Researchers who investigate our food choices and weight loss are confirming that calorie-counting may be one of the worst ways to control your weight. What you choose to eat is far more important for your waistline than how much you eat.
This study substantiates that when you’re trying to keep your weight down, you shouldn’t complain you’re starving because you can’t eat much of anything. Instead, you should switch to the kinds of nutrient-dense foods advocated by the paleo diet, feel full after every meal, and watch the pounds come off.
To control your weight, you need to make consistent shifts in the kinds of protein- and carbohydrate-rich foods you choose. Those have a significant influence on how your weight changes, say the researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University.
Focusing on more than 16 years of research on 20,000 men and women who were involved in a trio of long-term studies of U.S. health professionals, the Tufts scientists have demonstrated (no surprise!) that eating too many refined grains, sugars and starches are linked to gaining extra weight. In addition, these studies also suggest that no matter how many calories you cut, as long as you’re eating the wrong, sugary, refined foods, your weight control efforts are doomed.
In this research, the Tufts folks concentrated their efforts in analyzing how to keep weight off.
“There is mounting scientific evidence that diets including less low-quality carbohydrates, such as white breads, potatoes, and sweets, and higher in protein-rich foods may be more efficient for weight loss,” says researcher Jessica Smith. “We wanted to know how that might apply to preventing weight gain in the first place.”
The experiments showed:
- The people who ate more red meat and processed meat generally gained the most weight. (But the researchers didn’t distinguish between organic, grass-fed meat and conventional supermarket meat.)
- The people who ate more seafood, yogurt, seafood, nuts and chicken without the skin kept their weight down more effectively. Matter of fact, in this category, the more of these foods you ate, the less you weighed.
- Consuming dairy products, including full-fat milk, full-fat cheese and low-fat milk, did not seem to influence weight at all.
“The fat content of dairy products did not seem to be important for weight gain,” Smith says. “In fact, when people consumed more low-fat dairy products, they actually increased their consumption of carbs, which may promote weight gain. This suggests that people compensate, over years, for the lower calories in low-fat dairy by increasing their carb intake.”
That makes sense. Fat signals your brain that you’ve eaten, and you’re full. So on farms, when they want to get pigs to fatten up as quickly as possible, they feed them skim milk. The lack of fat in the milk keeps the pigs hungry, and makes them eat more feed, fattening them faster.
In other words, if you’ve been eating sweetened no-fat yogurt thinking you’re helping your weight and your health, you’re making a big mistake. Everyone I know who eats that kind of yogurt scarfs down the heavily sugared fruit that is included in the yogurt. Those are the kinds of refined carbohydrates that add inches to your waistline.
“Our study adds to growing new research that counting calories is not the most effective strategy for long-term weight management and prevention,” says researcher Dariush Mozaffarian, who is dean of the Friedman School. “Some foods help prevent weight gain, others make it worse. Most interestingly, the combination of foods seems to make a big difference. Our findings suggest we should not only emphasize specific protein-rich foods like fish, nuts, and yogurt to prevent weight gain, but also focus on avoiding refined grains, starches, and sugars in order to maximize the benefits of these healthful protein-rich foods, create new benefits for other foods like eggs and cheese, and reduce the weight gain associated with meats.”
While I don’t agree that eating meat is necessarily linked to weight gain (unless your daily meat portion comes from your local fast-food joint or is sitting on top of a pizza), I do concur that you can’t go wrong filling up on vegetables, seafood and nuts.
All those processed, glitzy foods you see advertised on TV don’t boost your health … they only boost food companies’ bottom lines and boost your waistline. You need to eat real foods with high nutrient density that have healthy fat and lots of protein, and ditch the sugary treats and the grains to see real changes in your weight.
