When was the last time you looked at the ingredient label of your food, rather than the calorie count?
I don't count calories, because, well, calories don't count. No one knows exactly what your body burns daily - and the brain actually burns the most energy, that is if you engage in creative thinking (which is rarely done looking at the calorie counter on the treadmill btw.). Calories are not created equal in how your body responds to them and burns them.
Calories were originally determined in foods based in an isolated laboratory setting. There was no consideration of how the human body responds to foods, once they enter the digestive system. This makes calorie count a complete waste of time. Thank goodness for that, because I don't know anyone who enjoys weighing and measuring their food - it's the first step towards a disordered eating behavior, that can be very difficult to give up.
Chemicals are a different beast, however. Most of the food we eat today is not food. It looks like food, but it is designed from a marketing perspective to drive us to come back for more. Along with tapping into the social pressure to be skinny by putting on messages of no-fat and zero calories. Unfortunately, neither of which will make us thrive or slender. Initially every diet works that cut calories drastically, the issue is that it changes your biochemical balance and then you pay the price and gain even more weight yet you may be eating still less. Here's the paradox: we tend to get so attached to what worked once (even short-term), that we go back and copy that. With every dieting attempt we screw up our biochemical balance even more.
Most foods with an ingredient list over 3 is designed to make you addicted - to come back for more.
This is not really breaking news: when you sell products, either they need to deliver results, or they need to make you addicted on a biochemical level.
Our food cravings are based on which chemicals we are addicted to.
If you are on a low-fat diet, you will eventually find yourself being constantly hungry. Because your body and hunger/satiety hormones NEED fats to be quiet. Especially saturated fats such as those types found in coconut, egg yolks, organic butter/ghee and grassfed meat.
Your BRAIN is built up by fat. Low-fats diets loaded with chemicals, such as aspartame, carrageenan, MSG, isolates and high-fructose corn syrup strongly disrupt your brain chemical balance, and shut down your leptin sensitivity (this is your key fat-burning and appetite regulating hormone).
The thing is, it takes years to develop a full-blown addictive biochemistry caused by these food additives. This means that in the meantime, you will simply experience it as a sluggish metabolism or an increase in cravings and think that your willpower may be off.
Next Monday, next diet, you will try harder --- yet with every bite, if you are taking in any of the above mentioned chemicals, you are stepping further away from a balanced and feel-good sensation on a biochemical level.
You can print out the list of Top Chemical Calories here and check off with your next shopping trip.
As a rule of thumb: Always trust butter from the cow more than processed margarine and industrial made products. Nature is not designed to make you sick, addicted or nutty - it's intelligently designed to heal you.
Food is medicine - that is when it's real, whole and untouched by man.
Get the Chemical Calorie guide.
Reference: Nutr Metab (Lond). 2013 Jun 19;10(1):44.
Prediabetic changes in gene expression induced by aspartame and monosodium glutamate in Trans fat-fed mice.
Collison KS