In Defence of Butter

I’ll give it to you straight: I’m a reformed fat-phobic. As anyone close to me will know, I went through over a decade of twisted eating, starting off with going low-fat, then low-carb, and eventually just plain old ‘low-food’. I clearly remember a time in which I’d eat as much as I wanted, as long as each meal had less than 3 grams of fat. Where the magical ’3 gram’ limit came from, God only knows, but even that seemed indulgent. This was a period in my life when fat-free foods to me were like ‘milk and honey’ to Moses. I started this regime around the age of 11, after realizing that changing your eating just slightly could change your weight. The problem was, I couldn’t exactly ask for diet advice at such a tender age, so I had to figure it out for myself. Thank goodness I started young, because I had a lot of mistakes to make. The biggest mistake was starting to diet in the first place; the second biggest was convincing myself that fat was the nutritional version of Hitler with a hand grenade: evil, and explosive (on the waist-line). It has officially taken me 12 years to undo the sort of brain-washing to which I subjected myself. If you’re on the lookout for a propagandist, I think I’m your girl.

Have you ever heard that old tongue-twister about Betty Botter and her bitter butter? It goes something like this:

Betty Botter bought a bit of butter, but she said this butter’s bitter. If I put this butter in my batter, it will make my batter bitter. So Betty Botter bought a better bit of butter.

If you asked me a few years ago, I might have said Betty would be better burning off that bitter butter with a bit of bicycling. During my early teens, the main staples of my diet were apples, 97% fat-free muesli bars, rice, non-fat yoghurts, skim milk, pritikin (non-fat) muffins and maybe a few more apples (I used to eat about 5 apples a day to stop myself feeling hungry). I’ve calculated that most days I probably would have eaten around 4g of fat in total – and that’s a generous estimate. I’ve also calculated that my taste-buds were dying off at a rate of 10 per day. I’m only half-kidding.

Then came a moment I will never forget. It lives on as an image of pure horror in my young, impressionable mind. I discovered the equation: Oxygen + Glucose = Carbon Dioxide + Energy. And what is the most direct source of glucose, I asked myself? Why, carbohydrates, of course – the bloody staple of my entire diet/life! Suffice to say, I practically fainted upon discovering that ‘fat’ was not my arch-enemy – in fact, it was carbohydrates who were the kamikaze pilots in this whole affair. And yet I had trusted them! Dieting was such a serious issue to me that I felt betrayed. In my head, it was as if some sort of moral war hung in the balance. At least I’d found the truth sooner rather than later: I was only 14 at this stage. Unfortunately, I could not reconcile myself to being friends with my old foe, fat. But I couldn’t trust carbohydrates either, so I embarked on a reckless new diet of minimal fat (maybe around 15g daily now) and minimal carbohydrates (usually less than 60g daily). What was I actually eating? Mostly lettuce and vegetables, tuna (in brine) or salmon, green apples, a little air, coffee, and a piece of seed bread here and there. When I wanted to really ‘cut loose’ (i.e. after a whole lot of exercise), I’d cook eggs in butter, or I’d have some dark chocolate, but that became an increasingly rare occurrence.

If my goal was to be super-skinny, then I certainly got what I deserved. Despite the best efforts of my poor mother and brothers, my dangerous eating habits nearly ended in my death. At my worst, I was told I had two weeks to live. I don’t want to go into that too much right now, but it really has taken me years to recover from those first shaky steps down the path of dieting.  And to think it all began with a silly delusion that ‘fat’ was the bad guy: such a seemingly simple, insignificant decision, with such huge ramifications.

It’s taken about four years of active re-education to get to the point where I’ll write a blog in defence of butter: the grass is definitely greener this side of the dairy farm. Some people defend Marxism, but I’ll go down for butter any day. It’s not that eating fats and oils is something I do by accident either: I happily go out of my way to include them in my diet now. I make salad dressings using coconut oil, I eat bacon fat, I love oily fish, and – most dramatic of all – I have reignited my love of butter. I’ve gone from feeling guilty about even considering eating fats, to actively trying to include fats in my diet every day. Up until a year ago, that still seemed difficult. But I discovered that the more I read about the benefits of fats, the easier it was to want to eat them.

Fats and oils (including saturated fats) are genuinely good for you. If you still think that consumption of saturated fat leads to high cholesterol and heart disease, you’ve got it all wrong. You only need to consider how our rates of heart disease have sky-rocketed, while our consumption of saturated fats has decreased, to see that scientists blamed the wrong culprit for heart disease. What has increased along with heart disease? Our consumption of sugar, grains, fibre, sweeteners and vegetable oils.

Rates of heart disease in the 20th century.

Saturated fat consumption since 1975.

I’ve talked about nutrition before, but I wanted to return to the topic because it’s obviously a big deal to me. If I can change my mind about fats and oils, then anyone can.  I used to have such a fear of butter that I would demand my mother scrape excess butter off my school sandwiches as she was making them. It got to the point where I just wouldn’t eat the sandwiches for fear of the butter they contained: I thought I was being ‘healthy’. And still my mother proclaimed that butter was good for me! I thought she was either foolhardy or trying to sabotage my plans to be model-thin. If she was trying to sabotage me, that was an honourable goal. Whatever the case, she had a point about the butter.

