Whole Food Nutrition: The Key to Your Success!

If you are reading this you have probably tried lots of different diets.  Some of the more common ones are listed below.

•      1200 Cal for women? 1600 Cal for men?

Should a 100 lb woman and a 500 lb woman be eating the same amount of food?

•      Atkins Diet?

Research shows that after 1 month this typically turns in to a very low calorie diet because people get tired of eating all the fatty proteins.

•      Glycemic Index?

This is a standardization of digestion times of various carbohydrates relative to another carbohydrate.  It is a valuable tool, but not perfect.

•      Lo-Carb Diet?

Low carb diets are great for rapid weight loss, but are not sustainable for most over long periods of time.

•      40-30-30

This is the idea that everyone should get 40% of their calories from carbohydrates, 30% from protein, and 30% from fat.  Different body types, goals, etc. play a big role in determine macronutrient profile.

•      HCG

Yikes!

The reality is that there is no cookie cutter approach to healthy nutrition.  What works for one person might not work for others.  However there are some basic biological principles that are the keys to fat loss and lean muscle gain.  Through your diet, you must regulate your blood sugar levels and consequentially your insulin levels.  Most people think of insulin as being a diabetic hormone.  Insulin is a hormone in your body secreted by the pancreas that helps to regulate your blood sugar levels.  One might ask why this is important for weight loss.  Well the answer is simple:

When your blood sugar increases, your blood actually gets thicker.  Basically instead of water it is now like oil.  Thick viscous blood doesn’t circulate as well so your body releases insulin which then takes the sugar and does one of two things.  It either uses the sugar to replenish your glycogen stores or stores it almost instantly as body fat.  Glycogen is your body’s energy reserve.  It is a carbohydrate that stores in your blood and liver and then can be used to manufacture energy.  Your body will store sugar as glycogen only if the reserves are depleted, which is typically the case after physical activity.  This is why you actually want to have sugar after you work out.

When you eat a carbohydrate in excess of 15g (a piece of toast for breakfast) without protein, your blood sugar will rise and you will elicit an insulin response immediately storing the bread as fat.  This takes approximately 45 minutes and is followed by a rapid blood sugar decrease.  When your sugar is low you will be hungry and burn muscle.  So basically you ate a piece of toast, it got stored as body fat, and then you burned muscle until you ate again.  If you just ate ¾ cup of cottage cheese or 3 eggs with your toast, your blood sugar would rise slowly, you would have time to use it as energy, then your blood sugar would slowly drop.  By combining protein with carbohydrates, you slow down the absorption of the carbohydrate and help to keep your blood sugar levels in line so you don’t store fat or burn muscle.

3 RULES TO WEIGHT LOSS

1. Eat every 3-4 hours hungry or not.

2. Never eat a carbohydrate without protein.

3. If sugar is more than 20% of total carbohydrates, DON’T EAT IT!