Your best strategy to lose weight and gain health is to eat clean, which means eating primarily plant-based whole foods in their most natural and unrefined form. Eat animal foods in moderation and avoid processed and highly refined foods. It’s really that simple. And you don’t need a calorie counter.
Weight loss, not baseball, should be America’s national pastime. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, as a quick trip to the mall, or a drive down any street will tell you. Americans just keep getting fatter and fatter on average. On TV and in the movies, of course, this isn’t the case – TV and movie stars are much thinner and fitter than the average American. Even the people in the ads for fast food and soda pop are skinny! Next time you stop for a hamburger at one of the national fast food chains, look around you and see how many of your fellow customers resemble the people in the ads for the chain. It won’t be very many. America is rapidly becoming the Land of the Couch Potato and the Home of the Morbidly Obese. Of course, millions of Americans are going to “do something” about being overweight. And what does “do something” mean for many of them? Making a New Year’s resolution to lose weight.
Every January 1st, there is a huge spike in interest in losing weight. The sales of weight loss products and fitness equipment goes up. Gyms and health clubs sell more memberships. People do more searches for “lose weight” and “weight loss” in the first couple weeks of January than any other time of the year. Books about losing weight are brisk sellers both online and in brick and mortar book stores. If January 1st, 2011, would be the first time this phenomenon occurred, it would be cause for hope, signifying that people are fed up with being fat, and are finally going to do something about it. Of course, that’s not the case at all. This has been happening for decades, and Americans just keep getting fatter and fatter.
So what’s the answer?
Your ultimate dietary goal should be to get the most nutritional bang for your food buck at every meal. This means you need to stop making food the enemy. Stop looking for ways to trick yourself into eating as few calories as possible and instead intentionally look for ways to increase your nutritional quotient for the day at every meal and every snack. Don’t count your food calories; make them count nutritionally!
All Calories are Not Created Equal
It is true that when calories are burned in a laboratory, they are all “equal” from the standpoint of releasing energy. In a laboratory, it doesn’t matter whether the 150 calories come from the “liquid candy” soda or from nutrient-dense nuts. However, the chemical processes that break down and metabolize food inside our body do not react to all calories equally. The foods you eat have varying amounts of substances (sugars, fiber, fats, etc.) that affect how quickly they are metabolized and what hormones they “turn on” or “turn off” once eaten. For example, sugary foods (like cake), refined carbohydrates, saturated-fat-rich animal foods, and foods that contain trans fats all “turn on” pro-inflammatory hormones in your body that ultimately slow your metabolism and thwart fat-burning.
Other foods that contain essential fats, antioxidants and phytochemicals (plant-based substances) actually “turn on” anti-inflammatory hormones that speed your metabolism and facilitate weight loss. In the process of trying to digest highly refined carbohydrates (white rice and foods made with sugar and refined flour), your body produces insulin, a fat-storing hormone that also makes you hungry. On the other hand, fiber-rich foods actually “lose” calories during the digestion process, which means you don’t fully absorb all of the calories in fiber-rich foods such as nuts, whole grains, beans, fruits, and vegetables.
The point is, you simply can not rely on counting calories as an accurate way of controlling your weight (and certainly you can’t rely on calorie counting to ensure optimal health!) All calories are not created equal; they are not created equal from a weight-management standpoint or from a health standpoint. Whether or not they have the same number of calories, a serving of cake and a serving of nuts are simply not nutritional equals.
