Healthy eating (not deprivation) is the way to come out of lockdown in great shape

As we begin to ease out of lockdown and out of lounge-wear, I am hearing from more and more clients wanting to get back into shape. For nearly a year now, we have been suffering lockdown food fatigue — constant cooking, coming up with new meals to feed our family and looking to food as a way to cope with stress, anxiety, boredom and loneliness.

“Diet” is usually the buzz word of the new year — in January, sales of diet books go up, diets are a major part of resolutions, membership of diet clubs goes through the roof. But this year is different — and it’s now, in March, that I am seeing this flurry of clients wanting to know what diet to try so they can come out of lockdown looking great.

But what do we mean by diet? Most people associate it with weight loss, restrictive eating and punishing workouts. But actually it’s about understanding that food is our fuel, and we should treat it like our friend, not our enemy.

Food sustains us, it nourishes us. It builds our body, bones, brain, heart, liver and hormones.

It also shapes our mental health and can activate our fight or flight response. And in a time of globally heightened stress, we don’t need to add highly processed food, sugar and overexercising to the pressures on our body.

There is no such thing as the perfect diet. We all probably have friends who have lost weight on a keto or paleo diet, by going vegan, low-fat or high-protein. Each friend is convinced their method is the only one that works. But clearly that isn’t the case, as they’re all following different diets.

Many of these diets demonise fat, but actually fat is the food group that triggers our satiety hormones — it makes us feel full. So a low-fat diet generally means being hungry all the time.

Healthy fats are an essential part of our diet, needed for every cell membrane, and to build our hormones. It’s also vital for our mental health since the brain is around 60 per cent fat. Healthy fats include nuts, seeds, avocado, oily fish and olive oil. Yes you can keep going for a few weeks or months on any of these diets, but eventually the deprivation will lead to your body doing all it can to hold on to any food, storing it as fat, in case another period of deprivation comes, and your metabolism slows down as a result. So when you come off a diet and go back to how you were eating before, you often end up putting on more weight.

The “calories in versus calories out” theory — eat less and move more — is too simplistic; it ignores the nutrient value of food. It’s difficult to know the exact calorie content of food, since burning food in a laboratory to assess its calories is different from how the body actually burns calories. And this will vary from person to person, depending on their genes, microbiome, hormones, stress levels… It also will depend on the food we eat, as the body holds on to more calories from processed foods than from whole foods.

An avocado contains roughly the same number of calories as a can of cola. So on a calorie-controlled diet these are considered equal — but in reality, the cola is nutrient-free, whereas the avocado is a great source of fibre, potassium, folate, vitamins and omega fats, which are anti-inflammatory.

So focusing on the nutrient content of our food, rather than the calorie content, is a great start to nourishing our body.

A new area of research, called nutrigenetics, is now proving genetics can also control the way we absorb and assimilate food, our tendency to put on weight and the impact of our diet on our health. Our microbiome and body are as unique as our thumbprint, so finding what works for us as individuals is the best way to get results.

Hormones have a big role to play, too. When we eat sugar, carbs and processed food, our body releases insulin to take the sugar from the bloodstream into our cells for energy. However, insulin is also our fat storage hormone, so instead of burning fat, we store it. To balance our blood sugar and reduce our need for insulin, include protein, healthy fats and fibre alongside our carbs. Also insulin interferes with our satiety hormone leptin, so we don’t always recognise we are full after eating these processed foods. Constant snacking again means we are not in fatburning mode, so breaks between eating can be helpful.

Stress is a factor, too because the stress hormone cortisol means we hold on to fat more. Lack of sleep increases our hunger hormone, grehlin, and makes us hangry and more likely to seek out sugary foods.

Stay hydrated, as thirst is often mistaken for hunger. And aim to exercise but maybe more gently.

Ultimately, we must also be kind to ourselves — especially after such a challenging year. Changing just one thing a week will make a difference, perhaps adding a daily 15-minute walk, swapping white bread for wholegrain or sourdough, introducing a new vegetable, having one fewer sugar in our tea or one fewer fizzy drink — even doing a few squats while we wait for the kettle to boil. All these small changes will add up and become daily habits and this will be more sustainable and less overwhelming than trying to change everything at once.

kellyconwaynutrition.com