Solveig Sigurdardottir, Iceland
Transcript
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I’m Solveig and I come from Iceland and I represent the Icelandic part of the patient council and I would like to talk about clean eating that has really helped me through my procession of losing weight. I started over three years ago by changing my eating habits into clean eating and sort of making all my food from the scratch. So in the beginning I had to be a lot in the kitchen and today it’s much better because I started to learn the easier version of making the clean food.
And I also started, I signed up on the health gym and through these three years I have lost over 50 kilos by changing my eating habits into clean eating and exercising and training. I go five times a week, one hour each time and I do all kinds of weight lifting, aerobic, Tabata, running, walking, but in the beginning I couldn’t do none of it. The only thing I could do was coming to the class and looking at other people’s doing their bit.
But slowly, slowly it took me about one month to get into the sessions. I could go on the floor and go up again and started to lift a little weight and today I do weight training. I love weight training.
And the kilos, they sort of went off in the beginning quite quickly, easily, because I had my mind still on dieting. So I was hungry and I was a little bit miserable. So through the years I have sort of noticed that dieting and putting yourself on diet and strictly banning yourself from eating something, it doesn’t work for me.
So I really had to change my eating habits and my lifestyle habits. And the benefits of the clean eating ones and making all my food from the scratch, stop always fast foods and getting my eating habits all together, eating breakfast, eating lunch, snack in between. And also I changed the eating habits of my family, because I’m the mom, I’m the one who’s cooking and I’m the one who’s making the food, I’m the one who’s feeding my children.
And I have two children and I have one son and one daughter. And my son was quite overweight in the beginning and he had epileptics as well, so he had seizures. And now for two years, for three years actually, since we changed all the food habits at home, he doesn’t get seizures anymore.
He lost a lot of weight and he’s a really healthy little boy now, going, tending basketballs four times a week. And it’s really, really this clean eating, sort of homemade cooking is getting him into a good shape of a little child. My daughter, she has always been healthy and she’s been eating sort of semi-healthy foods all her life.
And so it was not so much change for her, but she’s proud of mommy and proud of the brother. My husband, what can I say? He eats my food, but he really likes it. But he’s not so 100% in it, but he really likes it.
And what I’m most proud of is that by changing my thoughts of how to cook and how to eat clean and how to present it to my family and see my family’s benefit getting better. This is what I’m really the most proud of. Today, I’m helping others, people getting into clean eating and cooking.
And we have, I’m working with a doctor in Iceland, her name is Erla, and she’s the one who helped me in the beginning. And today we work together on helping people to help them to not only lose weight, but to get new thinking of lifestyle, to change the food habits and the life sort of seeing by stop dieting and stop banning and stop this yo-yoing thing. So that’s what I’m really most proud of, is the clean eating and making all the food from the scratch.
I have MS disease as well, and I had to take a lot of medicines. I had to be on quite a lot of medicine in the beginning. And I took sleeping medicine at night to sleep.
I took painkillers through the day, and I had to take some pills to stay awake because my MS tiredness was really slowing me down. Today I don’t take any drugs, not even a painkiller. I don’t take my MS drugs anymore, I don’t take sleeping pills, nothing.
And I believe, what I believe is that the food, the food is my healer today.