The holidays are officially over, and you’ve probably gained some weight. That means you’ll probably do one of two things: try to diet the weight off or shrug it off. Since either choice is a mighty mistake, I’m going to suggest a third option … and here’s the thing, it’s both easy and it works. However, before we go there, let’s see what’s wrong with our traditional choices.
Research shows that most people only gain between one and two pounds between U.S. Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, so it’s easy to see why we shrug it off. If you’re about to scream that your bathroom scale says it’s more like 4 or 5 pounds, be aware that the extra dinner rolls, desserts, and salty snacks result in a lot of water retention, so when you get back to your regular diet that 4 or 5 number will soon shrink to an “acceptable” pound or two, and that’s the classic case of weight creep.
Do the math. This annual “acceptance” will lead to severe weight issues in ten or twenty years. In fact, studies show that’s exactly what happens; we tend to gain about 5 to 10 percent body weight over ten years.
Yikes, I’ve gained a full two pounds! I’m going on a diet!
If this describes you, congratulations for being proactive, but if you’re going to follow the traditional weight-loss strategy of eating less and moving more, decades of hard data suggest you will fail.
Several studies from universities in the USA, including Harvard Medical School, (2) show that most people who diet will lose weight while dieting, then regain the lost weight and end up heavier than when they started.
The Folly of Dieting
Dieting for weight loss doesn’t work because it’s based on the false assumption that we’re eating too much food. The truth is we’re not eating enough food. Let me explain.
Most people are now getting more than 60% of their total calories (3) from fast-food, packaged food and ready-to-eat frozen foods, and if that describes your diet, then you’re suffering from malnutrition. As Michael Pollan put it, we’re eating high-calorie, nutrient-poor, food-like substances designed to make us overeat.
You may feel full shortly after scarfing a fast-food meal, but at the cellular level – where it really matters – you’re virtually starving. Sensing starvation, your body stores those empty calories as fat while it ramps up your survival system and makes you hungry. An hour or two later, after eating engineered food, you’re either avoiding food through sheer willpower or snacking to quell your hunger.
Option Number Three – To Lose Weight, You Need to Feed Your Body, Not Starve it!
In 2018, Obesity researcher, Dr. Kevin Hall, set up an experiment to determine the effects of eating real food to eating ultra-processed food. He recruited 20 healthy men and women to spend 28 days living at his Metabolic Research Facility.
For two weeks, 10 subjects ate a diet of non-processed foods (think home-cooked meals) while the other 10 participants ate a similar menu, which consisted of ultra-processed foods. The key to the validity of this experiment was that all meals in both diets were perfectly matched for total calories, macronutrients, fibre, sugar, sodium and even taste! Both groups said they liked the taste of either menu equally well.
The researchers tracked every morsel of food the subjects ate and carefully analyzed the effects of those foods on their weight, body fat and hormones, but here’s the kicker; the subjects were allowed to eat as much as they wanted on either diet – no restrictions.
Guess what happened? Those on the two-week natural food diet lost two pounds and saw improvements in all their biomarkers. Meanwhile, the subjects on the UPF diet unknowingly consumed an extra 508 calories per day, and it was no wonder; their hunger hormones rose, and their appetite-suppressing hormones dropped. In just two weeks, they gained two pounds and increased their body fat by almost a full pound.
When the subjects switched diets for the second two-week period, everything reversed. The group who had started the whole foods diet and lost weight regained it. The group who had gained weight in the first two weeks immediately lost weight by getting off the UPF diet.
Here’s the 2023 formula to lose excess fat and keep it off for good; eat real food. You can eat burgers, fries, pizza, and wings if it’s chemically free. The more you cut back on engineered pseudo food, the more you’ll feed your body, and a properly nourished body will automatically shed excess fat. And that’s the great irony of our obesity epidemic, eating food is obesity’s only cure.
