Most adults today can remember the low-carb dieting frenzy of the 2000s that had people with college degrees – some of them in the medical field! – thinking that potatoes or oatmeal was bad for you while steak and eggs were a good choice for a weight loss breakfast. Looking back, it seems inconceivable that so many people were so willfully misinformed about both weight loss and nutrition as to think they were doing themselves a favor by eating a bacon double cheeseburger without the bun. Fortunately, the Atkins diet has fallen by the wayside due to extremely low energy and muscle loss (when you followed it correctly) or lack of results (for those who did not follow it correctly). If you want to have a shapely and good looking body, your need to train and control your eating. The Atkins style approach only works for obese, sedentary people.
You need to know more than which foods are high in calories or fat…
The over-40 crowd will also remember the low-fat, high-carb fad dieting craze of the 1990s, when everything that happened to be low in fat was suddenly good for you. You might have even had some acquaintances who snacked on huge spoonfuls of grape jelly because, hey – it’s fat-free!
While relatively low-fat and medium-carb are good rules of thumb for anyone trying to lose weight, they don’t really get into specifics about nutrition. And what you don’t know about nutrition can and will stop you from meeting your weight-loss goals.
Weight loss and nutrition go hand-in-hand for much the same reason that excess weight and poor nutrition tend to plague the same people. We live in a society where most people are overweight and undernourished at the same time, and processed junk foods and convenience foods are largely to blame. Read the nutrition label on any pre-packaged dinner with “roni” or “helper” in the name, and you will find that they are high in carbs, perhaps protein and fat, and very little in the way of vitamins and minerals. In time, people who substitute processed foods for whole foods become what they eat. If you show us someone who’s overweight, we’ll show you a person with a chronic nutrient deficiency.
…but you do need to limit your fat intake.
In his book Eat to Live, Dr. Joel Fuhrman describes just how much easier it is to pack on fat than it is to lose it. For every 100 fat calories consumed, only three are burned in the process of depositing the other 97 calories right on top of the fat stores you already had. Doctors can even biopsy your fatty tissue and tell exactly where it came from! Sure, we all like a piece of fried chicken, rustic Italian bread soaked in olive oil and a helping of guacamole and chips once in a while, but if you have a weight loss goal, you need to think long and hard about whether you like those things enough to actually wear them day in and day out. Yes, you do need fat in your diet, but only the right kinds and in the right amounts.
Jason Kozma and his team at High Performance Personal Training is committed to helping people to further their understanding of nutrition in order to meet their weight loss goals. With our nutritional programs and guidance, we will help you to lose weight, improve your health and reduce your risk for preventable diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and cancer. If you live in the Los Angeles area and are ready to learn more about weight loss and nutrition to suit a healthy, active lifestyle, contact us today.
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