Dieting and Weight Loss: The impact of sickness and injury

No I really am, sick and tired. My body is fighting a cold at the moment, and I am not sure who or what is winning!! After weeks of unrelenting stress and pressure to deliver a 3 day conference to a 100 people, I think my body has decided it needs to rest...and who can blame it.

As is always the case, it makes me wonder if better prevention would have offset the need for a "cure".

In the lead up to the conference my "diet" changed. I sat for far longer, forgoing my daily walk for another hour spent in air-conditioning in front of the computer. I drank more caffeinated beverages and when the stress levels became too great I opted for higher levels of sugar....refined sugars including sweets and chocolate (don't tell Mike!!) and sandwiches over salad and fresh fruit. And home time was no better. Whilst I do cook proper foods nine times out of ten, there were occassions when I did succumb to the "chippy"...yes more carbohydrates that my body couldn't burn in the time that it was allocated. Even my gym time was impacted especially during the running of the event.

So what lessons can be learned?

• Old habits die hard, and it is easy to return to old ways of eating and behaving when you are under pressure;
• Reliance on caffeine and sugar for too long can overload the body and not allow the body time to heal, especially when surrounded by lots of new people carrying their own version of germs;
• Too much caffeine and sugar means the body spends all its time racing around trying to get rid of it, which usually means you have trouble sleeping, thus compounding the problem of tiredness, requiring more caffeine and sugar to keep you on an even keel during the day;
• And if you add in alcohol to the mix, you are setting yourself up for more problems - especially in the fat storage equation. Alcohol is a poisonous depressant - the body stops doing everything else in order to process it - the body starts stuffing the excess sugars hurtling around the blood stream into fat cells, so you gain weight quicker because the body hangs onto the water to process everything. So one of the questions I have for you is this - if alcohol is a depressant why do we use it to celebrate?