Unless you’ve lived in a cave for most of your adult life, you’ll be aware that the messages put out by the media and various ‘health professionals’ as to what the healthiest diet is and the best way to ‘lose weight’ (a term I hate, by the way, which represents much of what is wrong with the ‘diet industry’ today) are constantly changing.
Eating this......
I’m 33 years old but in just my (relatively!) recent memory I can remember the ‘diet du jour’ going from high carbohydrate to high fat (a.k.a. the ‘Atkins Diet’) to high protein to low G.I., via the ‘South Beach’ diet, the Mediterranean’ diet for a holiday, or perhaps ending up in the ‘Zone’ diet.
And that’s not even mentioning individual fad diets like Organic only, ‘Eat Right for your Blood Type’, honey, water and cayenne pepper only (or whatever that bootilicious black singer is known for).
What’s a girl (or boy) to do?
Well, the first thing to realize is that fundamentally weight loss is a matter of calories in versus calories out. This is simplistic (it ignores the ‘quality’ or nature of the weight loss as I aluded to above) but is the starting point. The purpose of this article is not to go into a comprehensive analysis of what a ‘diet’ is or how they work- I want to focus on fat intake. I’m therefore not going to say much more than if you’re one of those people who thinks they eat very little but cannot lose weight, the you’re either (a) under-estimating your food intake, (b) under-estimating your activity level or (c) most likely (a) and (b).
The same is true for some skinny guy who says he eats like a horse and cannot put on weight. Unless you believe you are living breathing violation of the Law of Thermodynamics (in which case you should probably get yourself to a physicist as you’ve the living solution to the world’s energy problem) you are mistaken. You haven’t got a slow (or fast, in the case of guy) metabolism, you haven’t got a thyroid problem, you’re just eating too much. The one exception to this is an individual who has chronically depressed hormone levels or whose metabolism is not functioning correctly- i.e. an anorexic.
How we get fat
I also need to touch briefly on how a person gains or loses fat. On any given day, the body is either adding to or reducing its fat deposits. This is very slow process, as the body has evolved to become very efficient at dealing with far for reasons of survival. So if the body’s intake of calories that day is less than its expenditure, the body burns a little fat. If intake exceeds expenditure, the reverse happens. All the high carbohydrate and low fat crazes were essentially based on the logic that if someone wanted to lose fat, they should eat less of it. That’s ok to point. The problem is that apart from missing the vital nutrients that fat contains, the dieter has to eat something else. And that means a lot of protein, and more likely, a lot more carbohydrate. And on a high carbohydrate diet its very easy to eat more calories than you actually need (because it tends to stimulate hunger and many carbohydrate foods can easily be consumed in large quantities). Result- you put on fat, even though you may have eaten very little of it that day. I’ll also briefly mention that the body needs a certain amount of fat (so called Essential Fatty Acids) for basic biological processes and good health- go ask someone on cholesterol blocking drugs how their joints feel.
Now the opposite of this- a high fat diet- focuses on limiting carbohydrates so the body enters ketosis, a process where it is metabolizing fats into ketones, to be burned by the body. Proponents of the Atkins Diet advocate that there is something special about being in ketosis, as if it allows a dieter to eat a greater number of calories than would normally be the case and still lose weight. Additionally, technically, carbohydrates are not essential to the body (it can metabolise other food groups for energy), though a lot of people feel like crap whilst they are restricting carbohydrates and in ketosis (at least for a few days).
However, whilst no studies have ever demonstrated a scientific basis for a high fat or ketogenic giving any sort of ‘metabolic advantage’ (i.e that you can eat more than your maintenance amount of calories and still lose weight), these diets are very popular for practical reasons, too: high fat diets tend to cause a high amount of initial water loss (which looks like in a mirror you are losing ‘weight’) and increase satiety (high fat diets are very filling). The combination of these (especially the latter) means that they too also appear to ‘work’ very quickly- they simply result in the dieter dropping water, and eating less calories which can lead to an energy deficit and weight loss. The same explanation lies behind the apparent success of other more fad diets- if you exclude a certain food group or drink only some water based drink- you will also lose weight due to decreased energy intake. The question is how long you can stay on such a diet and the health implications. (Incidentally, if you’re desperate to drop some fat for a special event, the absolutely best way to do this- if you can handle it physically and psychologically- is a very high protein, low carbohydrate and low fat diet. You’d basically eat only protein and fibrous vegetables, and that’s very tough to stick to. Its obviously not healthy in the long term, either.)
Everything in moderation
....does not necessarily lead to this
If you’ve been paying attention, you may have guessed that for most of the time and excluding special cases (i.e. not an athelete preparing for a big race, or a woman wanting to lose a few inches the week before her wedding, someone who is gluten intolerant or who doesn’t metabolise carbs well ) what I recommend is neither a high nor a low fat diet, its what you might call a balanced one. It turns your mother was right all along. Neither high nor low fat diets are healthy longterm. What you should aim to do is to eat enough fat to cover your nutritional bases (men, especially, take note- a higher fat intake is correlated with higher testosterone levels, and we all know what that means) and to provide a degree of satiety in the diet, whilst not causing you to eat too many total calories (because fat is so energy dense- 9 calories per gram, compared to 4 for both protein and carbohydrate).
What sort of fats should you eat? Well anything in a natural food, like the fats in eggs or avocado are fantastic. High quality olive oil is very good (use it in your salads- try not to cook with it- for this you should use butter, or another fat with a high oxidation point), but sunflower, canola and all those other cheap vegetable oils are not. Butter is great (in moderation) and actually modern ‘margarines’ (which are olive oil blends) are not so bad compared to the hydrogenated crap of a few years ago. If you need fat for cooking, use olive oil, butter, or a few pumps of those cooking spray things. Its also really nowadays important to supplement with Omega 3 essential fatty acids (more on that later) as our diet is so deficient in Omega 6’s.
Putting it all together
The balance of your food intake should be high quality protein and carbohydrates. I advise you to generally eat as few refined carbohydrates as possible- this is not because they are in some way evil, its just that they tend to be higher in nutrients and its easier to eat less of them. (Essentially, 100 grams of jelly beans will have the same effect on the body at the end of the day as 100 grams of brown bread. Its just that is a hell of a lot easier to eat 100 grams of jelly beans and still be hungry!). Additionally, once you start eating a lot of refined sugars, you start your blood sugar levels on a rollercoaster that isn’t going to end well. For example: after a bowl of (typically high sugar) cereal for breakfast, you’re setting yourself up for needing a couple of strong cups of coffee late morning, and if you follow that up with a sandwich or pasta lunch, I guarantee you’ll be picking some chocolate or something else sweet to nibble on with your 4 pm cup of tea. Sound familiar? Solution- less carbs, more protein and fat.
I strongly recommend supplementation with Essential Fatty Acids (the health benefits of Omega 3’s are enormous and the modern diet is very deficient in them. The list of benefits is huge and includes increased fat burning, energy and vitality, mood, healthier joints, and healthier skin, hair and eyes.) If you have a problem with using supplements like this you’re either very stupid or you had better be eating oily fish at least 3 times a week and minimising your intake of Omega 6’s in other things you eat.
The Perfect Breakfast
You also need to eat enough protein to support your body’s needs- if you’re weight training regularly like you should be, this should be about 1 gram per pound of lean body weight. So don’t be scared of fat- welcome it, and how about starting off tomorrow with a plate of nutritious scrambled eggs and perhaps some fruit, something that’s sure to keep you going till lunchtime.
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