You know you want it...

Butter is an excellent source of vitamin A (for eye health), vitamin D (for calcium absorption and thyroid health), vitamin E (an immunity-boosting antioxidant), vitamin K (for blood coagulation and bone health) and vitamin K2 (for heart and prostate health). All of these vitamins are fat-soluble – which is one reason why eating them in ‘whole-food’ form (i.e. by eating butter) is much better than taking them as a supplement, unless you consume the supplement with a meal containing fats or oils. Butter also contains lauric acid (which is important for gastrointestinal health and preventing fungal infections). It is the only known food to contain ‘anti-stiffness’ factor, a compound that stops the calcification of joints, arteries and cataracts – thereby preventing arthritis, heart disease, and vision loss. Unlike margarine (a hydrogenated and unnatural fat), butter tastes great, can be used in cooking and it isn’t linked to sexual dysfunction, impaired immunity, obesity, cancer, diabetes or heart disease. On top of all this, butter and other full-fat dairy have been proven to boost fertility in women.

This guy definitely needs his butter...

The best butter for your health is organic butter from grass-fed (pastured) cows, as it contains the highest concentrations of nutrients. Pasteurisation destroys nutrients, so if possible, get your hands on the raw, grass-fed butter – a trip to a local dairy farm may be required to find this stuff. Next time you’re shopping and you hesitate over a tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, you’d damn well better believe it. Food as good as butter doesn’t just get manufactured in factories. And, no, I wasn’t sponsored by a dairy farm to write this post, although my favourite butter shares my first name, and it may or may not have been harmed in the process of writing. You can solve the rest of that mystery yourself.

Top 10 Signs Your Procrastinating is Getting out of Hand

1. You consider it important to keep ‘up-to-date’ with the latest on Damn You Autocorrect (because you’ve memorised the 425+ older pages).
2. You read cooking blogs, even though your grocery-shopping skills haven’t progressed beyond the nearest petrol station.
3. Your time spent telling funny stories on Facebook is 95% greater than your time spent off Facebook accruing these stories.
4. YouTube recommendations make you feel like there is at least one person who truly understands you.
5. You believe visiting Reddit is relevant work experience for a career in ‘investigative journalism’.
6. If Interpol were on your trail, you’d have made their job real easy after joining so many internet forums.
7. You don’t have enough time to read a novel, yet you’ve completed the ‘collected works’ of Hyperbole and a Half.
8. You’re thinking of pioneering a new profession: the web-cam photographer.
9. You could sit the final exams to become a Naturopath, based on all the alternative health information you’ve read.
10. You start your own blog.
11. You write ‘Top 10′ lists on your blog with eleven entries.

Breaking up with the Pigeons

Pigeons are such underrated animals. I’ve always felt some strange protective instinct around them because they seem so gentle, yet they often get portrayed as the scourge of cities, defacing our lovely concrete monstrosities with their message of ‘bowel freedom for all’. In any case, I actually think pigeons can be very pretty creatures, especially when all flocked together – they kind of look like an impressionist painting from afar, adding feathery strokes of grey, royal blue and emerald green to everyday life. I also love seeing what local pigeons look like when I travel. Some of them seem almost unrecognisable from the pleasant little, effeminate pigeons I grew up with in Perth.

Given my affinity for pigeons, I was quite bemused to hear my Granda had some separation anxiety issues with them several years ago here in Belfast. Don’t be mistaken, my Granda wasn’t the one having the issues: it was the pigeons who just would not give up. A few afternoons ago, I caught my Granda peering through the blinds of the front room window, which looks out onto the 1960s-era terrace houses that line our street. Seeing this as strange behaviour, not befitting my cheery, innocent Granda, I asked him what was up. And without turning his head, he replied that he was just watching the pigeons nibble on the bread he’d left in the front garden. I was about to ask why he couldn’t watch them outside, when he began to tell me the sort of story that only he could tell.

About two years ago, before my Granda had invested in a dog, he started leaving leftover scraps of bread outside on his driveway for pigeons and starlings in the area. He used to enjoy watching how quickly they appeared, as if from hiding, to feast on his gift. However, things soon began to turn sour between my Granda and the pigeons. It seems the pigeons were telling their pigeon friends about this free all-you-can-eat, open-air buffet located in Ardoyne, where you could sample the best of Belfast’s many bread delicacies. My Granda began to notice the pigeons weren’t only dive-bombing for bread, they were also leaving what is politely called ‘dung bombs’. His car, driveway and the path outside his house were scarred with the digested remnants of his bread. Not to mention, the pigeon numbers were getting out hand. 

Now, my Granda is truly the sort of person who will not kill a fly – people fling that cliché about pretty casually these days, but I have seen my Granda go out of his way to ‘emancipate’ flies. He has a clever method of turning the lights off, catching the offending fly in a glass then setting it free, as I witnessed yesterday. According to Granda, the element of surprise is everything. And today when we noticed some flies had landed on the dog’s dinner, which was left outside, Granda commented that, “the poor critters must be starving.” So you can imagine Granda wouldn’t just go cold turkey when it came to breaking it off with the pigeons a few years back.

