I’ve gone non UPF, I just can’t believe the difference it’s made in a week

[LaurieFairyCake]

I feel like such an idiot. I can’t believe how well I feel, how much I’m ready for bed and how much better I sleep.

this shit is radical. I was eating 40% upf (a teenagers diet is 80% 😱) and I feel brand new.

i have zero pain in my joints, during the day loads of good energy

does anyone else do this ?

Are you coeliac?

No but due to another medical issue, I do way better gluten free.

to whoever said I’m getting my advice from ‘influencers and grifters’ it’s the Chris V Tulleken book and podcast and Jessie Inchauspe.
the books are ‘ultra processed people’ and ‘glucose revolution’.

i don’t think of either of them as influencers and grifters.

Your food sound a good . Obviously portion control is importantl regardless of what you eat. Could that be a factor? Maybe try a savoury breakfast if a couple of eggs with tomatoes and muhrooms rather than the sweetened( albeit naturally) smoothie.

Do you have a recipe for the flatbreads? I am desperately trying to get my teens into healthier eating and would like them to have a go at making their own flatbreads (And the crackers sound tasty too).

@doodleschnoodle

I completely agree.

Volume eating is the best diet you can do.

It only hit me after years of dieting and I thought it’s so simple and it’s what all the other diets promote but claim it’s something else.

Its literally eat less, move more but when they say eat less it’s not less food - it’s as much food as you can get but just less calories (usually just extra veg and less of everything else).

I think they were referring to chat gpt which just mines the internet.

You are eating a lot of sugar.

Agree. If they are so keen on proper food , my view is that whilst they could say look if you can’t get enough whatever then take a supplement but that not Zoe’s ethos so you won’t see us touting them.

I think I put a lot on due to a stressful time in life. Now it doesn't want to shift very easily.

I usually do the morning smoothies as I'm not really much of a fruit person, but I think it's important, so that gets my fruit in. I'm also not much of a morning person, so doing some food prep for a couple of days and just having to tip it into the smoothie maker and whizz it up works for me.

I'm quite active, I feel like my diet isn't that bad that it accounts for the weight, so I'm trying to just accept it for what it is. Stress, hormones, maybe autoimmunity all play a role. My tests are all good and I'm able to manage my autoimmune condition without medication due to diet. Got to take the wins. :-)

ooooh can you share your choc pot recipe please?

What country are you from please?

And do you know of any good cook books?

For you, it is second nature but for people like me, we weren’t raised like that.

Our parents or grandparents didn’t cook.
Many people never knew their grandparents.

My mum has MH issues and didn’t know how to feed us properly so we’d have sugar sandwiches (literally white bread with sugar sprinkled on top) and that is almost all we’d eat every day.
Sometimes we’d have beans on toast. We never had fruit or veg. I remember seeing a friends mum peeling a potato when I was mid teens and it was the first ever time I’d seen it.

As an adult I can work out what’s healthy or not but cooking and meal planning is a proper conscious effort that doesn’t come naturally to me at all.

I hope to break that cycle with my DC.

Other than the fruit, which in the smoothie is half a small banana, about 1/8 cup of mango and same of pineapple, there's no added sugar in anything. I don't worry about fruit sugars when I'm eating the whole fruit.

That snack is a bit exceptional. I don't usually have fruit in anything other than the morning smoothie.

Many reasons people don't: including time constraints, lack of knowledge, physical or mental health issues...

This is our typical daily diet (and bear in mind we WFH so it's easy to follow this routine):

No breakfast, we generally fast until around 1pm or later.

Lunch
Raw, fibrous vegetables (usually broccoli, cauliflower, celery, radishes) with homemade mayonnaise.
Greek yoghurt with chia, flax, almonds, shredded coconut, Brazil nuts and raspberries.
NB We have the same lunch every day—I would soon get fed up if I had to cook a variety of lunches as well as dinners

Dinner
Meat or fish with green vegetables or salad. Sometimes pulses as well, or a baked potato.
Fruit in the week, good chocolate or a homemade pudding at weekends.

We'll have pasta a couple of times a month, and some bread at the weekend (where we live, cheap non-UPF bread from local bakeries is available everywhere).
Alcohol only at weekends.

Snacks tend to be things like homemade pickled eggs, cheese, nuts, celery with peanut butter in the crevice.

We're not perfect by any means. I will snack when I'm out, or doing the supermarket shop. I do find that the really bad UPFs (Pringles, Snickers etc) make me feel a bit sick now though, so I've stopped being tempted by them, but I love pastries and will overeat them given the opportunity. Again, easy and cheap to get proper, bakery-made pastries here though, so it could be worse.

We've been eating this way for about four years now. Lost over 15kg in the first year and pretty much kept it off (tend to gain a few kilos over Christmas, but it comes off again once we get back into the routine).

I will say that it wasn't a massive stretch to do this, as we were fairly low UPF before, and have always cooked from scratch (my parents were very into the 70s / 80s whole food movement, so it was normal to me). The big change we made in terms of weight loss was to practice intermittent fasting and lower carbs (we used to eat a lot of bread), and alcohol.

I eat both, the house is full of nuts which I have plain or roasted with spices and flavours but theres nothing like eating nut butters, it just has a different hit.

Laziness.. sorry don’t buy into excuses for lack of eating well, except knowledge..

Nothing wrong with your diet but it would have me in a lot of pain very quickly!

Not entirely non-UPF then 😂

Tomorrow's breakfast I have a smoothie with half a banana, mango and pineapple, soy milk (unsweetened, homemade) and a bit of raw honey. I will have black coffee with it.

@hadenoughnows The problem with smoothies is that you get a really fast sugar hit because you aren't eating whole fruit and chewing it. It's the same with bottled smoothies- they aren't as healthy as people think.

Okay, fruit is good, but for example, people with diabetes are told to avoid some of the high sugar fruits and those in your smoothie would count.
Honey is the same as sugar really, in terms of glucose spikes.

Recipe attached for the sourdough naan flatbreads.

The discard crackers are very simple.
Mix 200 GM's starter with 2 tablespoons butter melted. 2 teaspoons herbs ( I use thyme)
1 teaspoon salt.
Spread very thinly onto a baking tray with a spatula lined with baking paper. Sprinkle with sea salt & sesame seeds( optional). Bake in oven at 160 ° until crisp. You can flavour with parmesan or other seeds/pepper. You can also use a pizza cutter to mark out the crackers after 25 mins. Then return to the oven.

So where is the UPF in that?

Edited to say Greek yogurt is a fermented food with lots of live bacteria.
It doesn't count as a UPF.

And none of the other things on the list are.

You're confused?

Chocolate and crisps are both UPF.

So you still have a percentage in your diet.

Anything not in its original form is processed.

No, the breakfast, the chocolate and the crisps are not upf’s, they’re processed foods.