5 Diet Tips You Should Ignore

Most people are confused about what they should and shouldn’t be eating. There are so much conversation around diet that diet it self has become so corrupt and confusing. It no wonder that many people who tried to change their diet end up giving up. Science is clear about certain things so here are 5 diet tips you should definitely ignore. 

The nutrition science community has known for decades that a plant-based diet comprising lots of whole foods is the way to go in terms of healthy diet. That's nothing new. However, journalists and various industry interests have worked hard to obscure the truth and insert doubt. We often hear about how certain healthy foods are or how they’re “backed by science.” But more often than not, the science is phony, and the motivation is to make money, not help people make better food choices. 

Cutting through the crap can be difficult for the average person because they aren’t sure who can give nutritional advice. In this post, I'm going to take a look at some of the diet tips that you’ll likely read but you can definitely just ignore. 

Juice Your Meals To Lose Weight

Juicing is pretty trendy right now. But juicing isn’t as healthful as you might think. Can you guess why? 

Watching people down pint after pint of green juices might look like the pinnacle of health, but don’t let the coloration fool you: juice diets are not optimal. The reason for this is because juicing removes a lot of what makes fruits and veggies healthy: their skin and fiber. The majority of phytonutrients in plants from apples to zucchini is contained in the skin. Juicing removes the water and some of the vitamins from veggies, but it doesn’t retain the fiber. What’s more, the small amount of roughage that does get through is so smashed to bits that it doesn’t provide a particularly suitable habitat for your gut bacteria, adversely affecting stool formation. 

Still some people did lose weight on juice cleanses. They did. But that’s because vegetable juices contain so few calories compared to the standard western diet that practically anybody will lose weight on a juice diet. Juicing, however, removes many of the components which make plants healthy. Avoid relying on juices for your meals and eat the whole apple instead. 

Eat Every Couple Of Hours

This one is a classic, especially in the fitness community. There are two main ideas behind eating every couple of hours. The first is that by eating every couple of hours, you’ll “keep your metabolism up and burn more calories.” The more food you give your body, the more muscle it’ll build and the more energy you’ll burn.

The second reason is to do with the “grazing hypothesis.” The idea is that humanity, in its ancient past, ate food continually throughout the day. Ancient people didn’t sit down to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and so neither should we. When we do, we work against our biology. 

Science shows, however, that humans benefit on several metabolic levels when they go significant periods WITHOUT food. People who stop eating at six o’clock in the evening and resume at 9 am the next morning have fifteen hours of fat burning. What’s more, they enter a fasted state which signals to their cells to clean house and behave more youthfully. Eating regularly means that you prevent your body from getting into this healthful state and could lead to weight gain. 

Count Calories

Calorie counting is a staple of the modern diet industry. But the average human managed to maintain their weight perfectly adequately throughout history without knowing what a calorie was. How did they accomplish this?

Our bodies evolved with sophisticated calorie-sensing mechanisms. Our brains, gut, and hormones interact to ensure that we deliver the correct number of calories to our cells with minimal variation. The problem is that modern foods can bypass this system, encouraging us to eat more than our biological needs and store fat. Chips, cakes, biscuits, hot dogs, sugary drinks, and French fries undermine natural feelings of satiety, leading us to eat more than we need inadvertently. 

When you eat the sort of foods that humans evolved alongside, however, maintaining weight is easy. You just eat until you’re full, and that’s it. No calorie counting. No weighing food. The body works it all out naturally, once hunger mechanisms normalize. After a couple of years eating like your average neolithic peasant, all but the most obese will achieve an optimal weight.

Avoid all fatty foods

Fat is a necessary element in our diets. Fat is fuel but also our body needs fat for normal brain function, hormone balance, cellular integrity and processing some vitamins. Fats also help curb appetite and stabilize energy levels. So avoiding fat as part of a diet is generally a bad idea. 

The thing about fat is to know the difference between the healthy and unhealthy varieties.

There are two types of good fats: monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. The mono fats can be found in oils and plants, such as olive oil, sunflower oil, nuts, avocados and olives, to name a few. This fat helps the body decrease the levels of cholesterol and then to keep this level balanced, stabilizing your heart rhythm and preventing cardiovascular disease. Polyunsaturated fat is often found in various vegetable oils, like sunflower, sesame and soy. Both omega-3 and omega-6 are essential as they are important for normal inflammation operation, nerve and brain function, and overall good health.

However, although eating foods naturally high in healthy fats is beneficial to our body, putting a lot of added fat on your plate isn't a good idea either. Adding too much fat can increase calories to the point where is no healthy.

Eat everything in moderation

Eating everything in moderation may seams as a good idea to live by. Having a sugary brownie or small hamburger and fries once a while doesn't seams like drawback from healthy diet. But if you use it as a regular excuse, you could be setting yourself back on wrong path.

Think about it... A piece of cake Monday, an order of fries on Tuesday, a scoop of ice cream on Wednesday, McDonalds take-away on Thursday... so on and so forth. If you are eating treats all the time, you are not moderating. Enjoy them sometimes, maybe yes, but other times swap it with satisfying and yummy replacements. Like why not making Cacao Walnut Brownies yourself without using refined unhealthy sugars. Or why not make healthy baked not fried Chicken Tenders for the whole family. 

For those favorite foods, find healthier options and recipes. That way you will still enjoy delish foods that are healthy, and won't cause you to feel out of control when you eat it. 

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What’s the most doubting diet tip you came across? Let me know in comments below. 

Xoxo, Natalie