I have this thing with my body, where if I'm lacking Vitamin C, I get a craving for oranges. Or if I'm lacking potassium, I chug on coconut water. Iodine or other trace minerals? Extra Himalayan Pink salt or unrefined salt...

So my body and I have over the years learned to communicate. We understand each other. My body tells me what it needs or what it lacks odd times, and I supply it with the nutrients I have neglected or with those it is running low on.

I read a fascinating thing a few years back, which totally changed the way I looked at food, and the way I looked at what others ate:

"Most obese people are starving."

This statement floored me. I mean obese people eat a lot. That's why they're obese right? All that food! Mountains of food, if one were to gather a year's worth and place it on the floor in piles...

I wanted to understand this. I am never 'hungry' see, everyone wonders why I never feel 'hunger pangs' or 'stomach rumblings'... I wanted to grasp why the rest felt these and I was this freak, who apart from the odd specific craving, never experienced this overwhelming need for 'food'.

So I delved deeper, so deep my head was spinning by the end of it. I gathered enough information to speak (and I often do) as an 'expert'.

Somewhere in all that research, I got the light bulb moment. The moment when everything falls into place and you sit back and this "uh-huh!" thing happens in your brain? 

Those obese people were starving because despite all the gorging, there were no nutrients being supplied to the body see?

So the cycle goes like this:

Body is lacking nutrients. "Hey, I am lacking vital nutrients here, help me out!" Brain sends out distress signal: hunger pangs.

Person then goes and gets the quickest and easiest thing to alleviate this uncomfortable hunger signal; usually some fast food. A double cheeseburger and fries?

Body then says to brain, "Yeah, that was tasty and all, but there were no nutrients in it you moron! I need nutrients!" So brain sends another hunger signal, more insistent this time.

The person feels this hunger an hour or two later and again, immediacy is important, so the person reaches for the nearest thing at hand: Some cookies from the pantry or a tub of ice-cream or some cake...

Body of course is panicking at this point: "Listen you dumb shit, much as I'm enjoying these things, I need nutrients - you know - stuff I can actually use?"

So even more intense hunger signals are sent out by the brain. Immediately satisfied short term... but the cycle continues, as the brain is hearing the body's struggle to maintain balance and health and keeps responding in this futile attempt to get the right food ingested.

I figured out why I was never hungry see? I wasn't a freak! I wasn't obese either because I was supplying my body with the right amount of 'nutrients' it needed - except during times of stress or over-work, when these supplies were used quicker than was anticipated.

So it finally made sense to me, why people were obese and how they got there and why they were indeed starving, despite the mountains of food consumed.

Dylan put on two kilos during our short stay in Cairns. The boys lived on fast food their entire time there, because we were guests in a household which largely subsisted on fast food. Fish and chips one night, pizza the next, McDonalds for lunch and KFC for dinner... Soft drinks in the fridge, an assortment of biscuits and brightly packaged 'Chips' and 'Cheesles' and other 'tasty' stuff in the pantry, as well as colourful breakfast 'cereals'...

Shortly after we returned, he said, "Mum, come see this!" He was in the bathroom, top off, pinching the skin on his stomach. There was some fat in that fold of skin! It was the first time he had noticed, and trust me, he notices things.

"That's all the crap food, right?"

"Uh huh."

"I get it."

Now those of you who have read my Memoir know about the crazy period in my life where I inspected everything, and systematically removed anything with even the slightest hint of 'artificiality' or chemical enhancement, or 'fast' and 'convenient' in the description. I tossed out the microwave and the Teflon sandwich-maker.

So the boys hadn't eaten this kind of food in many, many years save for the weekly pizzas - but even these are from our local place, where we know the owners and they make everything from scratch, including the bases and the tomato sauce. The ham is free-range (Marcus) and Dylan just has cheese on his, with some spinach garlic and basil. 

Everything at home is cooked fresh and with the majority of ingredients home-grown during the warmer months or organic. Their snacks consist of organic air-popped popcorn, nuts and seeds, organic 'chips' made from a variety of things 'non-potato' like lentils and corn and flavoured with spices such as chilli or sea-salt. They have seasonal fruit. They will indulge from time to time in treats from the 'Health Food shop' such as 'dark' chocolate, 'raw' cakes and slices, and yeah, 'cookies'. Only these cookies have three or four ingredients at best.

So you could say that those few days were an 'indulgence' on my part, a letting them be like 'normal kids' who don't have this mother... you know, harping on about the importance of a healthy diet? Plus as always with me, there was a 'life lesson' lurking in there...