Granda decided he would let them down gently, by slowly moving them up the street, and hopefully in doing so some of the pigeons would give up all together. He put this plan into action the next day by leaving the bread across the street, outside the house directly opposite his own. Granda even spoke to the man who lived in this house, to make sure he didn’t mind. However, when this man’s wife caught wind of what was going down, she told Granda he would have to be on his way. Granda then moved the feeding location to the next house up. The pigeons didn’t seem to get lost on their way to the bread, although initially a few of them were seen lurking outside his house, waiting for their version of the soup van. Gradually he was able to move the pigeons all the way up the street, every few days heading to a house closer to the top of the street. It’s when he reached the top of the street that things got really interesting: cue Ardoyne politics.

You see, the moment Granda and his pigeons reached the top of the street happened to coincide with some Ardoyne riots. It’s a fairly frequent occurrence here, particularly in the Summer months – a.k.a ‘marching season’ – when Protestants from surrounding areas like to march in commemoration of past battles. This never goes down very well with the residents of Ardoyne, which has long been a Catholic stronghold amidst largely Protestant areas. Anyway, on that ill-fated morning when Granda reached the top of the street with some wheaten farls, having got the pigeons to move a good 30 metres from his home, it seems that Ardoyne residents were protesting against Loyalists marching through Ardoyne. The police were there in force, according to Granda, with armoured vehicles and water canons to quell the protesters. Rubber bullets were even fired into the air at one point. Meanwhile, Granda’s pigeons – probably about 100 of them – were circling above, unable to land to get their breakfast. Some of them surrounded a man standing on the roof of the Ardoyne shops as he shouted obscenities at the police and hurled stones.

Granda was beside himself with worry, but obviously he couldn’t go scattering bread around the protesters’ feet. The pigeons continued to circle, perhaps seeing Granda in the crowd, adding to the chaos of the day. I have to admit, when Granda got to this point in the story, I was in fits of laughter. It is an utterly bizarre image: angry protesters struggling with police, while 100 pigeons circle overhead, like reinforcements sent from above. Trust Belfast pigeons to be so feisty and so stubborn. Had I been in the crowd that day, I probably would have been worried about a literal “shit-storm”. I wonder if any of the police or protesters noticed the oddity of the pigeons joining the fracas? I have yet to find out.

Jessie the dog, being a rascal

Granda says that after that day, he had to give up feeding the pigeons en masse: it was getting out of hand, and it was just lucky none of them got taken down by a rubber bullet. He says the pigeons were being put in danger by relying on him for food. So he boldly gave them the “it’s not you, it’s me” line and cut things off altogether. In recent months, he has returned to leaving bread out for the pigeons, but only intermittently and in small amounts. He mainly does it these days because his dog, Jessie, loves watching the birds eat. He also varies between leaving bread in the front yard, or throwing it over the back fence. Let’s just hope no-one with a wheat allergy is walking by at that point. I do sometimes wonder about my Granda, but only because I am in awe of him.

My Granda, at the top of Napoleon's Nose (a hill in Belfast)

The Oldest Diet in the World…

 Consider this scenario: you and I are arguing. The issue at hand: whether you should feed your new puppy specially-designed dog biscuits or whether you should spend the time cooking this lucky puppy some New Zealand lamb each day. I say that you can’t afford to have a puppy if you’re not going to feed it properly, and you say that the dog biscuits are a ‘complete meal’, designed by veterinarians and tested in laboratories – it says so on the package. You seal the deal by saying, ‘Come on, it’s common-sense to feed dog biscuits to a dog.’  And there we go – in that moment the argument has been won by you. There’s practically nothing I can say that won’t seem ‘wacked-out’ because apparently I’m arguing against common-sense – and only a fool would do that. I may as well leave immediately and join the mad-dogs and Englishmen out in the midday sun. The ‘common-sense defence’ is a sure-fire way to end any debate quickly, by discrediting your hapless opponent. Except for one problem: what happens when common-sense isn’t common?

My problem with common-sense is that human knowledge is always expanding, yet common-sense just can’t seem to keep up with the times: it’s a bit like the Conservative Party in politics – always upholding that old adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But have you ever stopped to wonder where ‘common-sense’ began? At some point this now ‘common’ belief or practice must have become popular because it seemed to make sense, right? The term ‘common-sense’ is something that has been investigated by philosophers ever since Aristotle, who seems to define it as a sort of universal human intuition (I’ve paraphrased his longer definition). For a more recent definition, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines common-sense as: ‘sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts’ – which itself leaves us to wonder what is ‘sound’ and what is ‘prudent’? In any case, I will assume that common-sense is something which most people hold to be sensible (i.e. the opposite of crazy) – in other words, it is ‘conventional wisdom’.

The thing with common-sense is that very often, when you trace it back, it isn’t all that old – certainly not old enough for us to be deciding our lives based on it. I think, as a basic requirement, I would like common-sense to be at least as old as ‘time immemorial’ in order to qualify as something I would listen to. Let me give you an example of how common-sense is fallaciously influencing your entire life. Maybe then you’ll feel a little more liberated (or happily reckless) when it comes to questioning common-sense.

