Pros and Cons of Low-Calorie Foods - Nutrition Tips

Pros and Cons of Low-Calorie Foods - Nutrition Tips - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. Low fat and low calorie foods fall into what I call a category of 'food products'. Really what I work with is the difference between food and food products. If you think about what your grandma ate, and you have a plate of what she ate, then you can think about, “OK. Well somebody out there is trying to put together something that looks like what she ate but has half the calories, or half the sugar or no sugar.” And it may look the same, or it may look really close, but the nutrient quality and quantity is very different between those two. So, really what you are looking for is rather than focusing in on a low calorie or low fat is “Is it real food? How close to real food can I get here?” So, things that you want to pay attention to are when you look at a label, when you are buying a food product, when you are buying a “diet” food, you want to avoid as many of those additives - the gums, the fillers, the flavorings, the colorings, the artificial sweeteners - as possible. Those are all things your body really does not know what to do with and they tend to kind of gum up the system. So, if you are doing this for a weight loss kind of a thing, what you are trying to do is get the body to essentially kind of eat it self. You know, to put it bluntly. So, we want the body to be able to process all of the metabolic excess of your body. You do not want it to be having to get complicated by these extra excess of strange chemicals coming in at the same time and it does not really know what to do with. So, I would say, if you are, for instance, looking at a sweetener, first of all try backing off of the flavor of sweet altogether. We tend to get way over-sweetified in this country. Try turning that sweet meter down a little bit. Try letting the food speak for itself. The other piece is those artificial sweeteners tend to be way, way, way sweeter than sugar, hundreds, if not thousands of times sweeter, depending on the one that you are choosing. That turns on certain systems in the body that expect sugar to be there, and when it is not there it can actually cause a lot of problems. One of the key things about those artificial sweeteners that a lot of people are not talking about is that chronic use of those over time, even though there is no caloric value, supposedly, they actually cause weight gain. Now, part of that, their thinking, has to do with the fact that it turns on the insulin system. So, insulin is ready there, waiting, getting pumped out by the pancreas. When the mouth senses sugar, brain sends a signal to the pancreas. Pancreas pumps out insulin, ready there, like with a catchers' mitt, for the sugar. There is no sugar coming. It has two jobs. Second job insulin does is store. So, it is part of that process that turns all of that excess carbohydrates into triglycerides and sends them off to fat cells for storage. So, that is one of the things that they are thinking that these excess high, sweet, sweet, sweet, but no calorie, sweeteners is doing, is it is actually forcing the body into storage mode instead of burn mode. That is a really key one to recognize. In terms of low fat, what you are going to find is that the more low fat diet you are on, the more hungry you are. Fat actually is the trigger for what is called satiety in the body. Think about this. If you have ever pulled apart the back of a toilet, it has got that little ball in the back. When you flush the toilet, the ball goes down to the bottom and you have to wait for the water to come back up. When the water pushes that ball up, that float, up, it shuts the valve off and the water stops running. It stops filling the toilet. That is essentially what fat does for the brain. If you do not have enough fat in a meal or a snack the toilet runs. It just sits there and runs. You are just hungry, you are hungry all the time. This is why I see a lot of people who use these “diets.” You see me do “diet” a lot. “Diet” is something I do not really like. They are having problems with it because they are hungry all the time. So you get through two weeks of it and you have been really, really “good,” right? And you are just starving. And that little four-year-old kid inside of you finally throws the tantrum and sits down with a half gallon of ice cream. Well, of course, because you are starving yourself of fats. The trick is which kind of fats? You want healthy fats. We will talk about the healthy fats another time. But what you really want to be sure to do is not go too low on your fats, and really stop relying on artificial foods, the food products, and start focusing on the real foods, as close to the way they came to you as possible. So, shop the perimeter of your grocery store. Make a mad dash for the toilet paper down the middle aisle. And really, if you stick with mostly those kinds of foods, you will do really well. And you will be satisfied.