Fat vs sugar

Tuesday:

Last night I watched a show about fat vs sugar. It started off a bit unscientific, they got ONE set of identical twins (the hosts of the show, both doctors, one person in each group is not really a valid sample size for a study!) and put one on a high fat/low sugar diet and the other on a high sugar/low fat diet. They could eat as much as they wanted of their assigned foods. They both lost weight, fat and muscle loss, in the four weeks. The high fat twin was deemed to be doing more damage to his body, I think. Surprisingly, his insulin resistance was much worse than his high-sugar brother's. But overall they said either extreme was bad and you shouldn't cut out any food group or overeat in another like that.

They then looked at scientific studies. The bit that interested me was that people don't generally eat just fat or just sugar. Lump of butter, anyone? A couple of tablespoons of sugar by itself? (But what about soft drink/soda?) And in studies with rats, they generally wouldn't overeat or get fat when given free access to fat or sugar along with healthy rat food. But mix them together... oh my. Apparently the most palatable combination is around half fat, half sugar. Cheesecake! It seems to switch off our self-regulation ability. The rats stuffed themselves and got obese. And people are the same. One reason all that processed food is so dangerous. The combination of fat and sugar together does not appear in nature, they said! (Although it occurs to me, isn't milk - including human milk - both fatty and quite sweet?) Anyway, it wasn't really an in-depth report and mainly covered one researcher's life work, but it was interesting just the same.

The last two days I've finally got back to writing properly instead of just staring blankly at the screen, I've had a couple of good sessions, the first since we got Thor. So that is exciting. Maybe I'll get this book written eventually after all. It's amazing what a bit of sleep can do for the brain.

The temperature has plummeted here and it is definitely making me want to eat more. Have to make sure I have hot and comforting yet healthy options available. I've got some chicken soup simmering away on the stove for tomorrow's lunch.

I cleaned up my blog roll a bit today, taking off blogs that hadn't been updated in months - or in some cases years. Still following around 30, either weight-loss or writing related. It's always sad when a blogger disappears. Unless they say goodbye you assume relapse that they don't want to confess. Other people I follow have said they are taking a hiatus. I guess I understand that, although I mostly just talk about day to day stuff so I never have to stress about what to talk about, or about being profound. It must be almost exactly four years since I started, just before my 40th birthday. Happy birthday, blog!