Most people in the Western world would accept that the Food Pyramid offers good, common-sense advice as to what foods you should eat. Below is a typical example of the Food Pyramid we are supposed to be following:

You can find versions of this same Food Pyramid in any Western country (Google ‘food and nutrition guidelines’ in your home country, and you’ll see what I mean). The Food Pyramid pretty much typifies the healthy version of ‘the Western diet’, much maligned though it is these days. I bet if you look at the foods in this pyramid, many of you might agree, ‘Well, these foods are safe and good to eat – we’ve always eaten them.’ Right? Wrong. I bet you might also think, ‘Well, it makes sense that grains are at the base of the pyramid, they’ve always been the staple of our diet, so we must need them.’ Again, wrong. Just because something has ‘always’ been the case in your lifetime, doesn’t mean it has always been the case, and it certainly doesn’t make it common-sense.

You might be a little surprised to learn that for most of human evolution, we never ate anything grain-based – not a bagel, not a muffin, not a single bowl of cornflakes. Have you ever consider how difficult it might be to consume any grains without a whole lot of farming and processing? Donuts don’t just grow on trees. Even all the porridge that Goldilocks stole had to have been thoughtfully boiled by the three bears beforehand, and that’s after a great deal of agricultural intervention. The fact of the matter is, humans have only been cultivating grains since the Agricultural Revolution around 10,000 years ago – and in that time we haven’t done a whole lot of evolving (for a while, we actually regressed physically, but that’s another blog-post). Prior to the Agricultural Revolution, humans had a period of over 150,000 years of hunting and gathering – living off animal protein and fats, fish, insects, vegetables, fruits, berries and nuts. Basically, we aren’t actually designed to be eating any grains at all – and scientists are now realising our flawed diet is the source of a whole heap of chronic illnesses and serious diseases – which could all be improved upon if we only returned to our natural way of living.

Now, before your stomach churns that last slice of pizza into oblivion, let me point out that what I’m saying is hardly the latest news, though it is only now filtering through to the public (i.e. me) in a big way. The idea of re-adopting a Paleolithic diet (or the diet humans followed right before the Agricultural revolution) has been around since 1975, and it has been increasing in popularity since the 1990s (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet). If you’d like to learn more about hunter-gatherer eating and become part of a community of followers, I’d recommend you start with Mark Sisson’s definitive guide: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/definitive-guide-primal-blueprint/. Apart from being an all-round nice dude, Mark Sisson has formulated a whole lifestyle based around the way humans naturally evolved to live. Mark’s website covers everything from diet to sprinting (aka ‘running from predators’) to allowing enough time for ‘play’ (which may or may not include sex). You can really start to get in touch with that wild, animal side of yourself that is actually more ‘common-sense’ than our current ‘conventional wisdom’. I list a few more helpful websites at bottom of my blog: start gettin’ friendly with the caveman ‘hood!

So now you’re with me on the science behind how humans evolved to eat, you may be asking, ‘How the hell did grains end up at the base of the Food Pyramid?’ It’s a good question, and the answer doesn’t just lie in the fact that modern Western culture grew around an agrarian way of life. Grains weren’t even such a huge part of nutritional wisdom until the twentieth century (you can hear about this here:  http://www.blogtalkradio.com/undergroundwellness/2011/01/14/why-we-get-fat-with-gary-taubes). Early nutritional guidance endorsed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) included a Farmer’s Bulletin from 1894 by Wilbur Atwater, who advocated eating more protein and vegetables and relying less on carbohydrates. However, it seems that subsequent guidelines placed an emphasis on increasing grain consumption (perhaps because grains were cheap and filling) and decreasing fat consumption (especially saturated fat – despite the fact that we relied on saturated fat from animal meats for hundreds of thousands of years). By the release of the first Food Pyramid in 1992, we were being told to aim for 6-11 servings of cereals and breads a day. Subsequent Food Pyramids, have shifted the emphasis to ‘wholegrains’, which are supposedly needed for fibre. (Hello? Whatever happened to eating a bit of apple-skin or some cabbage – foods which contain a lot of fibre, and a whole range of other nutrients). You can read more about these Food Pyramids here: http://www.livingpaleo.com/the-food-pyramids/.

The reasons behind the emphasis on grains are many and varied. At the turn of the century, our understanding of nutrition was limited – as was our understanding of Darwinian science and how we evolved to eat. The USDA wasn’t being ‘evil’ when it recommended consuming so many grains, it just didn’t know what it was talking about – yet. Couple this with Ancel Keyes’ heavily-biased 7 Country Study, which looked to prove a positive correlation between saturated fat and heart disease, et voila, the modern grain-based diet is served. The USDA has also been criticised for succumbing to lobbying from the heavyweights of agribusiness. Exhibit A: General Mills (hmm, I wonder what they produce?) who generously helped promote the 2005 food pyramid, when it turned out the USDA had not budgeted for advertising of the new pyramid (http://www.alternet.org/environment/21852). Interestingly, this same food pyramid encouraged adults to aim for 8 ounces of grains per day (http://www.everydiet.org/diet/food-pyramid), and yet it failed to point out the well-documented link between a high carbohydrate diet and obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

The problem with grains is that they offer largely empty calories, displacing your consumption of more nutritious foods like meats, fruits and vegetables. If you had a choice of eating a two pieces of toast, or a two slices of salmon, roughly equivalent in size – you’d get far better nutrition from the salmon. And if you’re going to raise the old ‘What about fibre?’ argument, well I’d have to shut your mouth with the apple I mentioned above. The Mayo Clinic advocate eating grains for a healthy heart and decreasing saturated fat consumption ( http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/heart-healthy-diet/NU00196), yet despite following these mandates, our levels of heart disease have increased from being relatively rare in 1900 to being the number one killer in the Western world. Somehow, I don’t think saturated fat is the culprit anymore. (You can read more about society’s scapegoat, saturated fat, and its importance in your diet here: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/diabetes-pyramid/.)

