The problem with your stupid diet

How to solve problems like excessive counting, clean eating and Paleo

Almost all diets will work at first, but the unsatisfying results and neuroticism that follow later will prove significantly more trouble than the whole thing is worth. You need to know when to follow the rules and when it's okay to break them. Here are three examples.

1 - Counting calories and macronutrients

What it's about:

A control of the amount of food you eat by counting calories and macronutrients(protein, carbs and fat).

Why it's not optimal:

Aiming for a quantitative intake of food has its place and justification. I've used and defended it myself before. But doing this to prepare for a competition or to develop a general awareness of your calorie and macronutrient intake is different than trying to stick to a predetermined set of numbers long term.

It's mentally draining and is it really healthy to go through life without being able to add up the calorie value of everything you put in your mouth? After strictly following such plans, women have contacted me about the following problem: an obsessive fear of eating without controlling their macronutrient ratio or calorie intake. This sounds like OCD, which is a mental illness - not something you should try to develop.

It can lead to downplaying food quality. If your meals consist of a chicken breast, 1.5 Oreo cookies, 107 grams of ice cream and exactly fifteen green beans, you may start to lose sight of the big picture.

Your calorie needs fluctuate from day to day. Your energy expenditure is not a fixed value. The amount of calories you use and need is not the same from day to day. And it is quite possible to lose fat if you consume more total calories than the calorie calculator (or a formula) on a website indicates for your maintenance calorie intake.

Also, it's not particularly useful to have to stick to a predetermined number of calories on a day when you've exercised harder than normal or when you have hormonal fluctuations. And losing fat doesn't mean you have to be hungry. As a side note, habitually eating too few calories to maintain a calorie deficit won't exactly have a positive effect on your metabolic rate.

And if you're a person whose workouts are constantly varying and always intense, you'll have even more of a problem. Some days you will need more food and others less, so using a calorie calculator will not be helpful, especially if it requires you to override your appetite.

In addition to exercise, there are many other variables that will affect your energy expenditure and metabolism:

• The temperature of the room you are in
• The amount of time you are on your feet
• How much sex you have
• The amount of spices in your last meal
• The duration of a cold shower
• Recent marijuana use, which could have a thermogenic effect
• Alcohol consumption, which delays your ability to burn fat

These are just a few variables that affect the amount of calories you burn and therefore need from day to day. So do you really think you'll learn anything about your body's actual needs if you train yourself to eat only by the numbers (instead of paying attention to your energy and appetite)?

In addition to this, the calorie counts themselves are also ambiguous. Even if you consume the same amount of energy every day, the number of calories listed for the food you eat in calorie tables or on the packaging can vary up to 20% up and down. So no matter how carefully you count your calories, the result could be up to 20% above or below the actual calorie count.

You can look at every label, consult all the calorie tables and weigh every bite of food and still the 2000 kcal you come up with could actually be 2400, 1600 or, if you're lucky, somewhere between the two. And yet many people who count calories and macronutrients are often fanatical about getting the numbers perfect.

A calorie is not a calorie and not all carbohydrates are the same. Let's assume that calorie tables and labels are actually accurate. Even in this case, the calories and macronutrients contained in different foods behave differently in the body. The body does not treat all calories the same and it does not treat the same macronutrients in the same way. This is true even if you compare carbohydrates to carbohydrates, proteins to proteins and fats to fats. Resistant starch is an excellent example. Just like beet sugar, resistant starch is a carbohydrate, but the two have a completely different effect on the body, especially when consumed regularly.

Similarly, fat consumed in the form of linolenic acid has a greater and more problematic impact on your waistline and metabolism than other types of fat, even if the calorie intake is the same.

This is why it doesn't make sense to lump macronutrients together in a way as if there is no difference. If you are counting macronutrients and a large portion of your carbohydrates come from foods that contain resistant starch, then you will get different results than if your carbs come primarily from high sugar junk food. No, the results won't necessarily be immediate, but your gut bacteria, your energy, your hormones, your metabolism and your appetite will know the difference... and your long-term results will be affected too.

You should also consider the thermic effect of food when counting calories but not macronutrients. The human body must expend energy to digest food. Digesting protein is the most costly in terms of calories - it costs the body more energy than digesting carbohydrates or fats. The digestion of dietary fats requires the least energy. So are all calories the same? No. Are at least all the same macronutrients the same? No.

