At some point in my teens, I was sent to live in France for a week, as the guest of an overly emotional family, in the mistaken belief that it would encourage me to learn the language. As a part of this exchange, I attended the local school with one of their aloof children and got to experience the French version of physics. Despite being conducted in a language I was yet to grasp; I remember that that lesson made as much sense to me as the ones I had attended on the same subject at home.
The only good I could see for physics lessons, even in my native tongue, was that they gave those who thought in a different way to the rest of us, sometime in the school curriculum that they could enjoy. It seemed a good separator of personalities. Rare was it that the school football captain, or netball star, were keen on the most mathematical of natural sciences. Rather, it became a haven in which the quieter children could come to life, demonstrating an energy and enthusiasm they dare not display throughout the rest of the school day.
I particularly remember that physics textbooks, in whichever country I read them, were an enigma. Packed full of equations that did little more than create an unreadable matrix from which I could decipher little. Others, however, took these codes and from them developed an understanding of the world and its beginnings. Or so they told me.
My experiences of the subject in both countries had led me to believe nothing more than it takes a genius to take something simple and make it so complicated that few people can understand it. For example, when considering weight gain, the obvious conclusion, before it gets clouded and confused by letters of the Greek alphabet, is that we all are here and reading this blog because we put more in than we took out. Generally, a positive approach with banks, not always with bodies. A handful of foreign letters does not help us understand why we did this.
After all, equations are exact. They are neat and precise; people, like me, are not. You may think a mound of chocolate ice cream added to any children’s party would result in increasing disorder, but amongst the mayhem there would be some who don’t like cold food and others who only eat pink flavours. We may think that we can predict the actions of a population but within that lies the confusing and conflicting peculiarities of many an individual. We are not numbers; we are free people.
Take the much-maligned calorie, as an example. A victim of its own success, it is now only used to advertise its absence or to apologise for its presence. It has been dragged into a mess not of its own making. A useful tool that gained little attention in the decades or centuries since its invention, it has now taken centre stage. And it seems as if none of us can survive without an encyclopaedic knowledge of every single calorie in every piece of food that passes our lips, along with the mathematical faculties to calculate the number of these units we burn up in every second of activity we are forced to endure.
An overriding focus on the measure has blinded many to what food is about. Focusing solely on these alarming numbers over taste, nutrition, or pleasure. Some would argue that calories are the only important thing and a calorie, they try to tell us, is a calorie, is a calorie, is a calorie. But this ignores that the fact that we are not completely efficient catches and consumers of energy and our ability to do so differs between people and by food.
Any lucky parent, blessed with the job of changing their dependent’s nappy after trying sweetcorn for the first time, may feel some disappointment. After all the effort of introducing their loved one to this food favourite, they find out that although it was welcomed at one end, it is commonly rejected/ejected at the other. The scattering of undigested kernels ably highlighting our inability to consume all of that inside us. We are not furnaces or bombs. Plenty of the food we take in is left behind and the ever-strong toilet paper industry is testament to that.
I say kudos to the scientists and their expertise. Not only have they managed to secure their position in the diet industry, they have also made it so complicated that we need such an industry in the first place. If we all understood calories and nutrients and found them easy to balance, we wouldn’t need the multitude of companies and authors trying to make the whole thing easier for us. We are slaves to their knowledge and acumen.
But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Weight gain is a simple combination of time, eating too much and not getting enough exercise and in the blogs that follow I will explain how these factors worked together to lead you into perusing the diet and health section of your local bookstore or online blogger.
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