So if you’re going to use common-sense to dictate your diet, I’d point out that you can’t get any more ‘common-sense’ than 150,000 years of evolution. You’ve heard of the oldest profession in the world, well, welcome to the oldest diet in the world: the hunter-gather diet. It’s actually a whole way of life, and one that you might just find easily becomes second-nature. If you’re craving a more detailed examination of the truth about grains, go to: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/01/02/truth-about-eating-grains.aspx.

Oh and as for our earlier argument about the puppy being fed dog biscuits (which are largely grain-based), I highly doubt dogs were out tilling the fields before we ever were. They may be man’s best friend, but I think that dogs’ agricultural skills probably peaked with sheep-herding. Thus, they shouldn’t be eating grains either: it’s common-sense.

I Want to Speak to the Manager

So, I have a bone to pick with a certain species of low-brow advertising that stalks me all over the internet. I’m sure people have noticed in the past year or so (maybe more), internet advertising has become cleverly targeted towards the items or terms for which you search. For example, if I Google “au pair” or “nanny”, then not only do I have au pair advertisements popping up next to my emails, but Lego ads have also wedged their colourful, square foot in the door – perhaps in the hope that I am less ‘Mary Poppins’ and more ‘Sugar Mama’ in my babysitting abilities.

Now when I first noticed these advertisements lurking beside my web pages, I was slightly concerned I’d become an unwitting candidate for The Truman Show. While I may be naturally melodramatic, I’m sure I’m not the only person who wondered who exactly was looking at what we were Googling and then sending targeted advertisements our way. More importantly, could this ‘divine being’ be trusted with the knowledge of what we were Googling? Well, apparently not – whoever or whatever they were, they’re out to make a quick buck , and that is reason enough to be slightly suspicious.

Never one to ‘throw the baby out with the bath-water’, I must admit that some of these advertisements have got me clicking – and I’ve even been grateful that I didn’t need to do any ‘legwork’. But some of them are just plain low-brow drivel, relying on shock-tactics and hyperbole to get our attention, kind of like certain news programs. Basically, they’re designed to appeal to the lowest common-denominator, and they’re downright insulting to our intelligence. So I figured I’d repay these advertisers the favour of tracking me down by re-writing their ads, free of charge. (Advertisers, you’ve been warned: I will soon be targeting your personal inboxes with my copywriting skills – consider it ‘repayment in kind’).

I won’t make a secret of the fact that I love writing and I love spending money – so I’ve considered combining these two love affairs  by doing a bit of copywriting (it’s kind of like the seedy Sex-shop Strip to literature’s High Street). Below is my own wording of an example of the sort of advertisement that has been stalking me ever since the advent of targeted internet advertising. I don’t have enough money (yet) to get sued for slander – or who knows what else – by including a real advertisement, so I’ve had to bimbo myself up to get in the mindset of this advertising. A quick caveat though: I am very interested in all things health-related, which perhaps explains why these sorts of advertisements target me. What they don’t realise though is that I almost died at one point of severe Anorexia, so I don’t appreciate any ads that might encourage me back down that path using scare tactics. Here we go:

Does This Remind You of Anyone?

"Eat your heart out, Ladies. Even my belly can sweet-talk you."

7 Foods that Should Never Pass Your Lips

Lose inches off those love handles by avoiding these 7 common foods – they’re not what you think! Find out what foods make you pack on the pounds and see results in the first week. Get access to my video now and score free tips on 5 exercises that melt belly fat away. Why wait to lose weight? You can be skinny too!

The advertisement that I concocted above is by no means different to other weight loss ads you can find littering any web-based search for health or weight loss advice. (The picture’s caption is written in jest though.) These ads often use lists or amounts (because people like to think things are that ‘neat’), and inevitably you will have to pay money for some nonsense video or web-book about how it is the humble banana that has been ruining your diet dreams. (Yes, dear banana, we are pointing the finger squarely at you for causing the obesity epidemic – now quit being so yellow and explain yourself!) I’m not joking either: according to one of these advertisements, you can lose weight just by cutting out bananas. If that isn’t black magic, I don’t know what is – but bonus points to anyone with a banana allergy – isn’t life for you just peachy?

