When it comes to nutrition and weight management, there are plenty of people wanting a quick fix and plenty of others willing to sell us one. This can lead to a lot of confusion and even fear around food.
It’s easy to get our attention with headlines like ‘X food linked to cancer!’ or ‘Avoid these five foods if you want to lose weight’ (why is it always five foods?). Look at the internet, pick up a magazine or browse a book store and there are gurus telling us what and how we should eat and that we’ve been doing it wrong. Remember, these are for entertainment purposes. If you take a birds-eye view, many of these are offering conflicting, contradictory advice. They can’t all be right!
Popular diets have always been around and long enough that they’re recycled and rebranded for new generations in different formats. They like to give us a set of, often arbitrary, rules to follow and you are either ‘on’ or ‘off’ the diet. There is also a lot of scaremongering about food as playing into our insecurities makes it easier to sell us temporary solutions.
The starting point for improving our diet is to look at what we currently eat, as we eat it for good reasons; we probably enjoy it and it’s available to us. Start to make small changes and tweak this if you’re serious about life long behaviour change. Try and do the simple things well and consistently without looking to complicate your life. This will help build a good relationship with food and your body at the same time.
Eating disorders are on the rise and trying to follow unnecessary and rigid dietary rules can contribute to this. If someone offers you a nutrition hack, particularly if it’s around championing specific foods or demonising others, be wary.
The biggest issue in nutrition isn’t a lack of knowledge, we know more than enough to make sound recommendations that will vastly improve most of our health. It’s making it actionable that is the challenge. However, food is political; availability, price (and therefore choice) is going to become more and more of a problem. If we can afford a fridge and a cooker in our home and to keep food in stock for ourselves and our family, we’re better off than many in our community.
At an individual level, I help people come up with ways they can fit a behaviour change into their lifestyle. I think one of the most valuable behaviours I can role model is having a relaxed, balanced attitude around food. What do I say when someone asks me what they should eat? It will be along the lines of ‘eat as wide a variety of food as you can – if you’re able to do this, please, please enjoy it’. Don’t be scared of food; like everything, it’s the dose that makes the poison/ medicine.

By Katrina Keeling.
Katrina Keeling is a Wimborne-based Personal Trainer. She coaches at WOW Ladies Fitness and independently. Her specialisms include functional strength for ageing. kkfitness.co.uk
kkeelingfitness@gmail.com