Two words I would never put in the same sentence, unless the sentence started with avoid. The news story is all over the place and I feel like I should address it before I start getting, “I told you so” emails from you guys.
The article in question, found here: www.cnn.com
The article describes a college professor doing an experiment on himself to prove a point about calorie counting, one of the things I don’t promote as a useful means of maintaing your health. That being said, at the latter part of the article a nutritionist chimes in to say, “There are things we can’t measure,” which I would have to agree with whole-heartily.
To give you a little perspective here I will explain quickly my story. I eat whole fruits and vegetables, occasionally sprouted grains or spelt flour, raw grass fed milk and about 5 grass fed eggs a day. My numbers are normal as they say but about 3 years ago I put myself to an experiment to see if I could gain “mass” while lifting weights and not changing my diet but increasing the amount of food I took in. So in short, I took the above listed foods and ate them till I went from 145 all the way up to 205. Does that mean I was unhealthily pursuing my goal of muscle mass? No. Because I was keeping my food in the context of whole, nutritious, balanced and organic.
What difference does this make?
The difference is clear, my body never got addicted to the food it consumed because of refined sugars and other chemicals, but more so than that my body didn’t burn out it’s filters in the process of my weight gain. Eating non-nutritive sugary sweets such as twinkies will wreak havoc on your filters as well as your insulin production which affects so many other organs and systems in your body. That being said, when I stopped eating one extra meal I dropped twenty pounds in five weeks. I was finding my “perfect weight” or healthy weight that I believed I needed to be at to do my job correctly.
In comparison you may be thinking, “well, you just reduced calories”, on the surface you’d be right, but there’s so much more to it, especially given the parameters I personally place on holistic well being. If you are going to just simply count and cut calories you are going to leave yourself open to all sorts of sickness and diseases like cancer, diabetes and early death. Skinny and obese people alike get diabetes and cancer and crohns and all sorts of sickness and disease. Yeah, that is how seriously I take refinement, chemicals, and GM foods. These foods are NOT time tested – just like the “twinkie diet”! There is no way of completely testing this long term, but if there was mind you, there couldn’t be any protein shakes and vegetables on the side like the professor said he had.
You can lose weight counting calories, it’s not practical but it can be done. You can’t gain or maintain whole health just counting calories and not the quality of the content you are eating. It will NOT be a conclusive answer to overall health, which is what we strive to do here at Life Fitness Academy.
