of intense public ridicule and scorn, no matter what food I may or may not put in my mouth, no matter how many times a week I work out. 

Continue reading "Why is the weight debate full of so much hate?" »

David Penberthy’s health sandwich is laden with a generous helping of cynicism and a pinch of exaggeration.

By calling for a reduction of the harmful fats in our food, Bob Carr is not seeking to ban fast food outlets. Instead, he is highlighting how easy it would be to make our takeaway foods substantially healthier.

Australians love to eat out - nearly one in three of us do so almost every day, which adds up to a massive 3.8 billion meals eaten out every year.

Continue reading "Big fat exaggeration" »

Our supposedly classless society is showing signs of being divided into two camps where people’s private choices as individuals and their behaviour as families are regulated on the basis of their affluence.

And it’s in the area of nutrition, preventative health and exercise where the working class, for want of a better term, is increasingly being treated like a bunch of babies, while the more affluent members of society continue to live as they please.

It’s only a small thing but it’s a signifier for the times, a demonstration of a mindset which holds that working class people are unable to modify their behaviour, while the gentry can be trusted to keep its conduct in check. But get along to the SCG, that great people’s arena, where our knockabout, egalitarian society lets the members drink as much full-strength beer as they want and limits the great unwashed to light beer.

Continue reading "A bourgeois recipe for working class palates" »

Several years ago scientist David Suzuki observed that humans have an innate need to be connected with nature, even if it’s only a nearby park or a tree in the backyard.

Australians, who have always expressed nature as part of their national identity, are manifesting this observation more than ever before.

In a recent study looking at a range of social issues related to modern living a surprisingly high number of participants reported growing their own vegetables or herbs at home.

Continue reading "Why ‘growing your own’ is growing" »

Restaurant award season is finally over. But I’m wondering if anybody really cares outside those who won gongs from the Sydney Morning Good Food Guide this week, The Age version last week and Gourmet Traveller the week before.

Certainly, there has barely been a blip in the blogger or Twitter sphere.

Once again, the old-media appointed arbiters of taste have taken one for the team by eating the finest foods known to Aussies with the usual predictable conclusions: plenty of excellent but very very expensive restaurants in Sydney; only two of these in Melbourne plus lots of very good moderately priced restaurants; not much else in Australia. Forget Tasmania.

Continue reading "Restaurant awards are the nation’s silliest private party" »

Does anyone else find it quite frankly perverse that in affluent first-world Australia so much time is spent fretting about the supposed weight problems of our children when UNICEF figures show five thousand kids across the globe die every day essentially because they can’t get a clean glass of water?

I sure as hell do. But here we go again. Last week the Rudd Government’s Preventative Health Task Force Report called for a ban on junk food advertising on TV before 9:00pm and for the use of toys, cartoon characters and celebrities that appeal to children to be phased out. But the Australian Communications and Media Authority is against the banning of those TV ads.

The reaction? A seething white-hot fury coming from nice middle class homes all over Sydney. How can anyone possibly put corporate profits before our kids’ health?

Continue reading "Junk food doesn’t make kids fat - junk parents do" »

It’s that time of year, isn’t it? When the intention to eat healthily just doesn’t result in the same. Puritanical thoughts of eating only soup for dinner somehow morph into soup plus half a loaf of buttery toast. Steamed fish and vegies ends up as steak with cheesy potato bake.

A roast with all the trimmings is a regular occurrence and apple crumble is, somehow, always okay. Yes, the winter weather is dictating my diet and I have no choice, do I? It’s rather impossible not to put on the “winter two”. Or three, or four.

And as we reach August, this means I’m stuck wearing what fits. One, my fat jeans, or two, my leggings - marvellous creations with lots of stretch. But of course, I’m sick of both. (See boys, when we say “I don’t have anything to wear”, we often mean “I can’t fit into anything in my wardrobe”). I’m afraid that looking great in winter is only achievable if you’re Gwyneth Paltrow. Aka, Wonder Woman.

Continue reading "“Detox” the new code word for dangerous dieting" »

I’ve long suspected what the secret to happiness is, and now I’ve got proof. It comes courtesy of the Nerve Gut Research Laboratory at the University of Adelaide.

It’s not love or money or success.

It’s definitely not in a self-help book.

It’s a good sleep and a good poo. It’s that easy.

Continue reading "Science proves morning ablution the only solution" »

Enforcing a blanket ban on advertising certain foods to children is not the answer to solving Australia’s obesity problem.

Activists and some politicians bleating for a ban on advertising high fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) foods on all media before 9pm need to get real.

Arguing that television adverts for HFSS foods are almost totally responsible for making people overweight, especially children, is an extraordinary leap of logic.

Continue reading "Changing ads on TV won’t tackle the obesity epidemic" »