“Help me lose weight.”
How often do I hear these words? Usually it takes about thirty seconds after someone finds out I’m a nutritionist that I hear them.
I remember hearing them for the first time -- in the most unexpected place -- right after graduating from college with my nutrition degree.
Papua New Guinea, my Peace Corps post.
I stood with the woman regaled in a colorful top and skirt as she explained how fat she had become. My head spun. Hadn’t I just devoted the first two years of my career to helping children stricken with nutritional deficiencies I’d studied like marasmus and kwashiorkor? Wasn’t I going to a so-called “third world” country where people were starving and malnourished? Hadn’t I seen the photographs of babies with protruding ribs and swollen bellies?
Instead, this woman stood there chomping away at a fried meal, complaining that she needed to lose weight.
My immediate instinct was to fly home.
After that initial culture shock, I did encounter secondary malnutrition out in the villages due to pulmonary disease, but the lack of food was not an issue where I lived. What was an issue, however, was the influence of the western diet on the native culture, the woman at the coffee shop being a prime example. Certain her first fried meal came to the country with colonists, growth and development, I wrestled with our influence over the world’s eating habits. Granted, Australia was primarily responsible for corrupting the eating habits of the Papua New Guineans, but I still felt a pang of guilt knowing McDonalds and McDonalds wannabes had permeated the planet.
Which is getting me back to “Help me lose weight.”
You want me to help you? You want me to tell you how? Three words.
Cut the cr@p.
Seriously. If you want to lose the weight, cut out all the garbage you eat. And don’t pretend like you don’t know what it is. Thanks to the internet and a 7 billion dollar dieting industry, we all know what the garbage food is.
But, if you honestly don’t know, let me give you a refresher.
1. Sugar. First and foremost, sugar in all its glorious forms from high fructose corn syrup to table sugar has to go. I know. It’s not easy. We’re sugarcoated from head to toe. We celebrate every landmark occasion with something sweet. Cupcakes are popping up everywhere like ripe zits on a teenager (yes, that’s gross, but my goal is to gross you out until you stop). Seriously, though? A cupcake kiosk at the mall? Why do we have a thriving cupcake trend happening at the same time we realize we have never been collectively fatter as a nation? Probably for the same reason we’re experiencing a renaissance of burgers and fries. Huh?
Well, I know it’s tough to cut out the sugar, but if you want to lose the jiggle, you gotta lose the sugar.
No sugar.
You don’t have to cut it out cold turkey. I’m not here to give you the shakes or a major migraine, but know where it’s coming from and start weaning. Check those food labels. Words like maltodextrin should not be on your food label anywhere. Barley malt, beet sugar, brown sugar, buttered syrup, cane juice crystals, cane sugar, caramel, corn syrup, crystalline fructose, carob sugar, castor sugar, demerara, dextran, diastatic malt, fructose, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, high fructose corn syrup, lactose, muscavado, panocha, rice syrup, sorghum syrup, sucrose, turbinado are all fancy names for sugar.
The food industry has found hundreds of ways to hide garbage that tastes good in your food. Know your labels if you’re eating processed food.
2. Alcohol. Alcohol consumption serves no one who is interested in being at the top of his/her health game. Sure, there’s drinking in moderation, and wine touts all kinds of resveratrol benefits, but the fact remains that most people who drink regularly battle the belly bulge. It’s simple. “Beer belly” got its name from scientific fact. Alcohol actually stimulates production of belly fat. Again, I’m not a teetotaler extremist who wants you to swear off the booze for a lifetime, I just want you to know the facts and own your behavior. And don’t tell me you’ve switched from beer to vodka because Weight Watchers says you can get more bang for less points. I knew a guy who did that and now has people trying to do an intervention with him.
Be very aware of your alcohol consumption, not so much because of the calories, but because of how it’s digested in the body and how it stimulates fat production.
3. Simple Carbs. These really are the same as sugar, but less obvious. White bread, rolls, white rice, most cereals, crackers, “enriched” breads, pretzels, potato chips, anything fried in batter. You get the picture. As soon as these processed grains reach our stomachs, the body registers them as sugar. No difference. They’re devoid of fiber and, unless they’re enriched, any vitamins or minerals or anything good for the body for that matter (if a product is "enriched," it's a red flag for over-processed, not whole grain and don't buy). Like sugar, simple carbs give us energy. If we don’t use it right away, which most of us don’t, it gets stored as glycogen in the liver or as fat. We only need a certain amount of carbs to keep our bodies’ energy fueled nicely. Unfortunately, when companies manufacture food, they usually process out of it all the important nutrients like fiber that help us get full and stop eating. A whole food is better for us for a reason.
By their nature, these “simple carbs” or “processed foods” actually cause us to overeat. There’s nothing left in them that helps us signal “full” so we eat and eat. Cereal is an example of this. Bowls and bowls later, you can still feel hungry.
It’s not impossible to replace these foods with whole grains, which do have fiber and nutrients intact in them, but if you’re used to the cocaine of carbohydrate foods – all the processed, white stuff – you’ll have to learn how to find the good stuff and get used to the taste. Most people, I find, are happy with the nuttier, heartier flavors of the whole grain foods after they try them.
These three things will be your main killers of any weight loss initiative. Sugar, alcohol and simple carbs. It's less about the fat and calories. More about what these three "foods" do to your body's physiological state. A little bit more than a tiny bit is too much. They must go or at least start to go.
If you dissect any diet book, they demonize these same three things in some way. I sometimes call myself a Paleo Beach Watcher – someone who sees the merits and even promotes the concepts in popular diet programs – but the truth is, it doesn’t have to be that complicated. You don’t have to detox for 42.5 hours or cut out every single carbohydrate until you go into ketosis or count a Big Mac as your points for the day. It’s way simpler. Those three words.
Help you lose weight?
OK. Let’s do it then.
