Eating well is a gift. To every part of you. Not only does real, healthy food taste better but the best diet protocols are the single greatest measure to help people get and stay healthy. For many, “eating healthy” is the gateway to weight loss. The key is that choosing a healthy diet is not about “dieting”. No counting calories. No starving yourself. This is a fantastic benefit to ancestral, whole food diets! They almost universally eliminate most of the pseudo processed foods that trick our bodies into craving more empty-calorie, insulin disrupting junk. No craving means no starving! Healthy diets allow you to eat well. And if you have no desire to lose weight, no worries. Eating the right way tends to normalize your weight at a healthy point so you look and feel great the way your body is meant to. Now if you want to gain weight you can do that too with a smart diet. And still remain very healthy.
To understand this better we need to know about the problems with the Standard American Diet (SAD – I love that acronym) Here’s a ridiculously simplified version of why we get fat on the SAD. Many of the foods in the SAD are literally engineered to make you crave more of that food. SAD foods tend to be made of the same highly processed ingredients that don’t nourish our bodies, a lot of sugar, refined oils and soy-corn-wheat monocrop. If you look at the labels of everything the average American eats in a day you’ll be blown away by how much of it is soy-corn-wheat , crappy oils and sugars. This consistently bad and limited diet deprives our bodies of important nutrients and throws our metabolism and hormones out of whack. It’s an overwhelming amount of the same bad stuff. So our bodies react adversely, searching for nutrition and trying to figure out what to do with all the crap. The net is we wind up wanting to overeat to get more nutrition and at the same time signaling our bodies to store all the excess as fat. Then to try losing weight, many resort to forcing themselves to eat fewer calories of the same bad foods, which only exacerbates the lack of nutrition. We wind up starving our bodies and forcing them to feed on themselves not just for fat but for nutrients and more.
On the flip side, ancestral whole food diets are focused on the quality of the foods, not the quantity. By focusing on quality and variety many improvements in health can happen. And happen quickly. Many people report increased energy, better moods, better health makers and of course weight loss. It’s one of the first tenets of regaining your health, embracing whole, high quality, unprocessed foods. Those diets that are rooted in this belief are the right way to eat. There are many to choose from. I don’t like getting caught up in the subtleties of diet arguments. In fact I think its probably a good idea to switch things up every now and again. No matter what diet you work with, focus on food quality over food quantity. Don’t “diet”. Eat the right foods, eliminate the bad and very good things will happen.
My favorite “diets” that aren’t about dieting
I’d love to know yours.