Kia Ākina

Working towards lifelong recovery from obesity

Eat Well – Rather than eat what we don’t need to eat

It’s time to have a look at the NEEDNT food list again. Remember, this is a list of foods that are non-essential, energy-dense, and nutritionally-deficient: non-essential in the sense that we’re not going to die if we don’t eat any of these 50 foods for the rest of our lives because they are superfluous to survival; energy-dense because they are packed full of calories and therefore perfect for putting on weight if we were starving (which we’re not); and nutritionally-deficient due to them being very low in the minerals, vitamins and fibre found in good nutritious food. 

However, as we all know, these engineered foods are yummy and can hit the spot, particularly when some stress appears, as it does most days of a normal human being’s life. Many of these foods have also been devised to be marketed as special treats. However, every day can so easily slip into being a special treat day for many of us. 

So these NEEDNT foods, foods we don’t need to eat, are pleasure and comfort foods. They are recreational and medicinal foods. 

A key ingredient in an obesity recovery lifestyle is non-food recreation for pleasure and non-food drugs for pain (if we really do require a medicine). 

Let’s take some time today to look over the NEEDNT food list and identify or re-identify our individual top 5 – 10 problematic foods. Let’s think about the role these foods play in our lives and make a commitment to ourselves about what we are going to do about those foods.  Better still, let’s share that commitment with someone else we know we can trust to support us to maintain that commitment.   

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