What are your fillers?
Feeling stuffed quickly
Virtually all conditions of obesity, lack of energy or digestive problems are caused by a wrong choice of food products.
In general, everyone has one or more products that are used as “fillers”.
A filler is a food that is relatively easy to prepare, which quickly gives a “full feeling” when eating. After all, an empty stomach is quickly misinterpreted as hunger. However, having an empty stomach is no sign at all that your body is hungry at that moment.
In our society, the fillers are often bread, pasta, white potatoes or rice.
Low quality fuel
Consequently, meals are still traditionally composed on the basis of such a filler. A plate is often filled with potatoes or pasta, and then topped off with sauce, a limited amount of vegetables and a protein source. Think of something like spaghetti bolognaise, a sandwich this or that or french fries with xyz.
The problem is that these common filling products are very poor in real nutrients, such as vitamins and minerals. You can think of them as a form of low-quality fuel.
In fact, you can stuff yourself until you almost pass out into a food coma, and still your body is waiting in vain for real nutrients. This is one of the reasons why (real) hunger quickly rears its head again, which you might smother with the same fillers. And so the cycle continues.
Systematically inflated profile
Here you have the recipe for the fastest-growing phenomenon in the world of health. More and more overweight people with a lack of energy. Paradoxically enough, obesity is in most cases not the result of overnutrition but of systematic malnutrition. The body does not know what to do with all that nutrient-poor, calorie-rich food. It converts the excess into fat and/or water. The body has too many acid-forming toxins to process. And to remove them from the bloodstream in time, there are only two solutions. Store them either in fatty tissue or in extra water pushed between the body cells. And there we have the recipe for the systematically inflated profile of most Belgians and Europeans today. We learned it from the Americans, and it is now quickly making school in Asia.
Healthy eating style
The lesson is simple: build every meal around a large amount of vegetables. Prefer green (leafy) vegetables, cabbages and coloured vegetables supplemented with root vegetables according to the season. Preferably strive for a nice balance between raw and lightly steamed. Vegetables are typically low in calories, but score very high in nutrients.
It’s a bit of a godsend, but the adage proclaimed for decades that “eat more vegetables” is not a free option. It is no more or no less than the single foundation of a healthy eating style. Without that foundation, the house of your health slowly collapses over the years.
Prosperity and ignorance
We are not exactly helped either. We are subject to traditions and habits about eating and cooking, handed down from mother to daughter. Our typical Belgian plate of today is the direct heir to the eating practices that have taken off since industrialisation. The standard diet of the working class person was cheap, “empty” filler food. Like the almost archetypal brown bread and the daily “cooked potatoes with sauce”. And if one was lucky on Sunday, a piece of cheap meat of the worst kind. The rich indulged in refined flour products and large quantities of meat. Vegetables played a totally secondary role in either case.
Diseases of affluence: really ?
And on the sidelines, the food industry, with its refined technologies and social marketing and engineering strategies, is aiming for one thing only: to make you buy and eat even more than is healthy for you.
There is no such thing as “diseases of affluence”. This term makes it seem as if you have to take it or leave it: either you have prosperity and you have to take disease with it as part of the deal, or you have no prosperity. What comes closer to the truth is “diseases of ignorance”. Or “profit driven-lack of legislation-lobbying diseases”.
Create your menus around the vegetables
So from today, reorganize your plate wisely and start eating a large quantity of varied vegetables of the season at every meal.