You’re told to eat less, so you do. You start feeling hungry all day. You get irritable and grouchy. Your sleep is crappy. You have low energy the entire day. Forget trying to exercise on a calorie-restricted diet when you’re hungry — it’s just not happening.
This study shows that conventional wisdom — to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods — isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”
This whole “eat less to weigh less” and “fat is bad” thing came into fashion with a seemingly logical, mathematical fact: that 1 gram of protein and 1 gram of carbohydrates has 4 calories, while 1 gram of fat has 9 calories. So eating 1 gram of fat would yield 9 calories and 1 gram of any other food would yield 4 calories. In a world where more calories = more weight, fat = scary!
So the natural next step becomes, “let’s just eat 500 or 1,000 less calories a day!”
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Here’s the thing: what you eat is incredibly important in addition to how much you eat. In fact, if you cook the food yourself and eat “real food” it’s very hard to actually overeat.
There are several problems associated with dramatically reducing how much you eat:
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- Loss of muscle mass – When your body isn’t given enough energy to survive, it will start drawing energy from your muscles because they are calorically expensive to maintain. In the reverse, the high caloric demands of muscle make them very important in weight loss. One of the main reasons we get fatter as we age is due to the decrease in muscle mass and associated hormones.
- Loss of testosterone – Muscle mass is important for keeping fat mass levels lower. Testerone levels decrease with caloric restriction, making it much harder to maintain muscle mass
- Decreased leptin levels, and low energy – Leptin is one of those hormones that helps signal to your brain that you’re full/hungry. Low leptin levels register as “I’m hungry!” .. which isn’t surprising if you’re starving.Also, low energy sets in with low calorie intake, because the body is trying to limit exertion. Good luck trying not to binge eat!
- Focus more on what you eat, rather than how much you eat. Stop counting calories unless you’ve absolutely tried everything. Stop splitting hairs. When you eat more of the right foods, you’ll end up losing weight.
- Fat is good. Do not avoid it. Healthy fat is crucial to brain health.
- Protein and fat stimulate hormones that keep you full, so you naturally eat less and are more satisfied.
- What took years to do cannot be undone over night. If you gained 50 pounds over 20 years, don’t expect to lose it in 2 weeks.
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3/1/14 11 AM- 5 PM
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