One of my recent favourite new discoveries is the Channel 4 show ‘Secret Eaters’ – Anna Richardson, a house full of CCTV cameras and a crew of 2 private investigators help people understand why they are struggling with their weight. People who are overweight are watched 24 hours a day at home and out of the house to see whether what they SAY they eat is in fact what they eat. In the first few episodes, it was mostly a case of Mr X saying “I eat really healthy and hardly eat anything and I can’t understand why I am x stone overweight” and the crew discovering that Mr X was actually eating 4 and a half thousand calories a day so no wonder really he was struggling with his weight. This was kind of to be expected I guess – I know that even when I think I am eating well, when I actually tot it up I am always eating a bit too much!
The episode that really intrigued me though was their 6th where they filmed and engaged couple from Farnborough who were struggling with their weight. For the man, it was a case of too many calories and skipping breakfast which was quite predictable given the nature of the show. But I really felt for Ronnie, bride-to-be who was my height but tipped the scales at over 21 stone. She said (as many people on this programme do) that she really had no idea why she had so many problems with her weight as the cooked all their food from scratch, took her own lunches to work and snacked healthily. She also said she ate 1500 calories a day. I scoffed at this – imagining how on earth you can get to 21st doing the above. Turns out, she really did! When a week of filming was over, all she was doing wrong was snacking too heavily on so called ‘healthy’ snacks and eating a few hundred calories a day more then she said she did. That sounds piggy, but bear in mind we women should be able to eat 2000 calories a day and not put on weight and she was normally never managing more then 1800 unless she was eating out and this was a treat and not too often.
The show’s dieticians put her and her husband onto a 10 week healthy eating programmes where all Ronnie did was make sure she counted her calories and watched her portions sizes. She shed 1 stone and 8 lbs (22lbs/9.9kg) in that time – simply because she made sure that she wasn’t going over her calorie count everyday. I was so impressed and hope she loved her wedding day! I guess the point I wanted to make, that I started in my last blog – is that you don’t have to sin much to pile on the pounds.
And thus my argument for COUNTING what you eat continues…
