You Are What You Eat

It’s a new year and a new dawn for Operation Transformation, with expert Aoife Hearne applauding a more complex weighing scales as well as a simpler food plan. Donal O’Donoghue gets the low-down from the dietitian

Dietitian Aoife Hearne talks about her simpler, more e ective food plan, advocates thinking outside the calorie box and reveals what she has learned from her OT time

On the edge of Waterford city, Aoife Hearne is, as ever, juggling a million things in her hectic home. It’s only a few sleeps to Christmas and the mother of three (baby Zoe arrived last May, joining Dylan and Alva) is planning for the festivities as well as running her own dietetic practice and gearing up for a new year of Operation Transformation. She sips as she talks, the phone-line zinging with her energy. “It’s been very noisy,” she says and laughs. “We were planning to move house this year but decided to put it o for a while.” As ever, Aoife is bubbling with enthusiasm about the new season of OT, not least a new method of weighing the ve leaders and a changed food plan that she says is more progressive.

The Food Plan

We start o weeks one and two with really simple recipes using jar and package sauces and an already cooked chicken. The goal is that by the end of the series you are making the sauces yourself and also cooking the chicken from scratch. I really wanted the food plan to be a progression this year, so we are starting with really simple recipes and moving on to more complicated ones so that you are building up your cooking skills as you go. There is also the key point that if you are pressed for time, using a sauce from a jar is not the end of the world. We still have a lot of viewers who are not able to cook. It is a basic life skill, so this plan prepares people to cook for themselves, to give them the basics.

The Body Composition Analysis Scale

The other really exciting thing this year is that we have a new weighing scale, the body composition analysis scale. So we are not only looking at weight this year, we will also be looking at body fat, the percentage muscle and a few other factors. That piece of equipment will allow us to examine those other pieces of the puzzle and really help us to see that if people are losing or gaining weight we can see where it is happening and whether there is muscle gain or fat gain. This specialised scale really brings the show into the 21st Century because weight is not the only thing we should be looking at. We want the people to have more muscle on their frame and when they are losing weight that they are losing fat. In other words, it gives us a more complete picture, especially for the weeks that people gain weight, which is rare but it does happen. In that instance we can see where that weight is coming from and make a better plan of attack for that leader.

Both Karl (Henry) and I have been asking for the Body Composition Analysis Scale for a long time. It is very expensive because it is of a medical standard and similar to what Karl would use in his gym and I would use in my clinic. It’s much better for the individual as it gives you a more complete picture, for example if you’re not drinking enough water and are dehydrated and lose weight in that way, we can tell by using this scale. So you can’t fake weight loss in that way either. For this scale you input your height, your age, your weight and activities and so OT 2019 will look more technical but also the TV audience will see that it is more than simply just losing weight, it’s also about maintaining muscle mass and reducing visceral fat from around your midri . This is the potentially dangerous fat that covers your internal organs.

The Right Diet

Once again this year I want to hammer home the ‘non diet’ message and to understand how damaging certain diets can be.

We should be having fat-free talks and not talking about the ‘big bum’ or ‘do my arms look big in this’. Instead we should always be focused on health and wellness. This year we have two leaders, Pamela and Paul, who have families and are busy and because I’m also in that space at that moment, I feel really passionate about supporting parents to make better choices for their families. It’s not about being perfect; it’s about trying to have some kind of balance and an understanding that making time is sometimes really challenging. It’s very easy to say make time when you don’t have kids but when you do have a lot of moving parts in your life, it can be tricky. It’s all about organisation and preparation, which will be really important this year for many of our leaders.

Family Plan

When people have families it’s not always as simple as cook that, eat this and we’re on our way. There is a lot more going on and the language that we use about health and wellness in front of our children is a regular concern for me. As my children get older it really strikes me when they use language I’ve used that they are little sponges who also take so much from what you do rather than just what you say. So I’d be very conscious of using a weighing scale in front of the children because health is so much more than that number on the scale. We should not only be focused on weight for healthy families but try to develop healthy relationships with food and use healthy language about food and behaviour around food, for our young people. Most of the people on the show have a poor relationship with food so it’s all about trying to do better for the generation who come after us so that we are not repeating the mistakes of our ancestors but changing them.

At the table I always ask my kids, ‘Is your tummy full? Eat until you’re full and then nish, no matter what is left on your plate.’ We don’t want people to be part of the ‘clean plate’ club. We want them eating because of their internal cues rather than external ones, which is something that Dr Eddie focuses on. It’s not just about diet and exercise and that is important because the messages you are being bombarded with all the time are that it is about exercise and diet and losing weight. If that’s what people think Operation Transformation is about, they are really missing the big picture. It’s about eating, moving more and having a better relationship with food.

Portion Control

This is crucial and this year we will also be talking about calories in, calories out. We can do all these fancy things but the simple fact of the matter is that if we are eating very high calorie dense food and not moving very much you are going to gain weight because you are storing all those calories as fat. Sometimes we tend to forget those very simple equations. For me it’s all about trying to get more colour onto your plate from nutrient-dense, lower calorie foods like fruit and vegetables, so the more of those on your plate the better. It also helps with the ‘full factor’. There are also great tools available for portion control that you can use to measure out your spaghetti, for example. It all comes down to portion control.

Think Outside the Calorie Box

People have to think outside the calorie box as well. We have to consider the food that is on our plates now: its constituents are so di erent from 20, 30 years ago. Calories are the basis of it but the type of nutrient is crucial and if you are only looking at calories, then that gure might be made up of too much fat and sugar; it doesn’t make the food healthy. Calories are just one part of the puzzle. What makes up those calories is as important. We want to move people away from low-calorie food that is potentially full of chemicals and little nutrition. Those foods may have zero bre but the food company might not want to draw attention to that and in fact divert your attention from it. For me, what you should look at on food packaging is how much bre is on it, how much saturated fat and how much added sugar. Also what are the listed ingredients? Is it something you know? Has the product got 20 ingredients or more? Generally, the rule of thumb is that the more ingredients in a product, the less bene cial it is likely to be. Also if there are words on that list you don’t recognise or understand, then for me that is a red ag. So fewer ingredients, ingredients that you know and plenty of bre are the three things I’d look for.

What I Have Learned from Operation Transformation

When I rst started Operation Transformation in 2014, I had no children. Now I have three, so personally, there has been huge change for me. I believe being a mother has helped me develop much more empathy for parents. I have also learned that people can be unbelievably hard on themselves and even though viewers sometimes want us to be harder on our leaders, they are hard enough on themselves, so showing empathy and compassion is probably a much more e ective way of helping them to lose weight. I’m always surprised at how people are so fat-phobic and scared of using natural products like butter when they are cooking. I really feel passionate about using real food. I don’t use any fat-free or sugar-free products in any of my recipes. Some people still struggle with the notion that it has to be fat-free or sugar-free to be healthy, but that is a message we are sold by the food industry.