Carbs make you fat, carbs are bad for you.
Eating after certain times of the day, like after 7:00 pm, will make you fat OR not eating breakfast is the key to losing weight.
If you don’t eat organic, gluten free, diary free, etc...you can’t lose weight.
The vegan diet or paleo diet or keto diet, etc...is the best and/or most healthy diet for you?
You have a broken metabolism and that is why you can’t lose weight.
Those are the top 5 lies I hear on a regular basis but before I tell you why they aren’t true I have one personal pet peeve. Anything marketed to you that says cleanse or detox is bullshit. Don't buy into the myth that any kind of cleanse or detox is the solution to your weight loss problem. The best way to cleanse or detox is through some guided fasting, exercise, drinking water, and eating whole foods.
Here are the truths to combat the top 5 lies about weight loss.
Yes, we don’t technically need carbs to survive but to perform optimally, feel good, and get the majority of our micronutrients, carbs are important. Carbs are our bodies preferred fuel source and our bodies have been fine tuned over 1000’s of years to how they function today. It’s not about carbs being bad for us, it’s about the type of carbs and if it isn’t a vegetable or a fruit don’t eat it when you’re trying to lose weight. We aren’t even going to debate whether fat and protein are good or bad for you, they are essential and need to be obtained from our diet in a balanced way to optimize health.
When you eat, also called nutrient timing, is not critical for weight loss. It can help with not getting hungry if you are trying to lose weight and it can help with mental and physical performance but it’s not necessary for losing weight. Being in a calorie deficit, having adequate muscle and eating whole, unprocessed foods is what matters to lose weight, not when you eat it.
Organic may have more nutrients in it but probably not, just less pesticides. Gluten free may help your microbiome and digestion but unless you have celiacs disease it’s not critical for weight loss. Diary is very calorically dense and most people have trouble digesting it well so I would skip it but you can still lose weight if you eat it. The bottom line is they are all helpful but none of them will help if you eat to many calories and don’t burn enough calories.
It depends on your goals and as you age you need more bioavailable proteins to stimulate muscle growth and preserve muscle. That means eating more protein and stimulating muscle grow with exercise is more important than a polarizing diet trend. They all have some valuable principles but each one of them also condemns certain healthy foods or even whole macronutrients. The only way to really know if one of those diets works for you is to try it and see how your body reacts.
You can't technically break your metabolism but you can continue to down regulate it by eating less and less calories and dieting not only too long but too intensely. Our bodies are way to smart to starve to death without extreme conditions. There are lots of built in mechanisms that preserve energy by decreasing how much you move, think, talk, etc...if there is not much energy coming into your body. Your metabolism isn’t broken it’s just to smart to be tricked by a linear decrease in calorie reduction over months and months. That is why you need the guidance of a coach to help you with periodizing your nutrition over months and months to “reset” your bodies thermostat and be comfortable with having less stored body fat, more muscle and a healthier metabolism.
Don’t be tricked into thinking there are short cuts to losing weight, maintaining muscle and living a healthy life. It’s possible and truly rewarding when you work at it over months and years to create a lifestyle that supports a healthy body and mind. This can be challenging in every way but with guidance from a coach you can do it.
Live Well, Move Well
~Coach Brant