When Dylan said "I get it," I understood that something in all the lessons I'd thrown at them over the years had sunk in. The connection had been made in his brain. They had been constantly hungry up there too, something they rarely experience at home. This all fell into place for him.

Thing is though, almost a month later, those two kilos are still hanging around. He weighs himself weekly, putting a five cent coin into the big 'old- fashioned' machine at the Chemist, where we pick up dad's meds. We don't have scales at home because we don't really need them?

"Easier to put on than to lose hun," I said when he again asked me why his weight had not dropped back to the stable range he's been at for almost a year now.

So he's been walking more. It has become a 'thing' with him, to drop those two kilos. Not because of image or the idea that he is 'fatter' than he should be - he is right in the middle of the ideal weight for his height and age. It's him trying to rid his body of those foods, see. Those 'foods' put the fat there and he wants them gone, it's like he polluted his body and now wants the pollution out?

Now here's where my indulgence could have gone horribly wrong: If upon our return, I had allowed this indulgence to continue. If I had stopped at Macca's on the way home from the airport, or after several long days spent at funerals and shopping sprees and so on. If I had given in to the ease and the convenience and the simplicity of it all, the way it had been up North... and continued the pattern?

And I think this is where most people DO go horribly wrong. If Dylan's two kilos gained in just a few days stubbornly remain despite changing his diet back, what if those kilos became five, then ten in mere months? His stomach would enlarge to accommodate the extra intake, his body would go into starvation mode, his brain would keep sending desperate 'hunger' signals... and yeah, in a year or so, Dylan would be struggling. In a couple more years, he would be severely overweight, and in a few more, dangerously obese. My beautiful boy would disappear in a mound of fat, his quirky personality engulfed by depression and embarrassment, his long and bright future full of so much promise shortened to a mere decade, if not less...

It's that easy, the getting from normal to obese. Too easy these days... because 'convenience' has become a way of life, and 'fast' is an expectation... Those large warehouses we call supermarkets have very little food in them but they sure contain a lot of fast and convenient 'food options', and mothers reach for those first because they are overworked and overtired and there's that thing called 'rest' before they have to get up and do it all again?

And choice! They are spoilt for choice really, they have so many options available... hard to resist trying each new mouth-watering offering despite the fact it is mostly a chemical concoction with a bunch of artificial colours and flavours and yeah, zero nutritional value. But it sure tastes fine - it's all about the taste after all!

And it's so cheap! Go to McDonald's and you can feed the family for less than it would cost to cook a meal from scratch right? (That's what my friend up North pointed out.) Factor in the fresh ingredients needed, the time to prepare then cook, the cleaning afterwards... Four triple cheeseburgers and fries, a milkshake for each, four large cups of Coke to wash it all down with... then just throw the empty greasy containers out when you're done. Tada!

Here in Australia we maintain some of the highest food standards in the world. Any packaged, and all fast foods must display the list of ingredients including all artificial 'numbers' as well as nutritional information. And according to McDonald's own Australian website, "You are what you eat, and you have a right to know what's in your food."

So here's what my boys ate each of the three times they visited McDonald's up North:

One triple cheeseburger: 33.5 grams of fat including 18 grams of saturated fat, 28 grams of carbohydrate and 1330 mgs of salt. (Total 'energy' 2350kj/561cal)

Large Fries: 24.3 grams of fat and 50.8 grams of carbohydrate and 435 mgs of salt. (Total 'energy': 1900kj/453 cal)

Large 'Coke': 55.1 grams of sugar (Total 'energy' 938kj/224 cal.

Large chocolate thick shake: 12.4 grams of fat, 67.8 grams of sugar, 61.8 grams of carbohydrate, 411 mgs of salt. Total 'energy' 2110kj/503cal.

So let's just add all this up shall we?

Fat                              70.2 grams

Sugar                         122.9 grams

Salt                             2.176 mgs

Carbohydrate              140.6grams

'Energy'                       7298 kj/1761 calories

Now here are the average approved daily intakes for an adult: (and these were teenagers)

Fat                              70 grams

Sugar                          90 grams

Salt                             2.3 grams

Carbohydrate              310 grams

Energy                        8700 kj/2079 calories

So in just that one meal, they'd pretty much 'done' their daily intakes. Then of course we'd need to multiply this by the three separate times they ate it, then we'd have to add breakfasts and lunches or dinners depending on when these meals were eaten and the various 'snacks' and 'drinks' consumed in-between meals.

