Snack smart! All calories are not created equal
Those 100-calorie packs are not as innocent as you think. Here’s the skinny
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Are 100-calorie packs healthy? July 11: Telemundo’s Maria Celeste talks to nutritional expert Dr. Mark Hyman about whether those 100-calorie packs of snacks are really good for you. Today show |
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The old concept that weight loss is simply a matter of calories in and calories out is wrong. Learn how the quality of the food you choose is more important than the amount you eat.
Eat more, weigh less: Eat real food
Unfortunately most of us have been brainwashed to believe that weight loss is simple math. Burn more than you eat and you will lose weight. Right?
Wrong!
In fact, you can eat much more food and lose weight. But here’s the catch. You have to eat real food. Just imagine what your great-great-grandmother had to eat. Everything came from a farmer’s field and nothing from a food chemist’s laboratory. Nothing was homogenized, refined or processed. There was no need for “nutrition labels” because nothing had labels.
The bottom line is that quality is MUCH more important than quantity. Eating only whole, fresh, real food completely eliminates the need for calorie counting, or measuring fat grams or counting carbs.
This works for one simple reason — you eat not only calories but also information. Eat the wrong information and you give your genes instructions to make you fat. Eat the right information and you give your genes instructions to lose weight. This is based on an exciting new understanding of how food talks to your genes called nutrigenomics.
And it doesn’t work slowly over years, but literally in minutes. Just try it for a few weeks. Don’t eat anything with a label. You are probably wondering what is left for you to eat.
It’s simple: real food. Vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, beans, whole grains (no flour because a bag of flour has a label), poultry, fish and eggs. That’s it. No counting calories, carbs or fat grams! Eat as much as you want and enjoy. Here are some examples of healthy and unhealthy snacks.
Foods to lose: Food allergies, inflammation and weight loss
Exciting new research helps pinpoint why some people just can’t lose weight. They are puffy. Puffy eyes, puffy ankles, puffy hands — and puffy bellies! Why do people get puffy? Allergies!
But I am not talking about pollen or dust allergies, nor am I talking about serious life-threatening food allergies from peanuts or shellfish (also known as IgE allergies). I am referring to low-grade, delayed reactions to food, that until recently have been completely ignored by conventional medicine.
A recent study broke incredible ground in our understanding of our obesity epidemic. Researchers examined two groups of children — obese and normal weight. They found the obese children had three problems (all related) that the thin children didn’t have.
First they were much more inflamed (as measured through a special blood test called C-reactive protein). Second, they had the beginnings of cholesterol plaques in their arteries. And third, they had 2½ times the level of delayed or IgG food allergies.
So what’s happening? These hidden, low-grade food sensitivities trigger a chronic immune reaction and inflammation. And anything that causes inflammation interferes with your metabolism, leading to weight gain.
But the solution is simple: Try a one- or two-week holiday from the foods that most commonly cause these low-grade allergies. Not only will you lose weight, but also a whole host of other chronic health problems like headaches, fatigue, joint pain, sinus problems and more might go away.
Just try this: For one to two weeks, leave these foods out of your diet: gluten (wheat, barley, rye, spelt, oats, kamut), dairy, eggs, corn, yeast and citrus. Think of it as a cheap experiment. The side effect will be not only weight loss, but also relief from many food cravings.
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