Diets And Weight Loss

Are Americans eating too much?

Americans are definitely eating too much. Scientific evidence tells us we are digging our graves with our forks. We usually eat two to four times the amount of food we actually require. We know that 64% of American adults are overweight or obese. More than 33% of our children are overweight or obese. Certainly, that's going to contribute to all kinds of health problems including cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

What is a "fad diet"?

Fad diets are rampant today. Fad diets would be equated to the high fat, high protein diet, low carb diet, you know, that aspect. Or to the no fat diet we saw years ago, few years actually, not that long ago, and that was a disaster. People were developing all kinds of symptoms because they weren't getting enough fat. But a fad diet is something that usually is restrictive. It's maybe a few primary foods, maybe one or two foods, up to five or six foods but it doesn't have a wide variety of foods in the diet, and it's cutting out oftentimes food groups, such as fats or carbohydrates. We haven't seen too much of them cutting out proteins in our culture, but they might do well to cut out some of the proteins. But that's basically what a fad diet is: it's something no one can really stick to for any length of time because it's so restrictive and boring, and generally tasteless as well.

What is the best diet for losing weight?

The diet that is best for losing weight is a diet that is basically plant-based, whole food plant-based. So, for example, a person who eats whole fruit for breakfast will not have that sudden spike in their blood, so they'll feel satisfied longer than a person who drinks the fruit juice. So it's the whole food versus the juiced part of the food, or eating whole grains versus eating packages of corn flakes or whatever, or Total, you know, the cereal that everyone thinks is healthy. But it's eating whole foods, it's getting back to the basics. It's food that, you know, for example, probably primative man ate except that we're not primative anymore so we're not going to go back to eating things out of the ground or off a tree to the same degree. But that's really what it boils down to: it's foods that are picked at the peak of ripeness, that are picked off of a tree, or grow out of the ground, not in a package or a box. The minute that you have things in a package or a box they have to have been tampered with, they have to have had things added to them for shelf life, most of the times they're higher in oils and fats that are not healthy, so it's really getting back to, you know, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, a little fish.

What are the most common dieting mistakes?

The common mistakes that I find people making when they're trying to eat healthier are in cutting out a specific group of foods. I think the big one right now is carbohydrates. Everyone's got this bug about carbohydrates being bad for you instead of defining what high-quality carbohydrates are versus poor-quality carbohydrates. People will cut down to far too low a calorie level. What happens then is the body compensates for that by going into what we call starvation mode and the metabolism slows down to accommodate that lower calorie intake. What would be much more advisable is to have higher quality and a higher calorie level and then increase your activity level so that you're building muscle tissue to trim down instead of cutting your calories to the bone. Those are two of the most common ones. Another one that I see a lot is the increase in protein. People think if they eat a lot of protein they're going to lose a lot more weight. The fact of the matter is, they're probably going to become very toxic, because when the body breaks down protein it creates uric acid, which is a toxic element in the body that has to be removed or released. You can't efficiently do that if you're not getting enough of the fibre and other nutrients from other foods. You need a good, rounded diet in order to be healthy and to lose weight effectively.