By Coach Maria - Salus Nutritionist & Food Expert
Surprisingly, when talking or dealing with nutrition, common sense takes a back seat.
Read on for a common sense nutrition plan that will produce amazing results in your health and body composition!
- Eating Every 2-3 Hours - you don't need to do it!
Contrary to what you hear, you do NOT need to eat constantly around the clock to lose weight. Eating frequent, smaller meals have been found to have little to no effect on fat burning or weight loss.
Not only is it inconvenient, but the majority of people, it is unnecessary. By simply eating when you're hungry and choosing healthy options that are nutrient dense, your body will look and feel as it should.
- Eggs - ranking among one of the healthiest foods you can eat!
Eggs have been unfairly criticized because of the cholesterol content in the egg yolk. The biggest myth surrounding eggs and cholesterol is that when healthy adults consume the egg yolk, their lipid cholesterol increases.
Almost all the nutrients in the egg are found in the yolk and avoiding them or the egg entirely is one of many mistakes people make regarding nutrition.
- Sugary Drinks - the most fattening and health-deteriorating beverage you can drink.
Consuming added sugar in our diets is probably the worst thing we could do in our nutrition. Getting it in liquid form is even worse.
When consuming liquid sugar, the brain does not register the calories in the drink but it creates a craving for more calories and typically more sugary calories.
Probably one of the most fattening junk "foods" out there, sugary drinks like soda and sugary sport drinks will cause nothing but problems with your health and weight.
- Low-Fat - the most misunderstood label that most certainly does not mean "healthy".
The low-fat diet that has been hammered into our heads over the past decade (or more!) has been a miserable failure. You will find every food product in a low-fat version and many people fall into the trap that "low-fat"="healthy". However, this movement has only created more health and weight problems than ever before.
Removing the fat from foods make them taste rather bad, so manufacturers add sugar to make the flavor palatable - not just a bit of sugar, a lot of sugar.
Foods that are naturally low-fat like fruits and vegetables are fantastic, but the processed foods that are labeled as low-fat are loaded with ingredients that are unhealthy.
- Fruit Juice - can be as bad as sugary drinks.
Many people think fruit juice is healthy and, in its most simplest form, it can be ok to have every once in a while, but should be treated as a sugar source and not as a hydration tool.
Unlike the whole, intact fruit, juice contains no fiber and no chewing resistance to mitigate the sugar levels in the body, making it very easy to consume excessive amounts of sugar when drinking the juice.
If you're trying to avoid sugar for health/weight issues, you should consider avoiding fruit juices as well. The tiny amount of antioxidants that you might be getting from it is not worth the large amounts of sugar.
- Weight Loss Supplements - almost always never work.
We are inundated with ads and commercials for weight loss supplements. There are lots of claims of magical results with little effort and the simple truth is that they just don't work.
Even if the rare supplement does something initially, the effect is so tiny, it is never noticeable.
The best and most lasting way to lose weight is to put the work in by adopting a lifestyle change - something that you can adhere to for a lifetime. Healthy eating plan and a consistent exercise routine.
- Calorie Counting - is not something you need to do.
Yes, calories matter, but counting them is not a necessary tool that everyone needs or should use.
Instead, concentrating on the quality of food you eat, avoiding processed foods and sugars elicit incredible results all by themselves.
Many people have experienced weight loss simply by increasing their protein intake at each meal - this has been done with no caloric restriction whatsoever.
- Refined Vegetable Oils - should be avoided and replaced with healthy oils.
Refined vegetable oils like soybean, canola and corn, use extremely harsh and high processing methods to remove the oils from the seed.
This process creates an oil that is highly pro-inflammatory that cause oxidative stress in the body.
They contain a high amount of omega-6 fatty acids (which cause inflammation).
Instead, look for healthy oils like coconut, avocado, and even olive oil (as long as it is used with cold food prep only, since heating olive oil causes the oil to oxidize).
- "Organic" and "Gluten-Free" - not always the health food you think it is.
Just because something on a package claims to be organic and/or gluten-free, it doesn't mean it's actually healthy or even good for us.
Now, I'm not talking about naturally organic or naturally gluten-free products, but the products that are processed and packaged - they are, often times, made with unhealthy ingredients that are detrimental to our health.
Gluten-free junk food is still junk food, and organic sugar is still sugar.
Purchasing a pre-made gluten-free dinner from the frozen food section is much different and less healthy than making a homemade gluten-free dinner with wholesome ingredients that mostly come from the produce and meat sections of the grocery store.
- Red Meat, Butter, Eggs - falsely blamed for today's health issues.
How many times have you heard negative things about red meat or butter and even eggs?
The biggest health epidemic we deal with today - obesity - began somewhere around the 1980's and followed closely by type 2 diabetes.
We can all agree that both epidemics have a lot to do with our diet.
The three foods mentioned above, seemed to have taken the brunt of the blame when dealing with these health issues.
These natural foods, however, have been consumed for thousands of years and yet these health issues are relatively new.
Seems like the sensible thing to do is to look at the new foods that were introduced into our diets around that time frame - all processed foods, added sugars (including artificial and high fructose corn syrup), refined grains and vegetable oils (like trans fats).
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