I’ve noticed for many years that physical activity is a great way to maintain or lose weight because by being active you get to add to your life. It’s a positive thing. Many people instantly tell me they don’t like being active but I quickly and consistently find things they like doing that are active that they didn’t realise could count. For example just popping our for a walk is important if you do no activity at all.
When you want to get control over your weight I want to explain why activity is, in my opinion, a better thing to focus on than the calories you eat.
Take a look at the graph below. What it shows is the average calorie intake in the UK between 1940 (yes, during wartime rationing) and 2000.
What you see is that we actually ate over 400 calories more during World War II, when obesity was extremely rare, compared to year 2000 when obesity is a huge concern.
Given that the data is from the goverment department defra I feel this is pretty compelling evidence that the idea of losing weight and preventing obesity by eating less just doesn’t add up. Either that or there are some serious flaws in the way the government is collecting and presenting information.
We’re also told that more of our calories should come from carbohydrate and less from fat. The chart below shows that we used to achieve this much better than we do now.
So if we’re eating so much less how come we’re so much bigger than we used to be? What’s changed? We all know what’s changed but we take it for granted. We’re just so much less active than we ever used to be.
Years ago we used to walk or cycle to work or the shops. We’d walk up stairs. Many of our jobs involved physical labour. So we spent a lot of calories just getting through our days that we don’t spend any more. The key thing is that our bodies are designed for an active lifestyle, not a sedentary one. I haven’t been able to track down the stats on activity over time, mainly because no one thought to record them. Most people don’t think to measure activity because they believe that we are what we eat instead of what we do but when I find the stats I’ll post them here.
Importantly it’s also logical that if we eat less food we’re probably consuming fewer nutrients than we used to. The data from defra indicates this isn’t the case for most nutrients which is encouraging.
I showed the data in multiple graphs because the amount required of each nutrient varies wildly. So I grouped the nutrients into similar values. One or two of the nutrients mainly the vitamin A equivalents and Retinol seem to have declined over time but the values of the others have remained relatively stable or increased.
The point being that while our overall calories may have been reduced our micronutrients appear to have stayed the same. Why is a big debate but the idea that we all need supplements is not supported.
Resources
The data came from the nutshist spreadsheet on the defra website. I created the graphs by uploading it as a google spreadsheet
This post first appeared on my original blog colchambers