How you can do better:

If you've never paid attention to calories or macronutrients, you should. It will show you how to compare foods and estimate calories and nutrients. Those who have never paid attention to this are often shocked when they find out that they are not getting nearly enough protein.

But at some point, you should be able to stop checking and counting and use what you've learned without having to enter everything into an app on your smartphone. Even monitoring your food intake for a few weeks should give you a pretty solid idea of the foods you eat most often. You should also have a rough idea of how much you need to feel good depending on your workouts, recovery needs, time of the month, appetite, etc

If you are doing the whole thing to lose fat, then overriding your hunger to stay below a target will do the exact opposite of what you want. If you do this long enough, you won't know what you're eating without the help of an app. No diet should make you so ignorant of your body's signals.

And remember that when it comes to hard training, consuming maximum amounts of energy requires energy again. So being too pedantic about your calorie deficit can also be counterproductive.

If you think you'll gain weight if you don't control your calories, then perhaps you need to get to the bottom of certain issues that are causing you to eat when you're not hungry. Or maybe you need to start making more quality food choices and eating meals that are more filling with fewer calories. If you can't control yourself or eat sensibly using your appetite as a tool, then you have a whole different set of problems.

You can get leaner and maintain a lower weight without pulling out your phone before every meal, but to do this you need to improve your food preferences and trust your appetite. If you're counting macronutrients and weighing out mountains of ice cream to maintain a perfectly average-looking body, realize that you can achieve the same results without the neurosis required to control every crumb you shove in your mouth.

2 - Clean eating

What it's all about:

A way of eating that emphasizes "natural" and unprocessed foods and includes fewer processed products and less refined sugar.

Why it's not optimal:

Even trying to eat clean can lead to obsessive thinking, and if you're eliminating one food after another from your diet without really knowing why, your efforts are doomed to fail. Not to mention that the oversimplified rhetoric of "eat only what's natural" is nonsense.

Many processed foods are packed with nutrients and can help dieters reach their goals, while many "natural" foods can sabotage your fat loss efforts if you eat too much of them. Quality lean breakfast meats, for example, are high in protein and make an excellent sandwich topping, despite being a processed food. Fish is another good example. You would have to eat several pounds of fatty fish to get the benefits of a few "processed" fish oil capsules. Protein powders and workout supplements are other examples of processed foods that can increase muscle growth, fat loss, performance and recovery.

And then there's this "if you can't pronounce it" bullshit that says you shouldn't eat something if you can't pronounce one of the ingredients. Or this "If your grandmother doesn't know it, you shouldn't eat it." But healthy and beneficial foods often have fancy names and your fluency shouldn't affect your diet. If your grandmother lived during the post-war era, she probably didn't concern herself with advanced nutrition, but simply ate what was available.

Not only do we have the ability to choose from what is available, but we can also manipulate those choices depending on our specific goals. An example: citrulline malate, which protects muscles from fatigue and helps them recover faster from an intense workout. If you didn't use it because your grandmother didn't know it, then the developments of this century would probably pass you by.

Nuts, on the other hand, are one of those unprocessed foods that people who want to eat clean really like to eat and often eat too much of. And even though nuts are very healthy in reasonable amounts, eating too much of them will not have a positive effect on your body composition. The same goes for all those natural organic sweeteners, butter from grass-fed cattle, fruit juices, dried fruits, etc.

How you can do better:

Appreciating food quality is great, but not keeping track of the calories and macronutrients your food contains is a surefire way to sabotage yourself. If you're consuming 5,000 or more "unprocessed" kcal per day, find a smarter way to satisfy your appetite.

Monitor your food intake for a while to develop a general awareness of your total calorie intake and macronutrient intake. This does not mean becoming more obsessive. It means taking advice from a nutrition calculator and eating for your goals.

If you find it easy to choose foods with high nutrient density, then you are already one step ahead. Now you should be more strategic about deciding which foods will support your performance and body composition and which will turn into a disappointing calorie bomb after just a few bites.

3 - Paleo

What it's about:

This is a way of eating clean, but avoiding anything that comes from agriculture. No rice, no oatmeal and no other grain products. There are varying degrees of strictness, ranging from no dairy to a more relaxed approach that only bans processed foods and grains.

