Monday, 20 July 2009
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The Ideology Behind Healthy Foods Helping You to Lose Weight
A common reaction/question that I get when people find out that I am a nutrition major is: "Oh! So you can help me lose weight then! Tell me... What should I eat?"
Nutrition is not as easy as "If I avoid this, and just eat this, then I'm fine." I could tell you to just eat boiled cabbage, and you'd probably lose weight and fart a lot, but you'd also get really sick of eating just one thing all the time and probably hate me for giving you such crappy advice. Healthy living is about finding balance and listening to your body's needs.
Some people have the idea that "eating [insert random food here] will help me lose weight". I've heard some really dumb stuff over the years... (Like the boiled cabbage example above) But essentially everything has calories. Even a cabbage-only diet could make you gain weight too. It's just unlikely that you could eat enough of it to gain weight (without exploding first). Even if you eat only "healthy foods", you can still gain weight if you eat too much. In the end, if you consume more calories than you burn, you will gain weight.
I like to simplify weight loss and the body's metabolism into a simple equation of:
Calories IN = Calories OUT
This equation is not perfect of course as physiology and biochemistry are complicated subjects. These courses truly fried my brain in school!The ideology behind healthy foods helping you to lose weight is that most healthy foods (eg. whole-grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes) are high in fiber and maybe lower on the glycemic index scale. Whole grain bread and white bread have around the same amount of calories. However, the fiber in whole grain bread is supposed to make you feel fuller for a longer period of time and your blood-sugar levels will not crash and fall as quickly as with white bread. Low-blood sugar causes people to have cravings and reach for high-sugar & high-fat foods.
Personally though, there are some days that I can eat A LOT and it seems like I can never get full, even if I'm only eating healthy high-fiber foods. Therefore, I can still gain weight -- even if it's just fruits and veggies. There are still great health benefits to these foods though, like antioxidants or lowering your cholesterol. Just keep in mind that too much of anything is not necessarily good!
When it comes to losing weight, I don't think the problem is so much of what you should be eating. I think the problem is more of how much you are eating. Weight loss requires a conscious effort to eat less than you normally do -- but still eat enough so that you are fueling your body for exercise and normal daily functions. I want to do a post on healthy portion sizing, but I am still considering how to communicate portion-control in an easy manner. I'm considering to make a video to show you guys some food models that dietitians use to communicate portion-sizing and do 24-hour diet recalls. I'm not the most tech-saavy person though, so I need to learn some video-editing if I want to do this. I usually leave my computer problems to my brother and guyfriends!
The answer to "What should I eat?" ------> Eat Kachino
(lol okay bad joke! Cannibalism is not cool!)
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Comments (19)
Great entry!
I agree with you about the cannibalism thing. <3
Enjoyed reading this, thanx for posting=)xoxoxo
LOL >>> "you'd probably lose weight and fart a lot."
Great post, thanks!
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this is good advice , thanks ;D !
Yup, you pretty much nailed it. Portions are such a big factor.
Hello! Thanks for your comment,
I like the 3rd one the best I think. l'll see when I try them on.. Yes I compete, I love swimming!!
And i dont know! I'm really sort of freaking out right now about a lot of things.. including my body and how it will look when swim practice starts . But I know it will all be fine because I'm quite skinny I just have to calm DOWN.
That is really really cool that you are majoring in nutrition, I think I want to do that.. or nursing. What are you studying to become? Like a nutritionist?
i always hv problems w/ portion control.cant wait for the video :D
It's a difficult question to answer, and one can write a thesis on the topic. it's a multi-billion industry dealing with this question.
The complexity of the human body is a major factor because everyone is build differently. Just look at all the different body shapes at the gym.
My rule of thumb is to avoid high fat, high sugar content food and eat in moderation. Anything fried is a no-no, and sweet stuff, esp. processed ones. Having a sweet tooth makes it that much more difficult.
i'm also a nutrition major, and people always ask me the same thing!
I think you really nailed the answer in this blog!! :D
That was a great post except the lame joke at the end. What did I do to you to deserve that?
Heyy I just wanna sayy I love your blog. I'm an undergrad student interested in studying nutrition so keep it uppp !
Hi there. This is an interesting blog you have here. It's nice to see accurate information about food and nutrition, as there's SO much BS and so many misconceptions on the topic! Here's some food for thought, if you haven't already addressed the topic: What's your take on the demonization of HFCS and fructose in general?
Seems pretty absurd to me considering that fructose is a low GI sugar found in fruits and that the composition of HFCS is almost identical to honey, which is always praised as a "healthy" source of sugar. I agree that the high availability of HFCS may "contribute" to the obesity epidemic in this country, but only because it's so prevalent, not because it's inherently bad. If HFCS were to be completely banned and replaced with sucrose or something like honey, I believe nothing would change about America's infatuation with gorging.
