The biggest trend in weight loss is one we can all get behind. It’s a movement away from counting calories and toward incorporating more whole foods-veggies, fruit and healthy fats into our diet. By enjoying these foods more we can balance our hunger hormones and keep our metabolism strong.
The golden rule to weight loss is not doing meal math, it is eating high-quality foods. The quality of calories is what matters most for staying healthy, losing weight and maintaining results. When you are eating the right quality and balance of foods, your body can do the rest on its own. You don’t have to count calories or go by numbers.
The problem with foods making people fat is not that they’re having too many calories. It’s that they cause a cascade of reactions in the body that promote fat storage and are making people over eat. Processed foods like chips, crackers, soda and white rice digest quickly into sugar and increase levels of the hormone insulin. Your cells are then directed to snap up calories in the blood and store them as fat, leaving your body feeling hungry in a hurry. Which is why it’s so easy to devour a bag of chips and still feel hungry afterwards.
Repeating the cycle too many times can cause your metabolism to start working against you. When we try to reduce the calorie balance, our bodies fight back. Metabolism slows in order to keep calories around longer, and you begin to feel hungrier. This combination of rising hunger and slowing metabolism is a battle that we are destined to lose over the long term.
The best way to break this fattening cycle is to replace processed carbs with healthy fats. Fats do not raise insulin, they can be key to weight loss. The idea, of course contradicts decades of dietary advice. We have all been warned about the dangers of fat since the nutrients contain more than twice as many calories as carbs and and proteins. By the math alone, replacing fat with carbs seems like a good idea, but it is not. Studies have shown that people on a low fat diet tend to lose less weight than people on a low carbohydrate diet.
In another twist, eating healthy fats- the types that actually support the heart, like the omega-3’s in tuna and the monounsaturated fat in olive oil- does not seem to cause weight gain.
Real, natural foods with fiber protein and fat are so satisfying, you’ll naturally eat less of them, the new thinking goes. If the meal contains all three then the food will move more slowly through the G.I. tract. When food takes its time passing through the body, you feel fuller longer.
Instead of choosing a meal based on calories, my advice is picking foods from all three categories, one high in fiber, like a vegetable or whole-grain, a protein source, think chicken or salmon, and a healthy fat like salad with olive oil and chopped avocado.