For many, the impetus behind the anti-diet culture movement is all about putting an end to fat-shaming and our unhealthy obsession with losing weight.

Diet culture is toxic, haven’t you heard?

For many, the impetus behind the anti-diet culture movement is all about putting an end to fat-shaming and our unhealthy obsession with losing weight.

While this is a noble cause, it’s not what this piece is about. Because the truth is, 50 percent of my clients have expressed to me a desire to lose weight—mostly for health, emotional, and aesthetic reasons. I’d like to help them reach their goals.

I truly believe the diet culture is hurting our chances of achieving long-term body composition changes, and more importantly, improved health. Be it the latest 7-day cleanse that promises to fix your gut or speed up your metabolism, or the popular 6-week or 30-day diet challenge of the year, more often than not we find ourselves back to the drawing board the moment the short-term diet or challenge is over.

So if diets don’t work, what does?

Build the Right Habits

I’m a big fan of Precision Nutrition’s principles, hence why I’m currently going through their Level 1 coaching course.

At the heart of it, success comes not from following an exact plan that leaves you feeling guilty when you fall off course, but from taking every imperfect day as it comes, by making as many right choices as you can along the way—but also knowing you’re going to make mistakes, too. Success comes from working on your nutrition by constantly striving to build better habits.

I know that sounds like just more fluffy rhetoric, so here are three small, practical things you can do RIGHT now—like today—to lay the foundation to see results.

They might seem insignificant on their own, but if you keep building on them, and adding more small actions each week and each month, I guarantee you’ll gain more than embarking on those quarterly turmeric cleanses.

1. The Five-Minute Action

This is sort of like the concept of compound interest: Over time, it adds up!

Choose one, small, emotionally and mentally manageable change you’re willing to make today.

I interviewed a Precision Nutrition client a while back who lost 100lb over the course of a year. The first five-minute action she committed was taking the stairs at work. Literally, she just started walking three flights of stairs. This small step was the starting point for what became a huge and lasting change.

Maybe for you, it’s cutting sugar from your coffee or committing to eating vegetables with every meal. Keep the action small and manageable, and once it feels normal, add in a new five-minute action.

2. Chew Your Food

It’s possible you have never considered this one, but chewing your food more thoroughly could be the answer to your digestion issues—bloating, cramping, diarrhea, and constipation—and may help you lose weight. And it may also help your habit of eating too much.

How so?

Well, digestion starts in the mouth. Salivary amylase breaks down starch, and the more you chew, the more your food gets exposed to this enzyme, which kickstarts the digestion problem. Also, when you break your food down into smaller pieces from chewing it more—aim for 30 chews per bite—it’s then more manageable for your body to process, and also helps you absorb more nutrients. This goes a long way in helping your metabolism becomes more efficient.

This Chinese study found that chewing more led to weight loss and an increase in energy.

The study looked at 30 young men, 14 of whom were obese and 16 were considered skinny. The first observation the researchers made was that the obese men tended to ingest their food faster and chewed it less than the skinny men.

After this was noted, the obese men were fed a high carbohydrate meal and asked to chew their food either 15 or 40 times per bite. The researchers found when they chewed more, they actually ingested 12 percent fewer calories.

The researchers believe chewing more leads to lower levels of the hormone ghrelin and higher levels of the appetite-suppressing hormone called cholecystokinin. Together, these hormones tell the brain when to start and stop eating. So basically, chewing more creates a hormonal response in your body that stops you from eating when you’re full, helping you to maintain a healthy weight.

So, chew more. And start at dinner tonight.

3. Failure As Feedback

One of the biggest reasons I have seen clients fall off the healthy eating horse is because they’re discouraged because they failed.

But as my good friend Jennifer Broxterman, a registered dietician and the owner of NutritionRx, explains, it comes down to changing the way you think about failure.

“Failure should be seen as feedback, not as a result,” Broxterman said. She encourages her clients to view feedback like data points a scientist would use to figure something out. And to view it with a mixture of curiosity, compassion and radical honesty.

“Let’s be curious, kind, and truly honest about what pushed you off your course,” she explained.

When you change the way you think about failure, and when you view it as an opportunity to change something in the future, rather than an outcome that causes you pain in the present, you’ll be able to embrace the course—bumpy as it may be—to long-term change.

4. Bonus Tip: Be Patient

As the cliché goes, change doesn’t happen overnight. (And it doesn’t come from a 6-week diet.)