The fact is, it doesn’t really matter what food is blamed, or what exercise is recommended, these weight loss ads get hits because they scare people: ignorance is like darkness – it’s frightening out there when you don’t know what to expect. So innocent folk go ahead and pay money to stay abreast of the latest health ‘discoveries’. However, these ads are also very misleading because they cause people to ‘blacklist’ foods (just as the Anorexic person does) as if it’s some moral war between ‘good’ foods and ‘evil’ foods. While losing weight and getting healthy can be two very different things, it is not so difficult to achieve both at once. What constitutes ‘being healthy’ is a hotly debated topic, and something we are only just coming to fully understand. When in doubt, I always think the safest foods are those which we evolved to eat – foods which include the humble banana, unsurprisingly. I will explore this topic in more depth in an upcoming blog.

After you’ve seen ads like the one above maybe three or four times, they start to get very ‘old’ and very annoying (which is probably increasing your cortisol levels and causing weight gain – okay, only kidding). It’s like the video-game effect: the same shocks just aren’t doing the trick any more. People stop caring – it’s a common problem that is also faced by ‘blanket advertising’ such as TV ads. So how do you grab people’s attention when they have enough cluttering their minds? Change the game. Below is an example of a weight-loss ad that I might actually click on – not only out of curiousity, but also because the ad is a little more honest:

How about not lying to yourself for once?

You don’t even want to lose weight – if you really wanted to, you would have done it by now. You’re pretty capable of going to the petrol station for chocolate late at night, when you feel the craving. Face it, it’s time to congratulate yourself for all your hard work in putting on weight.

If you don’t like what I’ve said, and wish to complain: click here.

Alternatively, if you agree that you sabotage your own weight-loss efforts for the sake of an easy life, then click here. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve just been misinformed. If you’ve tried losing weight and it hasn’t worked, then quit trying. Do something new: try being healthy. It’s a lot easier than squeezing yourself into that body glove known as ‘skinny leg jeans’.

Of course, both of those ‘click here’ links would lead to the same page. What about you? Is there a style of advertising that has been getting your attention for all the wrong reasons? Maybe you could do a better job. If so, give it a shot, and send it into the company in question – you might just have a new career direction on your hands.

The writing of this blog has probably just exposed me to a lifetime’s worth of targeted weight loss ads, thanks to all the ‘research’ I had to do. But all in the line of fire. Aside from putting me off watching anything ‘BBW’ (Google that and you’re gonna have some interesting targeted ads waiting for you), it was a lot of fun.

What is it about Steve McQueen?

Have you ever been asked that very unimaginative question, ‘So who’s your favourite actor/actress?’ It’s one of those questions that apparently indicates something essential about your character and interests. (I suspect this may be because you can then get an idea of a person’s romantic and sexual tastes – and that has to be the juiciest goss of all: humans are a lot more cunning, and a lot ‘dirtier’, than we give ourselves credit for.) Whenever I get asked that question, invariably my mind empties itself of every actor’s name I ever knew, and I begin to feel like the person who actually really, really likes beige. Well, that was always the case until I rediscovered Steve McQueen.

The Cincinnati Kid. And those blue eyes.

Now, you see, I had once considered myself above all those ‘get-to-know-you’ style questions. How could the answer to one question possibly encompass everything I considered desirable? Surely I was a little more complex than that, and maybe that would explain my mental paralysis when asked the question. Somehow, I’d forgotten those years of watching Steve McQueen films as a child when I went to my dad’s house. My dad is an original Steve McQueen fan – not a ship-jumper like me. You should see his eyes light up when he talks about The Great Escape or Papillon: it is then that I understand why my mother always thought of my dad as an eternal boy. Steve McQueen is the sort of anti-hero a boy from Belfast would look up to. And that car chase in Bullitt – my God, I think I feel a sudden interest in cars coming on, if only to be sitting in the passenger seat of any car McQueen drives – but more on that later. (You can watch the famous car chase from Bullitt here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMc2RdFuOxI.)

It was during some time spent in Vermont on exchange that I realised I did have a favourite actor. When I was feeling most homesick, I’d hire out a copy of The Thomas Crown Affair or Bullitt, and it was sure to cheer me up. I told myself it was because Steve McQueen reminded me of my childhood, in some roundabout way. But the reality was far worse than that. When I returned to Perth, I was in a shop that had posters of movie actors from the past, and there before my eyes was Steve McQueen as The Cincinnati Kid, just as you see him above, during one of the most tense moments in the character’s poker-playing glory days. I’d never been one to put up posters with any sort of human image on my bedroom walls (I’ve nothing against idolatry, it’s just that I don’t care for having a frozen human image watching me undress), but this day I became a turncoat. Steve McQueen soon adorned my wardrobe. Need I say more? I had it bad.

Since that time, I’ve realised I’m not alone in my love for Steve McQueen: men and women alike fall for him, for reasons that are not so different as you might at first think. According to Forbes Magazine, he was in the top 10 highest-earning dead celebrities, as of 2008 (http://mutinyontheark.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php) – and he died over 30 years ago now, at the tender age of 50. But I’ve come to wonder just what exactly is it about Steve McQueen that appeals to both women and men?

