Does Calorie Counting Work for Long Term Weight Loss?
Professor David Ludwig, the director of Obesity Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and teacher at Harvard Uni Nutrition Department is a well-known researcher and specialist in the glycemic index and obesity and in one of his interviews he explains the best and most simple way to lose weight.
In one sentence his thoughts can be summarized as: “Ignore the calorie count and simply worry about the quality and nutritional value of what you eat”. Decreasing your calorie intake, which is the most common and the oldest approach to losing weight, is simply not the way to go for long-term weight loss and may only work in the short run. Although at the end of the day it is true that we need to take in fewer calories than we burn off to be able to lose weight, this is not all there is to it.
And there is only a single simple reason for this to not work: The lower your calorie intake is and the more you starve your body the more hungry you will feel, your stress hormones will be on the rise and your metabolism will go down. And it will just be very hard for you to lose weight by limiting your calorie intake. Only a very small part of the human population can actually lose weight and maintain a healthy weight this way, the majority of the people can not.
Most of what Americans and rest of the modern society eat these days are super processed unhealthy foods that are digested very quickly and that cause a spike in your blood sugar, then a failure in metabolism. Processed carbs increase your levels of insulin, which is pretty much like the fertilizer to fat cells. But if you consume more of raw and whole foods, these will be digested much slower than processed stuff and will cause a subtle increase in blood glucose and go back to normal pretty smoothly.
The calories will be oxidized by your brain and other parts of your system rather than being stored in the fatty tissue. So in this case what you need to do is pretty simple but may take a little time to get used to, especially if you have been eating badly for a long time. You need to get rid of any processed or refined foods, including bread, pastries, sweets, white rice, and most of the breakfast cereals from your daily diet and replace them with legumes, veggies and whole grains for dietary fiber intake.
Eat adequate amounts of protein, animal and vegetable sources as they make you feel full quicker and the amino acids offer a variety of benefits for your body. And lastly eat more of healthy fats like olives, olive oil, salmon, mackerel, nuts, seeds and more, as they will also lead to satiety pretty fast with a very little effect on insulin, the fat fertilizer. Dr. Ludwig says that the blood glucose, stress hormone, and insulin levels act like the waves in the sea, simply rise and fall slowly and smoothly, as compared to the tsunami-like movements of the highly processed foods.
Your general hunger levels will decrease throughout the day, you will eat and fast as you’re feeling full longer, your fat cells will be calmer and store less of fat, and your metabolism level will increase. This is exactly what you need, to lose weight and maintain your physique in the long-run. And there is simply no reason to deprive or torture yourself and feel hungry all the time. You just need to avoid any industrial or overly-processed carbs to be able to not increase your insulin and fat cells storing calories. Work with your body, not against it and just give it what it needs and you will feel stronger and healthier over time.
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