But change can start to happen right now in three simple steps:

1. Pick a small, manageable five-minute action and turn it into a habit. Repeat.
2. Chew your food 30 times a bite.
3. If you mess up, chill out. Be kind. Be compassionate. Figure out what threw you off. And then continue.

The post The Toxicity of Diet Culture appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It is tough to figure out exactly what and how much to eat when you embark on a workout or weight loss plan. There is so much conflicting information online and so many different diets around. Having a good idea of what makes up the food we eat and how much energy these foods contain is essential, and I think everyone should know the basics.

I believe basic food education should be covered in schools and would significantly help in health and weight management. Having said that, what I want to focus on in this article are all the athletes and fitness enthusiasts who already know the basics. They know a potato is mostly a carb. They know an egg contains protein and fat. They know white bread is made from refined flour and that an apple has about 25 grams of carbs.

Many people who come my way are already athletes with this basic knowledge but who train and workout every day but still can’t lose weight and they don’t necessarily feel good. More often than not these athletes are sticking religiously to their apps and other methods of calibrating, counting and recording every single calorie they consume and doing what these apps tell them. So why are they still struggling with their weight and why do they feel like crap?

The Dangers of Fixating On a Number

Assuming that we know the basics for good overall education about what we put into our bodies, I find that meticulously counting calories can be very destructive. Counting calories provides a tool for people with disordered eating to limit their calories by skimping on meals or to gorge themselves and then hit the gym later in an attempt to burn it off and balance the scales again, so to speak.

Counting calories can promote disordered eating behaviors such as food denial, gorging, and overexercising—all of which are very detrimental to the body and puts it in a continually stressed state.

Another negative factor of being fixated on numbers means that the overall mindset is more likely about the calories and not about what is healthy. Decisions are more likely to be made on whether to eat that cake based on how many calories it has rather than if that food is actually beneficial from a nutritional or health perspective. I know this first hand.

Growing up as a gymnast and feeling pressured to be thin, my focus around food initially was about calories. Many of my food choices as an athlete were based on how many calories there were rather than if that food was beneficial to my body and if it would help my performance.

With this mindset, I often chose food that wasn’t the best for me and figured I could just “work it off” at the gym. But the bottom line was that I didn’t feel good and that was because I wasn’t listening to my body.

I did not count calories to prepare for this show. Instead, I listened to my body.

Tune In to Your Body

Our bodies are the most amazing machines and they are constantly telling us what they need. We are laced with this intricate array of nerves throughout our bodies and with a constant feedback loop system that sends information back and forth to tell us all about our inside world, our outside world, and what we need in order to maintain homeostasis. The body is finely tuned and it works super hard to maintain a constant equilibrium.

The problem is that we have become so disconnected in this day and age that we don’t actually listen to our bodies—instead, we rely on technology. Rather than our hunger being a cue that we need to eat, or bloating to be a sign that that particular food might not agree with us, we check in with our calorie counter and eat the 300 calories because that is what it says to do, whether our body needs it, wants it, or not.

It’s Not Just About Macros

There is a lot more to weight loss and overall health than just counting calories and sticking to a set of macros. I look at it like baking a cake.

Firstly, all the right ingredients need to be used, and this includes food that works best for you based on how you feel, not just what macros it contains based on an app.

Secondly, all the ingredients, including the food that is right for you and your body, needs to be used in the correct amounts in order to make the perfect cake.

The macros and calorie content of food is just part of the ingredients. There are also other parts of the ingredients that make up that perfect recipe for health and weight loss. This includes our state of mind, stress levels, and our sleep and wake cycles. The human body is so finely tuned and everything affects everything else.

For optimal results, we need to be able to tune in to our bodies or we will forever be disconnected. Are you hungry? Are you not hungry but eating anyway because there is food in front of you? Are you stressed, anxious, and nervous and don’t feel like eating? Does certain food bloat you? Does this meal give you good energy? Do you feel better with a couple more hours of sleep? These are questions that we should be asking ourselves constantly, yet most of us just go about our days accepting how we feel without actually stopping to ask why.

Personally, after being on this health and fitness journey for decades, I now make choices based on health and how I feel because I am so tuned in to what my body needs. My focus is on nourishing my body, mind, and soul for overall health.

I stop eating when I am full. I eat when I need to. I rest when I need to. I move when I need to. I breathe and meditate daily to reduce stress. I work daily on staying positive and as a result, I have never been leaner, more energetic, or healthier.