I think it has a little to do with the era in which he was popular: during the 1960s and 1970s, when an underdog was just the sort of person a culture in rebellion could look up to. But also, it has a lot to do with the sort of characters he played – men who were ‘real’, who faced up their responsibilities without fear. He also just had that almost indefinable quality of ‘cool’ (hence, his nickname, ‘The King of Cool’). Quite literally, nothing seemed to get him in much of a sweat. In his real life, and his films, he didn’t care for the type of authority that ignored his own intelligence. Before he was ever an actor, he spent time in a reform school for troubled boys, and he later served in the U.S. Marines. Despite being demoted to Private seven times in disciplinary action during his three years in the Marines, he was still considered trustworthy enough to guard the President’s yacht.

Doing his own stunts in The Great Escape

I actually think he was the kind of guy who would have been cool in any era, because he thought for himself,  and he had some inner sense of daring that speaks to our animal side. He was also just a man in the most classic of ways – not, ‘tall, dark, and handsome’ classic, but ‘shut your little mouth, and pour me a drink’ classic. Yeah, I do like a man who talks like that. A lot of men look up to that, and a lot of women just want that. I know I’m not alone – even if what I’m saying goes against what’s politically correct. If natural instincts clash with political correctness, then I’ll choose the more thrilling option any day.

What about you? Do you have a favourite actor/actress? (Damn, I’ve gone and asked that question!) And do you think your answer indicates anything about your personality or, shall we say, ‘preferences’?

The Not-so-Private Eye: A Story of Wanting to be Found

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.” – Martin Buber

Hello readers, new and newer, welcome back to your second helping (ever!) of Mutiny.

I started this blog, in many ways, in order to delve into my experience of returning to the ‘motherland’, only to find it felt a bit like a ‘wicked step-motherland’. A lot of that had to do with my own attitude, and the fact that coming to Belfast meant I was separated from my first true love (oh dear, my life is starting to sound a lot like a B-Grade Disney film!) It was strange to find myself here because for years I longed to return – it was in fact my predominant childhood fantasy, while living in Perth. I would lie on my bed after school, and imagine that moment when you get to the Belfast departure lounge at Heathrow Airport, where that infamous ‘Narn Iron’ accent surrounds you again, and you feel like you could kiss every Irish-looking person in sight. I never really imagined how I would feel after that moment though, when life in Belfast might seem a little less rose-tinted. I could develop a crush pretty quickly on the first guy who looked even half-Irish in Australia, but I failed to consider what normal life might be like in this dreamscape I had created. I had a pretty serious case of nostalgia.

So, when I landed in Belfast, after only booking my flight two days prior, I was a little stunned to be walking through the real place, the object of my unrequited love. I always expected to plan the trip months in advance, and thus to have months to look forward to it. But I guess I didn’t plan on running out of money while travelling through Asia, and then deciding it would be as good a time as any to drop in on Belfast. (Note: In future I will look into the economy before making such a decision).

It didn’t take long for my nostalgia to turn into culture shock. I have been brought up with a love of my Irish culture, largely due to my parents, who were always proud of their home, despite feeling the necessity to leave. In Australia, I am considered ’Irish’ by most people. I remember once walking past Rosy O’Grady’s Irish Pub in Perth to have someone call out at me, ‘Hey, Irish, come over here.’ And when I have ventured inside such a pub, I’ve had old men lining up to tell me I reminded them of their youth. Grand! But I arrived in Belfast to discover my own Granda couldn’t understand my ‘strong Australian accent’: horror of all horrors! Here, I am considered Irish until I open my mouth. I was at first concerned my accent might be mistaken for an English accent (I’m living in a staunchly Republican area, at the moment). Fortunately, the Aussie accent goes down like a Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day here. I may not completely fit in anywhere in the world, but I’ve realised that’s okay – it has its own virtues, and I’m hardly alone in my experience of this these days.

I have by now started to settle in, and a lot of that has been the result of locating family members I never knew I had in the first place. I realised I’d started to settle in when I thought about leaving and felt a pang of sadness. While I now suffer nostalgia for Perth, I also hate to think I might have lived my whole life and never experienced this trip. For a start, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know my Granda, who is an amazing soul: at the age of 79, he has taught himself the flute, he is learning the guitar, he has learnt to cook, he paints in his attic, and he bought a puppy to keep himself company. Most of this took place after his wife, my Granny, developed rapid-onset dementia and needed to be put in a Nursing Home. For years they had been inseparable and kept to themselves, with only each other for company – they didn’t even own a telephone! And while it has been terrible for my Granda to accept that the woman who was his wife is largely gone, he has managed to find a way through. He is also someone with an amazing sense of fun – he even writes his own jokes – which I’m sure has helped him in untold ways. Who said you can’t teach an old dog knew tricks?

Anyway, two nights ago I turned on the television for the first time in a few months, and there was a program starting called ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, in which celebrities are taken on a journey to uncover their ancestry – lucky things! I had been following this program in Perth before I left, and the episode showing a few nights ago was one I hadn’t yet seen. In this episode, Susan Sarandon unravels the mystery of her maternal Grandmother, who was also involved in show business, and who abandoned Sarandon’s mother as a child in order to start a second life.

