Two Big Enemy For Fat Loss

Hey folks, I know we’ve all been there before when you’re hungry, and in a hurry. It is easy to grab something that requires you to open a packet and eat it, versus foods that require preparation.

Well, in today’s expert interview Brad Pilon, he shares with us a common ingredient in  “convenience foods” that pose the greatest risk for fat loss and to your health. However, before we go into it jump back to part 4 where the “Eat Stop Eat” author addresses artificial sweeteners.

******************************

Craig: Fair enough. That leads us into sugar. My question is how big of an enemy is this for fat loss?

Brad: Okay. It’s a big enemy. It’s actually a really big enemy, but only because of its abundance in our diet. It’s a very easy compound to work with. When you’re doing any sort of food development the sugar component of making anything, whether it’s a package food, or whether it’s pie. It is the easiest part. Protein and the fats are a bit trickier and that’s why all of our foods have so much sugar in them.

So, to give you an idea, if you’re someone who feels like your eating has just gone completely out of control. Say you’re on a bit of a binge rampage here, and you’re eating more than you want. You think the easiest way to fix it would be to eat really low carbs. So by eating low carbs with no supplements you think you’re not cheating because you’re not going to deal with high protein. Then try to go about your regular day.

By making that decision you’re limiting yourself to only eating in your home. It’s extremely DIFFICULT to make a low carb food choice that’s unhealthy for you on a day to day basis by eating out.

So, sugar is bad only because of the abundance we have. If you cut sugar out of your diet in that kind of example you’re really quickly going to be amazed at just how limited your food choices are.

Now, sugar in itself as an actual chemical doesn’t have these amazing obesity causing properties that people try to make it out to have. I know people point to insulin and yell and scream about the effect of insulin on fat loss. Just remember we’ve been eating sugar for quite some time and there are lean people in this world that eat an amazing abundance of sugar and there are obese people who eat an amazing abundance of sugar as a proportion of their diet.

Again, just like we talked about earlier, with sugar you’re looking at the poison that is in the dose. It is very easy to over eat sugar. Even though fat has the most calories per gram sugar is so ABUNDANT in everything we eat, especially in the foods that don’t go bad. Packaged foods tend to be the thing we have in our homes. It’s sort of our general go-to when we’ve run out of healthy foods.

It’s easy to say “Okay. I’m going to grab the crackers. I’m going to grab the cookies,” or the bread, or make some toast. It’s all the foods that are EASY and CONVENIENT. That’s why sugar is important in our healthy eating and avoiding overeating lifestyle, but it’s not because of the horrible chemical properties it has as much it is it’s abundance in our society and in our day to day lives.

Craig: All right, well. So, if it is not the biggest enemy, and I’m not even sure if you mentioned that it was or wasn’t, but is there an enemy bigger than sugar to our fat loss success?

Brad: Oh ,yeah. A bigger enemy is calories. However, since calories aren’t actually a thing you can’t pick up,  you can’t touch it. We have to look further than that. It really becomes the sort of mindlessness and apathy we have towards eating. We have this sort of addiction to food, and it’s almost like a cult of food.

We think that food gives us strength. We know that there’s certain times we should eat, and we shouldn’t eat, and we get conflicting messages on whether we should be eating during our workouts or not during our workouts, or before, or after, when we get up in the morning or before we go to bed, and we’re just constantly bombarded by these messages to eat.

You’re sitting in front of your TV, and you’re eating your organic crackers with your hummus while watching commercials for McDonald’s and you’re laughing at the type of people who eat at McDonald’s because they’re not healthy but you are, but during that one commercial you’ve already POUNDED BACK 300 CALORIES worth of crackers and hummus.

It just becomes overwhelming. So, it’s the calorie and our inability to disassociate what we eat with our health. As weird as that sounds, if we could just get over the idea that generally eating less is healthy, and that you don’t have to overeat healthy foods to be healthy, that’s when we start to win.

So, not only is it the calorie that’s this great enemy, but it’s our addiction or infatuation with it thinking that we need to eat an abundance of healthy foods in order to be healthy, when, in fact, just eating less is probably more healthful than overeating but eating healthy foods. So, it’s the calorie and the addiction we have to eating for specific purposes that seems to be our biggest enemy.

That’s all for today. Join me tomorrow when Brad talks a little about calories and calorie intake. Click here for part 5.