Listening to Your Body Is the Best Tool

There is no doubt that for optimal health getting educated about food is essential. There are some great apps to use as tools to help learn the basics but don’t get caught up in the numbers.

For optimal health, we need to go to a deeper level that encompasses so much more than just macros. Listen to your body because that is the best tool of all and if you tune in, you’ll have a much more successful health, fitness, and weight loss journey.

The post The Best Tool For Overall Health appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Every year I watch the masses embrace their new diets and workout plans in January only to frustratingly witness their failure long before summer. If asked, I do my best to interject experience and point people to the only sustainable approach I’ve ever seen work over any significant period of time.

My attempts, more often than not, are fruitless, clouded behind the wall of modern diet myths: “You eat bananas? I thought they were an unhealthy fruit.” “I’d like to eat oatmeal, but they have too many carbs.” Or, “Yeah I don’t eat almonds or nuts because they have so many calories.”

Nutrition, in particular, is a minefield of bad advice and new diet adherents tend to be as dogmatic about their chosen path as any religious fundamentalist. But there is rarely a new nutrition program. Rather, we see fad diets rebranding the same old overly-simplified approaches.

Ketogenic diets are all the rage, but Dr. Atkins published his first book in 1972. Counting your macros and the Weight Watchers point system (which brilliantly makes money on the concept of dividing by 100 to track smaller numbers) are new versions of that oldest and most distressing diet delusion: Just count calories.

The Misadventures of Calorie Counting

The foundation of the counting calories approach is the belief that weight gain is completely dependent on your energy balance.

That is, if you eat more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight and if you eat less, you will lose weight. In its broadest, most generalized application, this approach is probably marginally true, but these oversimplifications create terrible diet programs and fuel the larger issues that keep most people in Western cultures fat, sick, and hanging by a thread.

There is a large vested interest that wants you to believe balancing calories is all that matters. Coca-Cola, Cargill, Kellogg, Frito-Lay, Nabisco, Nestle, General Mills, and our entire massive convenience and junk food industry want you to believe calories are the only issue.

Their narrative is that you should eat and drink their goodies, just move or eat them while cutting out that other stuff you don’t find quite as delicious. If you really want to optimize your calories or get to eat more, they’ve got a lineup of low-calorie products just for you.

Fat, being nine calories per gram, is removed and replaced by that tasty, cheap sugar that only rings in at four calories per gram. Better yet, sodas have zero calorie options that use artificial sweeteners and fairy tears to bring you that great taste at no caloric cost.

This entire strategy is, of course, founded upon the idea that physique is all that matters, not health. The reality is, for many reasons, counting calories is not a good approach for physique or health:

1. Nutrient Deficiency: First of all, despite their high-calorie load and unfortunate name, fats are not bad. In fact, it is essential to eat all three macronutrients: fats, carbohydrates, and protein. You also need all the micronutrients—those vitamins and minerals most available in and transported through real whole foods. The point is to get all these from quality sources. Your cereal may be “fortified” but it can never substitute for a good old fashioned spinach and bell pepper omelet, cooked in coconut oil and served with avocado slices, a few berries, and melon. But how many calories is that and why do I care about nutrients if I just want to look good? Patience, Grasshopper.
2. Poor Food Choices: Most people intent on counting calories will spend their grocery trips avoiding the less processed whole foods on the periphery of the store that they should be eating because these don’t come with packages that have handy calorie breakdowns. Thus, they opt for inferior processed products. There is often an inverse relationship between foods with nutrition labels and their nutrition.
3. Unsustainable: Counting calories is no way to live. We are not meant to come to each meal adding numbers, checking apps, and making bargains with ourselves about what we will eat now and skip later. Certainly, there are times early in a person’s nutritional education where they will need to be more conscious and critical about meals in order to internalize a healthier eating framework. Writing down what you eat each day for a week usually leaves people shocked by the frequency of their daily concessions. Furthermore, healthy people will often take steps to check menus or plan ahead on those days that are out of the ordinary. But counting calories every day is an insane, neurotic lifestyle that only the extremely anxious could even try to maintain for any significant period of time. You can’t white knuckle nutrition.
4. Metabolism Crushing: Your metabolism is this unbelievably important x-factor percolating behind the scenes of all eating. All your body’s natural functions have an energy cost. You burn a lot of calories each day just going through the arduous process of being alive. The number of calories burned each day without moving is referred to as a basal metabolic rate. Calorie-counters tend to worship this number while constantly pissing on it.

