The story about why I created Green Brain Food in 2018 and what it means to me.
Food is powerful - use it to your advantage!
When I was young, I felt a constant need to control what, when and how much I was eating. I was never pleased, I always felt stressed and I fought a constant battle against food. Luckily, I never suffered from any severe eating disorders like Bulimia or Anorexia, but it was nevertheless energy consuming and it would put me down and in a bad mood. It would even occasionally keep me from going out, meeting friends and enjoying life. I felt guilt around almost all meals and I would put pressure on myself to go on different diets to have a quick fix. I was never very successful however and I never liked the strictness of the many diets displayed out there. But I certainly learnt a lot from trying them out!
With weight watchers I learned to count calories. This might not be something I recommend to someone with a complicated eating disorder but for me it was a very good school starting to understand the content of energy inside food and how it effects our weight. For instance, peanuts are so much better than a bar of chocolate, but a bag of peanuts contains a much higher amount of energy than a bar of chocolate. This means you will not necessarily lose weight just because you choose a healthier option, but it can be healthier anyway and in the end it might keep you from overeating later in the day. You always need to understand the importance of knowing the amount of energy in food and that eating healthy and nutritious food means more than just losing weight.
"I eat, therefore I lose weight"
The turning point for me came in 1997 when I came across the book of Michel Montignac "Eat yourself slim", in Swedish "Jag äter alltså är jag smal" and with the original title "Je mange donc je maigris". Montignac was a French diet developer who introduced the concept of glycemic index (GI) in relation to weight loss. Based on GI, he developed a method that has proven to measure up. I still like the title and believe this is the core of finding a new lifestyle instead of constantly chasing new diets. He was, as far as I know, one of the first after the fat frightened 80ties that talked about fat verses carbon hydrates and how the combination of the two is the real problem. Not only did he explain what to eat but also how it affects your blood sugar, your brain and how this is where you find the keys to have success. For me, he changed my life! I followed his program and for the first time in my life I understood and felt I succeeded. Not only to reach my comfort weight but also to finally come to peace with food and what I was eating. After this book I started to read more about diets and tried them out one by one as an experiment. I always found them unresistant. But I learned a lot about how they work but even more interesting was how my emotions got affected. I took the best from each one of them and created my own version that I still live by today.
In 2000 a Swedish brain scientist and medical journalist released a book called "Hjärnkoll på vikten”. The title is a word game that basically means your weight is controlled by your brain. After reading this book I came to the next level of understanding what Michel Montignac had started up in his book some years earlier. I combined this knowledge with my studies in cell biology, nutrition and health at university and tried to get a deeper and more thorough understanding.
So, for more than 20 years I have had a growing interest in reading about health, diets, food and the human body but I have also followed medical science connected to eating habits, food products but most importantly our brain! It has been a journey where I have learned to understand my own misconceptions and how to find peace with food and my eating habits.
For me number one is to understand how our eating habits can be explained also with the help of science. My target has been to try to understand why many diets work only for a short time for most people but not for a lifetime. To me it is clear that it is all mastered from our brain. Therefore, I say we need to feed our brain, not our stomach. This is, and will always be, my guideline throughout everything I do in the name of my brand Green Brain Food. It will never be about diets, at least not as many of the diets we know about today.
The only diet worth looking for to me, is the one you can keep for a lifetime! Therefore, I believe in creating small changes in our lifestyle, brought in one by one. That requires time and patience, but we need to allow ourselves to work in baby steps. Rome wasn’t built in a day and if we keep this in mind, I am convinced anyone can succeed.
I cannot wait to inspire you and to take this concept to the next level! Get in for the ride and start by following Green Brain Food on Instagram...
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