Anyway, just want to say hello and nice blog!
@GrowingGrass - haha I agree with you on your ideas about North America's gorging habits. For sure a high availability of anything would cause the obesity epidemic with such habits of eating large portions.
You'll have to forgive me because I actually have never learned anything yet about HFCS. I quickly wikipedia'd it and skimmed over some of the information. Here is my take on it... Dietitians and health professionals still highly recommend fruits and vegetables til no end. Canada's food guide was recently revised in 2007. The biggest change was that you know how the grain group is usually the largest part of any food guide or food pyramid? The new Canadian food guide switched it around so that the fruits/vegetables group is the largest group. So many cross-sectional studies indicated that people in N. America are not getting enough fruits and vegs, so I think Canadian health professionals are trying to change this habit by emphasizing the diet to be based on this food group.
Fruits are high in sugars -- but they also have tons of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fiber. They're high in water-content, making them way lower in calories than cookies/chips.
Soft drink intakes have increased dramatically over the past few decades. You're right, even if they used honey/table sugar/other sweetners instead of HFCS, there would still be calories in these drinks that are so highly consumed. = obesity epidemic!!
Anyway, I can tell that you know quite a bit about nutrition. I have a feeling you are going to be the one with the challenging questions for me =P I was telling my friend the other day that I'm waiting for the day when somebody asks me the question that makes me go "daaaamn. errrrr......"
haha, I'm still learning every day. I sometimes have to research a lot before I can answer some people's questions. Thanks for helping me to broaden my mind!
Lap bands and stomach reduction are artificial ways to lose weight. The next frongtier is to see if we can reproduce the results of a starvation diet for humans. So far only lab animals have been proven to live longer via starvation diet.
I've read a few of your blog entries now, and while I don't generally leave comments, I wanted to take a moment to commend you - your writing on health & nutrition strikes me as exceptionally sensible and compassionate.
I do also have a question. Do you think, with all other factors being equal, there's a definite health benefit to being thin (or, let's say, "average" weight) as supposed to being overweight? For example, I'm 5 ft, 100 pounds. I exercise and keep a reasonably healthy diet. If I were 30 pounds heavier but still exercised and ate good food (just more of it), would that extra weight be a significant detriment to my health? Or is it mostly an aesthetic concern?
Thanks, and again, really enjoying your blog.
MS Paint is surprisingly useful for driving a point home... lol
@ronaldfirbank - Thanks for the feedback! You've made my day =D I wasn't always a sensible person. I hope that as I grow older, I become more mature and learn to balance nutrition/fitness, friends/family, and work/school. It's definitely hard to balance all these aspects of life!
In response to your question... Here's my take on it. "Weight" and BMI should not be the sole determining factors of your health. Weight and BMI don't take body composition into account. It's more difficult/expensive to measure your body fat and the more mainstream ways of measuring it are not the most accurate. I recently was at a tradeshow in Toronto where I was using a BIA scale to measure people's body fat. It's this device that sends an electrical current through your body and determines how much fat there is in comparison to muscle. When we weren't busy, I asked another volunteer to measure me. This was a time right after my exams and a busy semester so I hadn't been exercising much unless you count waitressing as an exercise haha. But I was really surprised to find out how high my body fat was. It was over 30%, which put me in this intermediate risk range for cardiovascular diseases. My BMI is in the healthy range, but as you can see, BMI doesn't take everything into account.
Where your fat is kept also takes a factor into your health. If you were 130lbs instead of 100lbs... but you kept ALL of that extra 30lbs around your stomach area, then this is the worst for your health. However, if you were active and those extra 30 lbs were spread out more around your body, perhaps a majority of it is lean muscle mass, and you kept your waist circumference low, you can still be just as healthy.
Your weight inevitably will increase as you age. Just a fact of life as metabolism will slow with age. It is possible however for "fat" people to be very fit. I've seen people with overweight BMIs... but they are fitness instructors. They exercise for hours per day, love it, and feel great.
Skinny and fat don't always determine your health. It's more about how healthy your heart is. My ex-boyfriend's grandfather recently had a stroke. He was always on the slim side, but age and diet composition take large effects on health as well.
In the end, there are some people who eat very heathily, exercise, maintain their weight, but they may get a heart attack when they are older. Then there are those that smoke packs a day, never exercise, and then they don't get a heart attack as soon as others.
Genetics play a large role in health. Exercise/diet can't 100% prevent chronic diseases, but many studies have shown great benefits of exercise/diet in decreasing your risk.
I hope this helps! Thanks again for the comment!
imo, it may be a good idea to include some exercising while eating healthy
great blog btw