Get to Know Your Metabolism

More muscular people will have a higher basal metabolic rate because muscle is very calorie expensive to maintain. Movement, also, triggers the body to metabolize a bit more. Eating actually spurs the metabolism to go to work processing food, thus burning calories while never as many as are consumed.

When calories are restricted the metabolism slows down. The body is conserving energy. Therefore, you may be eating less, but the body has down-regulated as well. You are burning less.

Restricting calories is not always a bad thing. Losing weight, after all, will necessitate a transition towards a slightly lower basal metabolic rate. But calorie restriction tends to be disastrous as it is typically applied in the calorie-counting realm.

Calorie-counters and their calorie-restricting, “I’m just hardly going to eat for a few weeks,” brethren are chronic yo-yoers. The process follows a variation of the following example:

• Tony has weighed about 230 pounds for a couple of years. His basal metabolic rate is 2,500 calories per day. Based on his movement norms he averages about 3,000 calories burned per day.
• In an effort to lose weight he restricts his calorie consumption to 2,000 per day and adds three days a week on the stair-stepper where he burns an extra 500 calories. That is a weekly calorie deficit of 8,500 calories. Conventional calorie counting wisdom suggests that 3,500 calories make a pound, therefore he should lose two and a half pounds per week.
• Yet, in the first three weeks, he only loses five pounds, a mixture of both muscle and fat. By week four Tony is starting to skip workouts and succumb to the cookies and other baked goods always populating the office. Tired and convinced that this “healthy eating” stuff is impossible, he quits the entire diet experiment and resumes his old patterns.
• Yet his basal metabolic rate has slowed to 2,000 calories per day. Within two months he’s gained the five pounds back plus another five, despite eating in the same manner as when he maintained weight for years. He is now 235 pounds and slightly less muscular.

Calorie-counting and calorie restriction are not fun. They certainly aren’t where I’d suggest people start on their nutritional journey. When operating from deprivation beginners will always eventually quit, falling back to old patterns. Play the long game. Any change should be sustainable for a lifetime.

Hormones: Not Just a Teenager Thing

There is an obvious truth sabotaging the entire calorie-counting paradigm: you have no idea how many calories you actually need to burn.

There are a billion websites that will calculate the basal metabolic rate for you using your height, weight, and age, but these are all shoddy, variable guesses. There is just too much going on in your body, much of which fluctuates over time. I’ll illustrate this with a few more examples:

• Sandy (girl) and Sonny (boy) are 15-year-old twins. They eat the same foods and both get most of their activity playing soccer for their respective high-school teams. Both have begun eating more in the past year, not because they were told to eat more calories, but because they feel hungrier. Both are gaining weight. Most of Sandy’s weight is fat and it is going to very specific areas. Most of Sonny’s weight gain is muscle. Same foods. Same activities. Different results. Odd?

No, this is characteristic of puberty. Sandy and Sonny’s bodies are working with very different hormones intent to create very different physiological developments. Take another example:

• Mike and John are 24-year-old twin roommates and best friends. They eat together almost every meal and spend the majority of their free time together. Mike begins lifting weights three days per week. John uses this time to walk his dog. They both burn about 250 calories in this hour period.
• After a year of these patterns, Mike has gained ten pounds and John has gained seven, but Mike’s is all muscle where John’s is all fat. John decides to start coming to the gym with Mike. However, convinced he needs to cut fat, he goes to the treadmill while Mike continues to lift weights.
• Mike is maxing and John is jogging. After six months Mike has not gained any more weight, but he’s maintained the muscle he built. John has only lost two pounds—one of muscle and one of fat. They both quit going to the gym. Six months later, Mike has lost five pounds (mostly muscle) and John has gained four. Odd?

No, this is characteristic of the hormonal response to activity. Despite eating the same foods and burning the same amount of calories, Mike gained muscle because heavy resistance training triggered a very different hormonal response.

His body, therefore, used food differently. When John began training, his physique changed little because he ate the same and running at low intensity elicits little hormonal response. Six months after they had both quit, Mike loses weight because half the muscle he gained withers and, yet having gained ten pounds of muscle, his body metabolizes more in a day.

John simply stopped burning calories. After this two-year process, Mike is five pounds heavier, but it is mostly lean muscle. John is up nine pounds, mostly fat. Take home point: Training changes your hormones. It changes how you use the food you eat.

