We remain committed to giving too much importance to the calories we consume in our diet. It’s not that calories are not something to keep in mind, but they are not the most important thing. The type of food we eat is more important than the calories they have.
The example of the cover image is very clear; the calories that come from the apple are not the same as those that come from a sweet that is basically processed flour and sugar. The impact they have on each other in metabolism, hormones and fat storage is very different. We already saw in its day, as a calorie is not always a calorie. They import the quality of those calories, more than the quantity.
It is a mistake to base the diet on the amount of calories
Years ago, the thermodynamic vision of the diet did a lot of damage to the way we had to see a diet of slimming. If our body consumed 2500 kcal a day, we should eat less or spend more, obsessing with the number of calories.
It did not matter, as much if that calorie came from a tomato or a sweet, the important thing was that we did not surpass the daily calories not to get fat. That led to basing the diet on numbers and walking counting calories. This, of course, is unsustainable. A person cannot quantify everything he eats, besides being boring he has no grip.
But then the subject of digestion comes in. A food can have 100 kcal and we will not store them or use them all. There are calories that are lost in the digestion process, others that, depending on where they come from, will tend to be stored or not as fat. The issue of calories is not so simple; it influences much from where they come from and how they digest.
The important thing is not the amount of calories, but where they come from
We all know that fats are the most caloric food that exists, but we should not banish them from the diet. Fats are needed, olive oil, for example. Not by taking daily extra virgin olive oil we are going to gain weight, this food will provide us with more benefits than damages.
Another clear example is the nuts, which have a high energy density, but it has been proven that the nuts do not get fat. Even so, we continue to think that having many calories, we must avoid them in a diet of thinning.
You have to stop counting calories and be more aware of what you bring to your mouth. The less processed and the fresher and less processed the food, the better. And if we think about what those foods are, it is easy: fruits, vegetables, vegetables, fish, meat, eggs … in short, all those foods that do not come from the food industry.
You may also like to read another article on Blog-Collector: Eating the Right Food Is One Way Of Having A Healthy Brain And Sharper Memory
Moving from a quantitative diet to a qualitative diet
That you eat two apples instead of one for snacking, will not assume anything in your weight, even if you do daily. Now, if instead of an apple you take a bun or a snack to snack on a daily basis that is going to have a negative impact on your diet when it comes to losing weight (and health).
And how do you go from a quantitative diet to a qualitative one? Stopping thinking about calories and grams of food to consume and changing the chip to what kind of food I have to consume and what kind of food I have to avoid.
The Harvard Healthy Plate Example
The healthy bowl of Harvard is a practical example of qualitative diet, which moves over the importance of the amounts (although into account), and takes as its protagonist the type of food, that “where the calories come from”, which is what really matters in a diet.
By the time we are aware that there must always be vegetables, fruits, and protein (from unprocessed foods) in the main foods , and we put it into practice, we will realize that the calories are going to the background and It is really the type of food that will make us lose weight and gain health.
And what we are talking about solid foods, serves the same for drinks. We are also not very aware of the importance of beverages in the diet, to lose weight and to health in general.
Quantifying is fine, but do not go crazy
Today we have many mobile applications that help us analyze our diet. And that’s fine, because they give us an idea of how much and how we eat. If we eat few proteins, if we go with the sugars, etc. But do not go crazy telling everything we eat.
As an initial analysis of how our diet is, quantifying it is fine, but it is a very tedious thing to do daily. It is more helpful to know how many fresh and unprocessed foods we have taken in the day what many calories. As we have been saying throughout the article is improvement for weight and for health to be concerned about what type of food we eat than how many calories we eat.