Why it's not ideal:

This approach is primarily detrimental if you're an exerciser who regularly works out at the gym and uses high-intensity exercise. Convinced Paleo followers even have a term for people like us: "chronic exercisers." - as if regular workouts were a disease. (Are people who love books chronic readers?) You can make any behavior sound bad by calling it chronic.

But this categorization simply means that their way of eating is not optimal for people who want to build impressive muscles and a high performance body. In fact, those who train hard and follow a Paleo diet often can't recover fast enough to train regularly. Nor can they satisfy their appetite for fast-digesting, carbohydrate-rich foods using a Paleo nutritional approach. Many of them will therefore have cheat days packed with non-Paleo junk food, trapping them in a cycle of hardcore Paleo days followed by fast food binges.

The second reason that the Paleo approach can be suboptimal is that, just like "clean eating", there are numerous Paleo foods that are very high in calories and therefore easy to overeat - bacon, nuts, butter, dried fruit and coconut oil are just a few of these. And if these are eaten in excess, they will make fat loss impossible.

How you can do better:

People who work out with weights occasionally need a spike in insulin levels to reach their performance goals. A coconut and kale smoothie won't do the trick. But because insulin is portrayed as "the hormone that makes you fat," dieters try to avoid it at all costs, while simultaneously encouraging the development of their Paleo-approved man boobs.

If you're a "chronic exerciser," here's what you should do:

1. First, make peace with select processed foods and supplements that serve your purposes (increased performance, satiety, anabolism, and energy). Keep in mind that foods that satiate your appetite are very different from foods that satiate the appetite of the average American who doesn't train as hard or as often as you do.
2. Next, try swapping out some of your higher fat foods for starchy carbohydrates. Beans, oatmeal, rice and potatoes are examples of satiating foods that are nutrient dense and the lectins won't kill you. if you're worried about binding to the vitamins and minerals in your diet and preventing you from absorbing those nutrients, relax, because you're probably taking in more than enough nutrients. Whatever bindings should come about will not be enough to put you in a vitamin or mineral deficit. Eating enough carbohydrates to replenish your glycogen stores and give you energy to perform will likely reduce your desire to have one or more cheat days every weekend.
3. Become aware of the portion sizes of things that are the most calorie dense. Hint: they are usually very high in fat like coconut oil, bacon, butter, nuts, cream, etc. - these are the things that will sabotage your fat loss efforts if you eat too much of them. And trust me, if you feel a craving for carbohydrates and override that appetite, you will be tempted to eat too much high fat calorie bombs.

So which diet is best?

How about a diet based on common sense? In a perfect world, you would eat the right amounts of delicious yet beneficial (or at least not bad) foods and use your appetite to work out when and how much you should eat. You would enjoy your meals and be as lean, fit and athletic as you want to be.

The problem is that our food preferences and eating habits have gotten out of control, which is why it's hard for most people to use common sense when it comes to nutrition. The excessive palatability of the standard Western diet has led us to develop some really bad eating habits. And dieting has become the antidote.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Diet comes from the Greek word diata, which simply means daily or lifestyle. So trying out a new lifestyle to improve your appetite and your health is a good thing - if you learn something from it. Dieting should make you a smarter eater - if it doesn't, then you're doing it wrong because you're not learning anything.

They say you have to learn the rules to know how to break them. So if you're dieting and you're no longer seeing results, then you should start thinking about which parts of the diet you can keep and which you should get rid of. Don't be anti-diet, but don't become a diet fanatic either. Don't lose your head. Follow the rules first. Give them an honest chance. Read a damn book on how to do it right.

There are people who use diets that have been molded by headlines and hearsay. They are the ones who make a half-hearted effort to follow the rules without knowing why. Then when they fail, they claim that dieting doesn't work. Don't become one of these people.

The most important thing to realize is that very detailed dietary guidelines are a poor cure for underlying problems such as binge eating. And if you are a binge eater, don't start dieting in the first place. Instead, keep a food diary to increase your awareness of what you eat, why you eat and when you eat. Take care of this first.

Almost every diet involves something useful (apart from a few exceptions, like the HCG diet or everything celebrities do). Use what you learn and use it for the long term.

By Dani Shugart | 12/29/15

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/problem-with-your-stupid-diet