• Tyler and Tyson are thirty-year-old best friends. They’re both six feet tall and 200 pounds. For the new year, they decide to clean up their eating by counting calories. They both begin getting 2,000 calories a day.
• All of Tyler’s food is packaged, processed, and easily added. Tyson eats only fruits, vegetables, meat, beans, and whole grains. He’s done a lot of measuring early on.
• After six months Tyler has lost 10 pounds. He is tired, moody, and frequently sick. Tyson has lost 18 pounds. He feels better than he ever has. He sits less, walks taller and more vigorously, and is even planning on joining a morning running group.

Clearly many factors may account for the difference. Tyson may have better genetics. He may have a better work environment, get more sunshine, and have a shorter commute home.

Yet, anecdotally, this gulf in experience typifies the differences between everyone I know who chooses to restrict calories with package foods (Tylers) versus those who eat natural whole foods (Tyson).

People who are not nutrient deficient utilize food more efficiently and feel better. They naturally move more and engage in more constructive activities.

Hormones decide what is done with foods. Some foods are much better utilized by the body and promote more fluid hormonal reactions and more physical vitality. Additionally, activity, sleep, stress, environment, genetics, and probably more than I’m forgetting will affect your hormones and how the body uses food.

The delusion that you can somehow know how many calories you burned in a day would require you to know your exact resting metabolism (which is always in flux), to know exactly how many calories were expended (did I have more energy and walk more enthusiastically throughout the day?), and a host of other factors that tend to distract from the behaviors that drive long-term health and improved physique.

Google, What Is the Answer?

I shouldn’t count calories. Got it. So, all those keto people have it right?

Not exactly.

While ketosis may be very attractive for an ultra-endurance athlete and there is intriguing evidence surrounding long fasts and the purging of cancer cells, I’d confidently recommend most people avoid the ketogenic diet. People flock to the idea that by eliminating carbs the body will start using fat for energy.

This will happen, however, since people are eating mostly fat, the energy still mostly comes from food, not the fat stores of the body. Any weight loss is probably the effect of fewer processed foods. Packaged foods are inordinately full of empty carbs like refined sugars, but there are also many great carb-heavy foods (fruits, vegetables, oats) that the keto crowd misses out on. Most importantly, keto is probably unsustainable.

We all have to live in this carb-filled world. A ketogenic diet requires a strong ability to be very counter-cultural with your social and eating behaviors. This is not a common attribute in people adopting diets. The yo-yo issues arise when people fail and, unless they are locked in elite performers or extremely disciplined people who have consistently eaten healthy for years, they do.

So, the Whole 30 diet must be the answer? No. Not necessarily. The Whole 30 diet might be a good framework to teach you how to cook nutritious meals and look at foods differently, but it is usually followed by a swift return to the old bad patterns.

The ketogenic diet and the Whole 30 are full of needless restrictions that serve only to funnel you to buy more of their niche products while pulling you away from good options that you might love. Beans, for example, are a staple of some of the world’s longest living populations like the Okinawans of Japan, the Nicoya of Costa Rica, and the Ikaria of Greece who also eat such taboo items as potatoes and whole grains.

We need to stop looking for quick fixes and start looking at food differently. The keto diet, Weight Watchers, and general calorie-counting all distract from common sense and practicality. Have some pinto beans. Have some oatmeal.

Stop counting the almonds. I don’t care that seven make up 1 point. Just eat them. Have a sweet potato and an apple and some peanuts. Sauté and eat up as much broccoli and carrots as your belly can hold. THESE THINGS AREN’T MAKING YOU FAT!

It doesn’t even matter where you fall on the energy balance vs. hormone debate. If you eat only/mostly real foods available in nature, your body will regulate itself. You’ll hardly have the ability to get out of energy balance. There is this innate human mechanism, whereby your body alerts you with a feeling of fullness when it is prudent to stop eating.

Fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, oats, barley, brown rice, chicken, and fish are not the problem.

If you are looking to make a change in how you eat, you’d be better off eating healthy things when you are hungry, while occasionally allowing treats and a night free from boundaries.

At the root of most eating woes is a lack of understanding, lack of self-mastery, and little understanding about environment design.

If self-mastery and environmental design are the issues, check out my free e-book, The Essential Guide to Self-Mastery.These understandings more than anything else are the route to freedom and flow in life. Avoid the typical diet traps and instead, embrace self-education and self-mastery.

The post Anti-Diet Common Sense: The Banana is Not Making You Fat appeared first on Breaking Muscle.