Certainly, the energy expended during this trip was far greater than at home. They swam, they snorkelled, they walked, they hiked. Back at home they do some walking but little else apart from the sometime bursts of activity we enjoy as a family.

Dylan had always insisted that to keep a healthy weight one just had to eat less food. He watched our family gatherings see, and the rest all heaped up plates with mounds of food. The rest are all in various stages of 'overweightness', some bordering on the very heavy side. So he was seeing them put away large amounts of food and equated the portion sizes with their respective weights.

His thinking has shifted drastically due to those stubborn two kilos. He now understands it's not only quantity but also quality which plays a part in this obesity cycle.

He has made a friend at Uni, a Chinese fellow who is severely overweight. It puzzled him the first few days because he couldn't figure out why this guy, who is several years older, (and knowing the traditional Chinese diet) carried so much weight. Over a few weeks and spending time at a couple of dinners out and some days studying at his place, he understood. His friend and this friend's sister were living on their own, and had adopted the 'Western diet'. The pantry and fridge were full of soft drinks, energy drinks and quick meals and snacks.

He tried to explain to his friend, this relationship between 'empty' calories and hunger, that what he thought of as 'food' - whilst appreciated by his body for the flavour - was doing nothing in terms of providing the nutrients vital for his body's maintenance.

Maybe over time the message will sink in: It's not how much one eats, it is what one eats. And exercise won't cut it, fad diets won't work. The vast warehouses do not sell food; they sell 'taste' and convenience. Microwaves do not cut heating/cooking times, they irradiate food, killing off most nutritional value and leaving a heated 'shell' behind. Every time we have to have an x-ray, we see the danger signs everywhere, the way lead 'aprons' are worn by staff and how much in a rush everyone else is to get out of the room. Yet we stick our food in those microwaves and nuke the shit out of it and then call it a meal. Huh.

Sure I am preaching. You need to understand this one simple fact: Like McDonalds proudly states, "You are what you eat." They tell you this to your face! They warn you! Yet every time we pass a 'Macca's' it is full. The drive through has a long line of 4WDs driven by busy mums with children in the back, tradies in Utes and office-workers on a break.

An hour or two later ALL these people will be hungry again. The sugar spike will wane; they will feel both shitty and hungry. Back at home or at work they'll hit the pantry or the vending machine for another quick fix. And on it goes, this plea by the body, assumed satisfied but never really satisfied.

People scoff when they hear we eat 'organic'... like we're some weird fools buying into a conspiracy? They wonder why we don't eat seasonal foods 'out of season'. I explain how these seasonal foods - let's take a tomato - are picked green and unripened during the growing months and then stored in large coolrooms and brought out batch by batch over time - after first being artificially 'ripened'... so they are essentially eating this hard, unripened thing which has been irradiated to kill off pests and then magically turned red, so it resembles something just picked off the vine?

A real tomato ripened on the vine is soft and juicy and flavoursome and the smell! You can pick one off and eat it like a fruit (which it is) and you certainly couldn't do the same with a supermarket one - oh no, you need to dress it with 'salad dressing' to make it palatable since it has little flavour or smell and cut it into thin slices or small chunks to make it easier to chew... Nor much juice there, ever notice that? Of course you haven't because most of you have never tasted a 'real' tomato'.

We don't mind the scoffing and the ridiculing. I call the extra cost an 'investment' see? And like any 'investment' this regular investing needs time to grow and mature to return rewards... These rewards are longer healthier lives, without clogged arteries and high cholesterol and diabetes and everything else inflicting those around us...  

So those of you struggling with weight, those wondering why since you don't eat "all that much" (something I hear a lot) are still piling on kilos... look at what you are eating, not the portion sizes! Figure out what your body needs in terms of nutrients and feed it those nutrients. That's all you need to do, the body will do the rest. Learn your bodies and learn those signals between your bodies and your brains. Don't nuke 'ready to eat natural foods' in microwaves. You may as well eat nothing for there are few nutrients left. Eat seasonally and if you can, try growing your own salads and vegies...

Mothers, reject the easy and the quick and the convenient proffered to you in those large and enticing food warehouses; brightly packaged by 'marketing gurus' and largely formulated by men in white lab coats on assembly lines... Eat real food - yeah, it's been labelled 'organic' now so you have to pay more for the privilege... but this food was what your parents/grandparents ate, this was real food before real food became an industry...

Go back to the turn of last century and see the rates of obesity and see what people died from? Cancer, heart disease and diabetes were 'rare'. Now they are the three biggest killers and obesity plays the largest role in all three. Make the connection; get to that light bulb moment! Invest in your childrens' futures...