I became very emotionally involved in Sarandon’s journey, as it was something I too had recently experienced: the quest to find long-lost relatives, and to discover they have parallels with your own life. I have often thought I would like to be a Private Detective (another foolish fantasy I entertain), but it seems like one of those jobs that ‘just happens’ to you, rather than one you can really pursue. Well, having been  in Belfast a few weeks, and having found a few undesirable jobs and turning them down, I decided I could make better use of my free time by tracking down my mother’s Uncle Tom, whom my mother had not heard from since 1992. I remember my mother speaking fondly of him, when I was a child. He was apparently quite a character, with a love for a bit of good Irish ‘merry-making’.

My Granny, Florence, aged 17.

Tom is the youngest brother of my Granny who has dementia, and since they were once very close, my family felt he should know what had happened to his sister. My Granny’s own mother died when my Granny was just 17 -though she was sick for a long time before that – and so my Granny was very involved in raising her two younger brothers. We suspected Tom was living in the Republic of Ireland these days, but we weren’t too sure. My mother emailed me everything she knew about Tom, including the details of his ex-wife’s family, who were possibly still in Belfast. Thank God my mother has such an amazing memory! It looked like a job that would require a lot of leg-work, door-knocking in the areas where Tom and his family used to live. He and his ex-wife had seven children, so there was a chance their children would still be in Belfast. My mother thought that if I tracked down Tom’s ex-wife, Ena, I would find their children, and then I’d find Tom.

So I went about locating Ena. Thankfully, Google made it easy for me. I noticed her name coming up linked to a political group here, and knowing from stories that Ena had been politically active when she was younger, I thought there couldn’t be two such similar people in the same area. I emailed the head of the local Councillor for the political party in question, though I suspected he might not have the time to get back to me – and I also thought he might be suspicious of why I wanted to contact Ena. Well, I was happily surprised when he replied to my email within an hour, telling me he would pass my contact details onto Ena, as he too thought she was the very person I was looking for. I went home pretty pleased with myself for trusting my instincts in his instance, and telling myself I was clearly meant to be a Private Eye.

That night, as I sat down to dinner, I had a phone-call on my mobile – one of the first I’d ever had in Belfast, since I had a new phone-number and I knew practically no-one here. I answered, but the caller only listened for a few seconds and then hung up. I had a very strong feeling it was Ena, perhaps checking I was ‘legitimate’ in some way. Less than a minute later, Ena called, and was so friendly and wonderfully helpful, I immediately felt like I was being welcomed into her side of the family. She gave me the number of one of her daughters, who then gave me my great Uncle Tom’s number. By this point, it was late in the evening, so I had to wait until the following day to make the phone-call Tom.

It was a bittersweet moment, to finally speak to Tom, because I had sad news to pass on. I couldn’t believe how quickly it all came together, finding him so easily after a few ‘lucky breaks’. The grandest part of all has been that Tom’s children, my second cousins, have welcomed me with open arms. Tom’s daughter Ciara has already treated me to a night out in the style to which I am accustomed, and we get along so well that we could only be family. I even look like them, which has been a bit eerie for me: apparently I take after my Granny’s side of the family. At last I feel at home here. When I started out on the quest to locate Tom, I couldn’t have imagined how much happiness it would bring me. You only regret what you don’t do, as the saying goes – and you might never know just how much you’ll regret it.

Tom has been to see his sister in the past two weeks, which was obviously an upsetting experience, but I would hate to think he might not have had the option of seeing her and speaking to her. When Tom was a child, my Grandmother liked to call him, ‘the wanderer’, due to his penchant for adventuring off on his own. Though her mind is pretty far gone as a result of the dementia, he held her hand the day he went to see her and she managed to call him by that name again: ‘the wanderer’. Most of the time she struggles to find any words, but obviously the bond between brother and sister is a powerful force. My Granny is still somewhere in there, and I think she knows what she wants to say, but she just can’t find the words. Sometimes a little says a lot more, anyway.

Below is a photo of my Granny as a teenager, with Tom on the left, and her other brother Roy on the right.

Three siblings: Tom, Florence, and Roy.

“There are only two ways to live your life: one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is.” – Albert Einstein.

You’ve reached the Mutiny on the Ark, a blog for anyone who wants to escape the ‘zoo’ of modern life and release the animal within.

I have often felt in my life that I couldn’t make myself do the things that most ‘normal’ people manage to do every day: I couldn’t keep a 9-5 job for long, I didn’t want to save up to buy a house, and I didn’t want to live my life waiting for the next holiday or long weekend. For a long time, I felt that this was a fatal flaw in my nature, that I would never achieve much (in conventional terms), and that I would probably end up living on the streets one day. Despite my fear of what might become of me, I really didn’t care enough to change – it didn’t seem worth it to live an unhappy or boring life, if only to have material success. I guess I always valued my time most, even if that meant I couldn’t buy all the pretty objects that caught the attention of my vanity.

However, I have now come to realise it’s okay if I can’t make myself do those things that many ‘normal’ people do: maybe humans weren’t meant to live like that anyway – maybe that’s why it’s so difficult to maintain such a life. So I’ve decided to stop trying to fit in, and to seek my own fortune. There is poetry to life, if only you have the time to read it. I’m being a bit gentler on myself and living in the way that feels most natural, doing whatever I naturally enjoy. This blog will function as a record of my experiences and thoughts in doing so, a sort of Captain’s log of a mind at mutiny.

If you would like to become a creature of instinct, not habit, then join the Mutiny and read on!