I love food. Food food food food food. There is one difficulty: I can't eat any of it. I am lactose intolerant and have an insulin resistance, which means that I can't gain the nutritional benefit of any foods that cause my blood sugar to spike- foods that have a high Glicemic Index. This includes...
- Almost all carbohydrates: breads, potatoes, wheat products, rice, dried pasta, crackers and cereals. This includes gluten-free options. No joy.
- Sugars: including [obviously] sweets, cake, chocolates, and limiting my intake of some natural sugars like honey, dried fruit and juices.
- Saturated fats: Anything deep-fried or fried in excessive oils, and limiting intake of really fatty cuts of meat like patés, duck and goose, lamb and steak, or reconstituted meat products that contain rusk or breads like burgers and sausages.
- Dairy products: I haven't eaten dairy since I was 15, and I'm trying to work it back into my diet. Progress includes low-fat yoghurt, cottage cheese, low fat Philadelphia or a dash of semi-skim in my tea.
Easily the most difficult thing is eating out, or at friends houses. Although eating intolerances are becoming increasingly 
understood and catered for, you try asking for your meal to come dairy and carbohydrate-free with a low fat content. People look at you like you're totally nuts. Or have an eating disorder. It's just embarassing.
Worse than that is that the information you can find on a foods' glycaemic index is patchy at best, and extremely variable. Sometimes I read that spaghetti is perfectly ok, other times that only fresh egg-pasta is acceptably slow-burning. Pules and Legumés like beans are great, but commercially tinned baked beans aren't cool because of the sugar content of the sauce. A mash potato has a higher GI than a boiled one. Go figure.
Labelling is also a problem. Tesco [as far as I'm aware] are the only vendor that give an indication of the Glycaemic values of their foods. Others, like Sainsburys operate on the nutrition wheel system which although useful isn't that helpful when applied to the low GI diet.
But some good has come from having to monitor my diet so strictly. I am absolutely astounded at the amount of crap we perpetually put into our bodies. Most British households will consume wheat products 2-3 times a day, red-meats 4-5 times a week, and our daily calorie consumption has rocketed from an average 2000-2500 calories to a whopping 3000-3500 per day, exceeding our recommended intake by 1000. (Source: Food Standards Agency National Diet and Nutrition Survey 2008-2009)
My Dad recently had some pretty hardcore Gallstones, and needed to completely cut out fat from his diet in the lead-up to his operation. He's an educated man of 55, but had absolutely NO CLUE what was in the food he ate. Who knew there was that much fat in a something as healthy-seeming as a bowl of meusli, or a spaghetti carbonara? Dad has a pretty healthy diet anyway, but the fact he just had no concept of the amount of fat in his food and how much or it he was consuming was shocking to me. But then, I am a nutrition geek.
But that's the thing: people just don't know what's in their food, and they don't think about it either. And it's started to really piss me off. Living in South London, we have A LOT of takeaways. And I for one am absolutely sick of seeing school-kids in their uniforms strolling down the road at 3pm munching chicken and chips. Recently, a bus-stop on Old Kent Road was displaying an advert for Coco Pops that scared the crap out of me: how can we let them get away with it? WHY aren't we EDUCATING people about their food? Why are such poor standards of commercially distributed foodstuffs allowed? Jamie Oliver- I am with you on this one.
I think about food all the time, and I notice food in the world around me constantly. Now that I'm living with the culinarily-extraordinary Ms. Dipa Patel, I only expect the obsession to grow.