Healthy Habits By Lisa Conway

It seems the older I get the more attention I require to maintain a standard of good health. I have always been very in tune with my body and the connection of mind and body fascinates me. My highest personal value is health so it makes sense that I would be a serial searcher to find and maintain the best version of self.

Recently I decided to eliminate alcohol completely, I was a few glasses of red on the weekend’s kind of gal and although that might not seem like a lot to some that next day, I found it was seriously slowing me down.

Six months in, I must say I don’t miss the sluggishness of the way the wine left me feeling, however I did miss the ritual of setting time aside at the end of the day. The making time to stop, to unwind and reflect left a void. The act of holding a long stem wine glass in hand had a lot more to do with the ritual than what was in the glass.

Lisa Conway

I decided to find an alcohol-free wine, it took a few tries, but I found one that I really enjoyed so I was back having an evening red on the balcony. Then a few nights of alcohol-free wine I found myself back experiencing all of the yukky puffiness, the sludge that I thought was the alcohol, it has to be the sugar? My conclusion is that drinking non-alcoholic wine was just as bad.

I was shocked to find that the puffiness along with all of the heavy sluggishness I was feeling had returned. I felt as bad from drinking the alcohol free one as I did the real one. The penny dropped! It’s the sugar, it must be that and probably the preservatives too. I was blaming the wrong thing.

I had suspected sugar wasn’t helping but I had no idea just how much it was affecting my moods. The transformation I felt without sugar really had to be experienced to be believed. “I think the worst type of sugar is liquid sugar loaded with preservatives too as it finds its way into your system even faster. Soft drink is at the top of the list. Our bodies are incredible machines and mine was screaming ‘DON’T DO THAT “I can’t process that, anymore. I could years ago but now it’s almost impossible. The body’s ability to heal, stay alive is remarkable but like all things struggle with age.

Anyone who has watched a loved one suffer through palliative care to their final death would understand a saying my mother often used” you got to be very sick to die”

What you got away with once will change as it did for me. The standard seventies breakfast of a tablespoon of white sugar on your Weetbix is unheard of today. However, I think the product companies are just way better at hiding sugar from us. Many fancy titles such as dextrose, fructose, glucose, and lactose! Sugar has been described as addictive as cocaine. A rather large statement however one worth exploring.

I think we need to go back a bit and consider the introduction of sugar. We wouldn’t have to “GET OFF IT“ If we weren’t on it in the first place

I think we need to hold off the introduction if we can. I will give you an example of the standard.

A woman ahead of me in the coffee queue the other morning would be about 34- 35 perhaps? Beautifully dressed the whole family was. So lovely to see people taking such pride in their appearance. The wife was using all her eight arms keeping their two little ones in line and a very handsome designer dog, something cross poodle. The husband, let’s be honest, no octopus skills, just the standard two arms.

What I could not help but notice was her order, she had some rather large drinks, some double mocha with a shot of vanilla syrup. As she pointed to the size, I thought it looked like the size of a milkshake container to be honest, and she also asked for two baby chinos, her husband had the same super-sized drink as she did, only he had two sugars whacked into his. We chatted, while we waited for our orders to come and when they did one of the kids was not happy, that’s a little of an understatement - the little minx was super pissed!

Apparently, there had been a terrible mistake with the order and the marshmallow wasn’t on top of the baby Chino. And off course she let her parents know that this was simply not acceptable, I guess you have already imagined that she didn’t say ‘excuse me mum but my marshmallow is missing do you think it would be too much trouble to ask the barista if she could get me one please’ No f#*ing way, this little tot grew another head, she let loose with a performance a drama teacher would be proud of, a 10 out a 10 performance. I watched on with an internal grin because I have been there and it’s so embarrassing you just want to hide. It is a time of social judgment from the audience around you. She was probably 3? And she carried on like it was life or a torchieres slow death.

I don’t care about the drama performance; however I care about the sugar and I think it’s time that we have an open discussion about what is going on when it comes to kids’ diets.

I’m all for kids having fun. I’m all for parents taking their children to public places and enjoying the fruits of the hard work that parents put in to provide such lovely experiences but a couple of things I’m worried about how desperate she was to get that sugar fix, that’s what I think the problem was. You might think it was her parenting techniques, I don’t. All kids can be little shits. We all know that I did feel this was more than just’ I want my own way ‘. I think it’s more about being addicted to the UPF we are all consuming today. change and I think it is taking its toll. I believe that this tot is addicted to sugar. Our diet today is so different from the diet our grandparents ate I think that it’s almost unrecognisable. This little girl is sure she might be overtired. She may even be a bit spoiled or indulgent, but I think the problem here is sugar or what I call legal crack.

Our diets have changed a lot and I think the same could be said whether your grandparents came from Germany, Greece, Italy or the fifth generation Australians. I think what we eat today needs to be looked at. Apart from the tantrum which let’s be honest all kids try it on, it’s in the brief they get when they arrive. The food we consume has a lot to answer for, it concerns me.

Poor gut health is affecting our quality of life. I think it is an epidemic. There is no way that the little one would have behaved like she did for anything else than an over processed sugary treat.

The Mountain I have had to climb from books, podcasts, doctors, naturopaths all with the aim to repair my gut health has left me somewhat scarred. My mother pickled herself in sugar and I really want to break that cycle of ignorance when it comes to nutrition.

As you age your body just can’t handle the same amount of abuse it did when it was new.

The way I feel about myself when I look in the mirror comes from the fuel that I put or don’t put in my body, this is true. I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. What we eat, its quantity and the quantity does affect our physical appearance, how heavy, how fit, our posture and so on. All can be changed over time; it will require some lifestyle changes and it is a long-term strategy. You will need to enrol a fair amount of patience to succeed and maintain.

A much shorter-term strategy is how we feel emotionally about ourselves. This also is connected to what we eat, I am certain of that. We have probably all noticed it in the extreme. Think about how you have felt after eating something like greasy fish and chips. They sit in your gut like a big heavy weight, and you often can’t be bothered even moving for the next few hours? The truth is probably only a few 100 grams; however, you feel like you are 5 kilograms heavier, so the heavy feeling is a mental feeling yeah? Exactly.

A lot of food today is full of chemicals that really do not earn the right to be called food. How you feel about yourself is connected to what we eat, often instantly, not anymore because I’ve spent thousands of dollars and hours of my time rebuilding my gut health, but there was a time that I could send a funeral procession up a back alley with a fart. The bloating and pain I would feel after eating some foods was horrible. I would be literally rolling around groaning in pain.

The single word that describes a lot of what goes on in our bodies that is driven by our food choices is’ inflammation’ In the same way I can tell a smoker by the appearance of their skin I can also see a poor diet on a person’s skin. There is a puffiness in a person’s appearance. I know there is for me the cleaner I eat the clearer my skin is, my joints stop aching and I look at myself through a lens of kindness. I like the way that feels.

The human skin is an organ, one of 78, it’s the largest and the most versatile of all the organs. Its main function is to protect us from chemicals, bacteria, and temperature, so it all seems a bit backward to be eating the thing our skin is protecting us from. When you think about it, our skin does things or changes to get our attention, things like hives, dermatitis, eczema, psoriasis, the way our skin appears tells the medical profession clues about what’s going on internally. Our skin is a bit like the notice board in the school canteen, anything that’s going in and around the school is pinned to that board.