The Fighter's Body. Loren W. Christensen
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bet. While some produce good results, many others aren’t worth your hard-earned cash. Educate yourself about any product you put into your body. Research it and talk with your physician or dietitian. Then listen to that little voice of common sense in your head when strolling through the health section of your supermarket.
Low-fat Food is Healthier but Tastes Terrible
There is some truth to this, though “terrible” is in the taste buds of the, uh, chewer. A friend of Christensen’s once shared a no-fat muffin with him as they drank coffee together. Christensen says it not only tasted horrible, but it had a consistency of chewing gum, and at one point it got caught half way down his throat. At first he tried to massage the outside of his neck to get it unstuck, then he went into a retching fit, looking a little like a cat with a fir ball in its throat.
As mentioned earlier, fat adds flavor to food and gives us a sense of feeling full. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all low-fat food is devoid of flavor. Again, that is up to each person to decide. Christensen’s friend chomped on the muffin with obvious pleasure, while Christensen prayed the man was adept at the Heimlich maneuver. The good news is that people in the food industry are working to develop more flavorful low-fat foods that taste closer to those that contain more fat.
Maintaining your weight or dropping a few pounds needs to be approached from all angles; eating low-fat foods is just one. If you try to survive solely on low- and no-fat foods, you soon will go mad and fling yourself from the roof of a high-rise building. To ensure this doesn’t happen, eat only those low- and no-fat foods you like, while keeping an open mind to try others. Don’t overindulge. They still contain calories, sometimes lots of them. For example, two of those Volkswagen-sized muffins contain enough calories to keep a room of kindergartners looting and pilfering for hours. Eat low- and no-fat foods as part of your overall plan, but you still need to count the calories.
Low-fat Foods Can be Delicious
If you happen to be a kitchen warrior, know that with some creativity you can whip up a delicious low-fat meal that just might be tastier than those artery-choking, high-fat ones. There are zillions of low-fat cookbooks on the market and gazillions of low-fat recipes on the internet. Test it out on the net: Keyword “low-fat chicken and Spanish rice” into the search box of your favorite search engine. You get mucho recipes.
When one flavor dominates, it’s often less enjoyable than meals that offer a variety of tastes. The flavors in many packaged foods, for example, are poorly balanced so that the dominant flavors - salt, barbeque sauce, cheese, hot sauce — prevent you from distinguishing subtle nuances. This can lead to overeating as you unconsciously search for a greater variety of tastes.
Make your meals flavor intense. The best recipes are those that give you balance in flavor and nutrition. Do a little research on cooking low-fat meals to see how you can combine different flavors to create a delicious meal without consuming volumes of calories.
Low-fat Foods are Best for Losing Weight
Along with herbal and natural products, low-fat foods have — as a result of clever marketing — taken the world by storm. Today, virtually every type of food on the market has a low-fat version. The smart marketers slap on appealing labels, such as “low-fat,” “light,” “fat-free” and “reduced-fat” and then charge more than their fat counterparts. However, all this creative verbiage about the product’s fat content ignores or deliberately hides one important question: Exactly how low, how light, how free and how reduced is the fat in the product? Five percent? Ten? More? Less?
These are vague labels (deliberately so?) and their meaning varies from one product to the next. The food industry might have a mandate as to how foods are labeled, but it’s still incredibly confusing to consumers. You might find a good tasting low-fat candy bar that contains only two-percent fat, while another brand, also displaying a low-fat label, contains a higher percentage. Not only might there be a difference between two low-fat candy bars, it could be a significant difference. This is why it’s important that you always check the nutrition value table on all products. While the terms low, reduced and light are not consistent from product to product, the labeling laws are strict as to the quantity of carbs, fats, protein, calories, and micronutrients in the products.
Make special note of the calories in the low-fat products. Remember, your body doesn’t care whether the excess calories came from carbs, protein or fat. Any unused calories get stored somewhere on your body. Know that low-fat, reduced-fat, and no-fat, doesn’t necessarily mean low calories. Co-author Christensen learned this about three months after he discovered no-fat, frozen yogurt, sold in a quaint little shop a few blocks from his home. Since it had no fat, he naively assumed he could have an industrial-sized cone once a day, sometimes twice, sometimes dipped in chocolate. By the end of summer, his training uniform fit snugly and his martial arts moves had become sluggish, a result of about 15 pounds of unused calories — no-fat calories — surrounding his waistline.
One low-fat commercial cupcake, for instance, contains the same number of calories as a regular, high-fat cupcake, but because it’s labeled low-fat it sells like, well, hotcakes. No doubt the naïve even eat two or three extra believing it’s okay to do so. Learn from Christensen’s discovery, the same sad one made by thousands of others, and don’t overeat low-fat foods under the assumption that they contain fewer calories. Check the labels, check the labels, check the labels.
How They Still Get You
One reason why there aren’t fewer calories in some low- or no-fat foods is that the manufacturers have added things to get you to eat them. Fat-free desserts, for example, often contain extra sugar, sometimes a lot of extra sugar, to compensate for the lack of rich taste lost when the fat was removed. What this means is the calories saved by eating a low- or no-fat desert come back to haunt, laugh and mock you in another form.
We aren’t saying that you shouldn’t eat these foods, but we are encouraging you to read the labels and keep your portions in check. Low- and no-fat products are a valuable addition to your diet, but they aren’t a quick fix to losing weight. The manufacturers have spent a lot of money to fool consumers into believing that fat is the bad guy in your diet. While it’s true that too much saturated fat can have detrimental effects on your health (we talk about this later), it’s also true that eating too many calories, no matter where they come from, causes you to gain weight. This is a fact the admen haven’t been able to change and almost always fail to mention.
Keep this fact in mind and hopefully it will help you remember to check the labels: We now have more fat-free foods than ever before in history, but the population is growing ever more dangerously fat with each passing year.
Don’t let the ad men win. You are a warrior. Keep your guard up.
By now you know that it’s all about calories and anything you hear that claims otherwise, you should suspect immediately that they are evil, stinking low-life liars. That might be a little strong, but you get the point. Here are 10 diet cons that slim and trim — your bank account.
The program is effortless Sure, and a kick in the groin is a lot of laughs. Losing weight takes time, effort and discipline. It’s not always easy, but it’s definitely worth the effort.Your weight loss is permanent Not if you resume eating and training the way you were before you began the diet. If after you lose the weight you maintain a sensible, calorie conscious eating plan and a good training regimen, the weight stays off. Eat more calories than you burn, however, and your old self comes back to strain your waistband.Eat all the sausage and bacon you want Even if this worked, do you really want to feed your heart and arteries all that fat? Along with a sensible reduction in calories, eat lots of fruit, veggies and lean meat to slim down healthily.You need a Masters degree in chemistry to figure it out This diet claims that you must eat only protein at one meal, carbs at the next and fat only on Sunday. Nonsense. There is no scientific proof that you can lose weight by not combining certain foods. It’s okay; your body can handle bread and turkey at