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Weight loss |
Almost all people who try to lose weight fail. Weight may be lost temporarily, but will eventually be regained. Going the rest of your life eating less food than your body is asking for is no more possible than trying to breathe less. Diets don't work.
Everyone knows that to lose weight, you have to eat fewer calories. The naive response, to try to "eat less", is based on ignorance about the body's complex hunger mechanisms.
As explained at Dr. Fuhrman's blog, there are at least four dimensions of hunger, which must be addressed if you are to maintain a healthy weight:
1. VOLUME: You must consume an adequate amount of food, and fiber from that food, to feel physically satiated.
2. NUTRIENTS: You must consume enough nutrients in your food for your body to meet its biological need to thrive. Even if you have adequate volume, if it's from low-nutrient food, your body will have a nutrient deficit, and you will feel that you require more food.
3. CALORIES: You will be driven to overeat on calories unless the other dimensions of hunger are addressed. The only way to avoid overconsuming calories is to ensure that you have enough volume and nutrients so that your body can feel satiated.
4. ADDICTIONS: You must break yourself of your addictions to food, which often manifest themselves in feeling ill or in cravings. If you don't, your body will not be able to regulate its caloric needs appropriately.
The nutritarian eating style addresses all four of these:
1. It provides ample bulk and fiber, so is very filling. In fact, most nutritarians use blenders to pulverize some of their fruits and also greens (which make amazingly delicious combinations with fruits and other foods), because they don't have enough stomach space, or enough time, to eat all the food they want in its natural form. Blending also increases the availability of nutrients.
2. Since a nutritarian eating style by definition consists of the highest-nutrient foods, it has the highest possible ratio of nutrients to calories. It is the most nutritious diet that can exist.
3. It's close to impossible to eat enough calories from green vegetables, fresh fruits, and beans to maintain your weight. Once you are obtaining your nutrition from these foods, you just choose the level of healthy fats and additional optional foods (if any) needed to make your weight go down, go up, or stay the same. Whatever you choose. Warning: it is essential to eat at least one ounce of seeds or nuts per day. Excessively low-fat diets have some serious health risks, and the fat in seeds and nuts is the most protective.
4. The hard part, of course, is to break food addictions. You do that by developing new tastes, for foods that are nutrient-dense. That takes effort, but good nutritarian recipes and the rich varied flavors of green vegetables and fruits help a lot. A nutritarian diet also helps extinguish food cravings, which are often driven by nutritional deficiencies.
Since the nutritarian eating style addresses all the dimensions of hunger, it is the most effective way (in fact, the only effective way) to maintain weight loss, while at the same time providing nutritional excellence for maximum health.
Fianlly, those who are losing weight should maintain a vigorous exercise program. Although it is not a substitute for a healthy diet, exercise aids weight loss in various ways. As the only healthy way to increase your metabolic rate, it will aid in burning calories not just while exercising but during the days afterward. Exercise is necessary to avoid losing muscle mass rather than fat. And if you hit a weight "plateau", it can help free your body's "set point" to allow it to readjust your weight more readily. But most important, exercise is so beneficial for health in so many ways that everybody should already be doing it.