The myth about food that makes you fat

In the post about calories we talked about the ways our bodies use energy and what makes calories so important with regards to weight change. If we combine that knowledge with what we discussed in the piece on eating healthy we come to a very interesting conclusion, and that is that no food in particular makes you fat. For instance, you can go on a McDonald’s diet and if you were to consume fewer calories than your maintenance you would lose weight. Obviously, this is an extreme approach and your health would suffer greatly but it would be effective for the purpose of losing weight. Mark Haub, a university professor in the States, showed this by going on a Twinkie diet and in 10 weeks he lost around 12 kilos.

If you remember anything from this text, apart from the Twinkie diet, please let that it be the fact that there is no specific food that makes you fat, being in a state of calorie surplus does. We could end it here but I’d really like to share a couple of useful tips on how you can apply this knowledge to your daily food intake.

The first thing you have to eliminate is the thought that unhealthy food and food that makes you fat exist. All food makes you fat and can be unhealthy if consumed excessively. The second thing you should adopt is a new way of looking at food:

1. Nutrient-dense food
2. Calorie-dense foods

This will drastically impact the way you look at food. For instance, your food intake should provide you with protein, vitamins and minerals, fiber, healthy fats none of which you can find in a serving size of McDonald’s fries. For comparison’s sake, large McDonald’s fries have 487 calories which takes up a huge part of a lot of people’s total daily intake. Contrast that with lettuce which only has 15 calories per 100 grams which means that you would need to eat 3 freaking kilos of lettuce to get 450 calories. If you can eat 3 kilos of lettuce in a day I am personally going to take you out on a full day of hedonistic indulgence and you will get a free nutrition plan from me. Another example could be Milka’s chocolate or any chocolate for that matter which will sit at around 500 calories per 100 grams. In those 100 grams you won’t get anything of value, no protein, no fiber, no vitamins, no minerals but you will get a 2-day dose of sugar. Does that mean that you should never eat chocolate? Hell no, you can eat it, you just can’t have 300 grams 4 times a week. In contrast, let’s take my favorite fruit – blackberries. They carry 43 calories and 5 grams of fiber per 100 grams. Given the standard recommendation for daily fiber intake of anywhere between 20 – 60 grams a solid dose of 10 grams of fiber would only cost you 86 calories of blackberries. There are also some food items that contain higher calories but they also offer a lot of value and these food items should obviously be included as well. Good examples of this are meat, olive oil and nuts. You should try to make sure that foods that can be classified as useless calories constitute only a small portion of your diet because these foods do not contribute with anything except with sugar and bad kinds of fat.

In the aforementioned text on eating healthy I recommended that anywhere between 70% and 80% of your calories should come nutrient-rich foods because they will make you healthier overall and that kind of intake will by default make it easier to hit your calorie targets.

Summary this time around has two points:

1. You will gain weight if you consume more calories than you need even if those calories come from “healthy” food
2. “Healthy food” and „food that makes you fat" is not the best way to look at food. It would suit you better to look at calories and nutrients instead because some food will carry higher calories but it will also provide nutritional value while some food offers nothing but useless calories.