Why Are We Getting Sicker Yet Unable To Change?
Our Modern Diets have us over-eating, never fasting, and over-consuming refined carbohydrates and animal proteins, causing systemic dysfunction of both our bodies and our minds.
Among the negative effects of this way of eating are increased cellular inflammation and reduced autophagy – our body's way of cleaning out damaged cells in order to regenerate new ones. Together, these add up to accelerated aging and increased risk of preventable diseases such as obesity, diabetes, chronic heart disease, stroke, cancer and Alzheimer’s.
The physical signs of this are very easy to spot - increased abdominal body fat. The harder one to spot is the impact on your body’s set weight.
Similar to how a thermostat regulates a room’s temperature, your bodyweight can be ‘set’ higher or lower, and your body will do its best to stay there - if elevated, it will drive you to eat more and move less. Unfortunately, turning the thermostat up is much easier than turning it back down due to the dysfunction that has developed. This is similar to tackling the current climate crisis: the longer we leave it the more costly and difficult it becomes.
With the thermostat turned up, your body has increased energy needs, leading to heightened hunger signals and more powerful cravings for high-calorie, easily absorbed foods. Think of all the well-researched and industrially produced foods you tend to crave - that’s no coincidence.
Faced by constant temptations, our resultant behaviours are to eat more, eat more often and move less. Our food environment is making us sick to our core and the diet industry asks us to fight not only our hijacked internal signals, but also to fight well-designed and cleverly marketed temptation with every decision we make.
It should be obvious now why almost all diets fail long term. In the short-term, you can fight your metabolic cravings by trying to eat less and exercise more through sheer willpower. But this doesn’t address the problem of an increased body set weight, or any of the deeper dysfunctions that compel us to do the exact opposite.
It’s time to end this vicious cycle started by our unhealthy Food System and exacerbated by the diet industry. It’s time to stop blaming the individual and instead understand the powerful internal and external factors at play.
We must stop merely treating the visible symptoms and instead look to address the deeper dysfunctional systems at fault. We must take a systemic approach to developing healthy and sustainable behaviours that will bring benefits to personal, public and planetary health.
The next decade of your choices and behaviours will not only shape your future health but will also shape the environment that we all share. The Suste personal mission is to empower you to break out of the vicious cycle, to help you be healthy and live sustainably.
Our planetary mission is to help the required billion people be healthier in order to prevent 0.5°C of global warming by 2050. Join us and be part of the Suste movement.
