The challenges surrounding obesity – on BBC Breakfast News

It was great to be invited onto BBC Breakfast last week to talk about the obesity crisis with two of our students.

Kirsty is new to Bags of Taste, and she talked about how hard it is to lose to weight when the environment around her is filled with cheap deals in supermarkets, and how mobile phone apps make ordering takeaway a piece of cake.

An integral part of our courses is to get people to reconsider the convenience of fast food that surrounds us.

We provide all the ingredients to complete the three recipes on the course for free, so there are no barriers to getting started.  The ingredients themselves are also easy to find, so that students can continue cooking once the course is finished.

Kirsty also brings up how takeaways taste good because of the all the fat, salt, and sugar they contain.

Because of this, we design our recipes with taste and style in mind.

Many of our recipes and dishes will be familiar to fast food eaters, so that home cooking can more easily replace takeaways in people’s diets.

We offer dishes like curries and Chinese, in vegetarian and meat variations, cooked in many different ways, but with much lower salt and fat content (and little to no sugar content).

The range of recipes helps to stop our students from reverting to old habits of just ordering a takeaway, and encourages them to develop new habits to try new recipes and flavours.

Click here to watch the video

Also appearing on the show was Lorraine, who talked about the social stigma around being overweight, and how that can damage a person’s confidence and motivation to change their eating habits.

We understand that low self-confidence is a major factor that holds people back from doing their own cooking.

So we developed our courses specifically to overcome the confidence barrier, to break old habits more easily, lose weight and keep healthy.

Our recipes are simple to make, in addition to having easy to find ingredients, and we teach basic cooking skills for the long run, making future recipes and dishes easier and quicker.

Students gain confidence in the kitchen to grow and experiment with new recipes.

The government obesity initiative is a step in the right direction to helping people make good eating choices, and banning junk food advertising on television is a good start.

But when the whole environment we live in is geared towards encouraging bad eating choices, there is a lot more that needs to be done to fight the growing obesity crisis.