- McKeith couldn't wait to get in from filming to polish off that plate of doughnuts
One thing I 'learnt' today from a baseless, wholly speculative headline in the Guardian was that fruit might not be all that good for you. I tried to skip over it, but was stopped in my tracks by an arty caption that claimed that drinking a smoothie is as bad as drinking ordinary Coke! A statement that ridiculous had to be investigated, and I was soon angrily reading the mitherings of some so-called expert, who claimed, perhaps not entirely incorrectly, that the sugars in fruit are released slowly, but when it's liquidised it's sugar content enters the bloodstream quicker, causing a rise in blood sugar similar to that obtained by gluggin' down a can of sweet fizz. Hence, smoothies are as bad for you as Coke. What said expert fails to bring into the equation is the relatively high level of nutritional goodness in fruit, compared to sugary coloured water, which to me appears to contain precious little in the way of goodness.
It's not even the inaccuracy of the statement that gets to me, really - it's the scaremongering tone of the whole thing. Fruit might not be good for you? It's fruit! What are we supposed to eat? Twigs? I'm currently (ahem) attempting to lose a little weight, and am eating balanced meals, made with less fattening ingredients than I was eating before, and I'm losing weight and not going hungry. Yet some people have gone so far beyond this that they're advising us to cut down on fruit (sorry, I really can't get over it). To be honest, anything encouraging nutritional awareness, whatever it's intentions, instantly brings to mind the sour-faced nutrition Nazi, Gillian McKeith, who I watched yesterday on TV, forcing women to show the nation their posteriors, in order to make a series of wanky voiceover puns about how fat their arses were, with a sinister tremble in their voice that suggests that she'd quite like all those fat fucks to be rounded up and shot. She just doesn't understand the concept of eating for pleasure, and going without having an arse like a shrivelled walnut as a compromise. On that You Are What You Eat programme she was forever stealing people's chips and replacing them with something she'd found in a swamp, and then couldn't understand why they started sobbing uncontrollably. The programme she swanned into last night involved a fat and a skinny person swapping diets; I've written in to ask if McKeith will take part in a special version with my good self, where I force feed her Krispy Kremes until she explodes.
Anyway, all this talk of healthy eating oppression and it's Machavellian overlord (even her voice makes me want to shove whole danish pastries into my mouth, and wash them down with butter) made me want to look into what my actual weight should be, according to the Body Mass Index (BMI), which tells you your ideal weight based on your height (pretty basic - do your age and gender not matter) - now I'm 5'11" and last time I looked, weigh 15st 11lb, which I knew was overweight but have now discovered is actually obese (I thank you). Anyway after a few calculations which, handily enough, looked a bit like actual work, I discovered:
My ideal weight, according to the BMI index, is approximately 11 stone. As of January 2007, I am 4.5 stone overweight.
Jesus. Must be all that fruit.
No comments:
Post a Comment