Five Simple Rules of Eating
The diet industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. Every week or so, a new diet book comes out with the absolute answer for losing weight. Many of them are controversial and disagree with each other. Sometimes that’s a good strategy for selling books. Some say low fat will make you leaner, some say the only way to go is to have low carbohydrates; anything else will make you fat. Some say eat like a caveman/woman, others say eat in a postmodern way with a diet consisting mostly of supplements. What to do? What to do?
What I’d like to do is give some simple rules that apply to most of the diets out there. Simple rules that hold true whether you do low carbohydrate or low fat, Paleolithic or Dr. Phil, Atkins or Lindora. Some simple, fundamental rules that will work in a variety of situations.
Rule #1 To lose weight, burn more calories than you eat.
“Eat less and do more,” is often thought to be too simplified and antiquated an idea, but the thing is, it’s true. Of course, there are some details that need explaining. For example, it’s not necessarily eating less food, but only less calories that matters.
The low carbohydrate guys have a good argument when they say that lowering the percentage of carbohydrates in your diet will help to make you thinner. Lots of studies have shown this idea to have some truth to it. No one’s completely sure of the reason, but it’s probably that the body (particularly the brain) requires a large number of carbohydrates to function every day. If it doesn’t have sufficient carbohydrates it can make them from protein. Making them from protein is metabolically expensive, meaning that it costs calories to turn protein into carbohydrates. Therefore eating the same number of calories, but a larger percentage of protein is like eating fewer calories.
I suppose you could call this a principle rather than a rule. We all like to think that nothing bothers us and that we’re not affected by the habits we’ve gained over our lifetime, but the truth is, most of what we do, believe, and feel about things comes from our past. When people decide that they weigh too much, or have too much body fat they have to make changes. It’s amazing how many people want to lose weight or body fat without changing anything about their life. It is said that there is nothing more foolish than doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. If you want to change your body, you have to change your life. Change is psychologically hard and something most of us just naturally don’t like, but it has to be done.
Rule #3 Eat several small meals per day.
It is possible to lose weight/body fat without doing this, but I’ve found that in most cases this is one of the best tricks for controlling appetite and weight/body fat loss. The main argument for this is that the human body is always watching out for periods of famine or shortage of food. For 99.5% of human history there was never enough food, and human bodies and DNA are attuned to this. It appears that, for most people, any long amount of time (even as few as ten hours) can be interpreted by the body as a “mini famine,” and time to conserve by lowering metabolism (the rate at which the body burns food). So by keeping the body regularly fed it will sense no reason for alarm and keep the metabolic fires burning at full speed.
Rule #4 Stay away from processed foods as much a possible.
As Jack La Lanne used to say, “If man made it, don’t eat it.” There are lots of good arguments for this concept. Every day new discoveries are being made regarding new phytochemicals, and anti-oxidants in common fruits and vegetables. Most fruits and vegetables are ingenious biological packages of low calorie, high nutrient food. True, they are often more trouble to buy, store, and carry, but isn’t it worth it? Isn’t it often true that in our current culture people will sometimes spend more time, money, and effort on their car than they do on their bodies? You might use your car a few hours a day, but I guarantee you’ll have to use your body twenty-four hours a day for the rest of your life. Which really matters the most? So, whenever possible, and if you work at it that can be most of the time, stay away from processed foods.
Rule #5 Losing weight/body fat is an individual thing.
Humans are herd animals. Most of us congregate together in cities, towns, and suburbs. When we are trying to accomplish things it’s great to have others to work along with us. But the truth about our bodies is that there is enough genetic variation, both physiological and psychological, to make losing weight/body fat a rather individual thing. Unfortunately, there are things in life we have to face alone, or at least learn to accept our own individuality. We all know those individuals who eat “anything they want” and remain slim, if not skinny. What worked for your cousin may not work at all for you. Sixty-five-year-old Clarence Bass says that fifty years of training has taught him that bodybuilding and weight/body fat control are essentially “an experiment of one.” Oh, there are some fundamental rules and principles, like the ones I’m trying to put together here, but there are always individual variations in the details, and a lot of body fat/weight loss has to do with the details. So just wade in and try the fundamentals, but then change and tweak things as you find out what works and what doesn’t work for you.
Hopefully these are five basic rules that will help in the war against fat. If you’re having any success at all, congratulate yourself, because statistics show that most people are not. Americans are continuing to get fatter and fatter. It makes you wonder where it’s all going to end. I often tell clients that I’m thinking about buying property in Corona, because I’m sure that with the continuing girth of Americans, they’ll weigh down the continent making Corona beachfront. So although the big picture is dark, do not despair. Changing your body is doable. I’ve seen it done many times. Just follow the fundamentals and move on from there.