Journeyer’s Chronicles

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Earlier this week I watched Jamie Oliver’s Eat to Save Your Life. What a fascinating program. It was based around analysing the diet of a group of ordinary people and then shocking the pants off them by telling them what would happen if they didn’t change their bad food habits.

I think Eat to Save Your Life appealed to me because it was very visual (a bit too much at some points). Rather than telling us the consequences (which I am sure we’ve all heard a hundred times before), we were shown all the gory details. From preparing typical mass produced sausage mince to performing an autopsy on a 25 stone man, it was all there.

I was starting to feel a bit cocky part way through the show, as I prepare most of our foods from scratch and we spend a small fortune on fresh fruit and vegetables.

My bumptiousness (I got that word from Hairy McLary ) soon disappeared when we learned that most of the participants were overweight and around one third were obese. I would have classed maybe two as obese. Even worse, one of the fit looking guys had the very beginnings of liver disease because of his poor diet.

Eat to Save Your Life really emphasised to me the absolute importance of what and how much we put into our mouths. While I am reasonably vigilant with the “what” the “how much” seems to have become larger and larger over time. Portions seem to have become bigger or we’ve been conditioned to expect more. Most of us are unlikely to go through the barrage of tests that the participants of the show did, so we may never know what’s going on inside our bodies until disease has taken hold.

After being told by two doctors over the last couple of months that some of the minor health problems I’m experiencing are because I’m “getting older” (I’m only 38 for goodness sake) I think it’s time I stopped taking my body for granted. Eating wisely is one step in that journey.