Pinus pinea (Stone Pine) cone with pine nuts
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Hi,

Are there really any weight loss foods?  In other words, can you lose weight by eating certain foods vs. other foods.

Well, according to an article I read awhile back the answer is yes.  I am not so convinced. 

Basically this article said that if you ate more millet, asparagus, pomegranates, pine nuts and green tea your waistline would shrink.   

While I have no problem with these foods and drinks from a health standpoint, there are a couple of problems.

First is that no food by itself is a weight loss food.  Specific foods have nothing to do with weight loss or weight gain.  How much you eat will control what you weigh – to a point.  Which leads us to the other problem.

That eating a healthy diet and weight loss have nothing to do with each other. 

Now you might think I am a little crazy to say that.  After all eating a healthy diet should help you lose weight – right?

Sorry, but losing weight has to do with how much you eat and how your hormones react to the food. 

Of course eating healthy is better for you.  But, if you ate nothing but steak and broccoli you could gain weight and become fat. 

On the other hand, if you ate nothing but cookies and ice cream, you could lose weight. 

It has to do with how much you eat. 

So under the above circumstances, the cookies and ice cream would be weight loss foods and the steak and broccoli would be weight gain foods. 

However, even if the cookies and ice cream helped you lose weight, it still would not be healthy for you to eat all the time. 

If you ate nothing but cookies and ice cream you will more than likely die much sooner and have more health problems than if you ate steak and broccoli.  This has to do with how your body reacts and uses the food you ingest. 

But Mike, you might say, what about the insulin spike?  Won’t the ice cream and cookies diet cause you to gain weight because more sugar in your blood stream gets stored as fat?

Good point.  However, it isn’t as clear cut as that.  After all there are plenty of diabetics who are not fat.  One of my friends is strong, muscular and ripped.  Yet he has to take insulin shots every day. 

So diabetes is not 100% directly correlated with eating too much sugar. 

The other point is that everything we eat gets broken down into sugars anyhow.  The body only functions with blood sugars – mostly glucose. 

Even the steak and broccoli gets broken down into glucose.  So too much steak and broccoli can raise your blood sugar levels also and cause insulin to spike in its attempt to lower your blood sugar levels.

Now it will take a lot of steak and broccoli to do that, but the point is that you can’t just make blanket statement like certain foods are weight loss foods. 

Losing weight can be simple, but you have to have the correct information to do so.  You can get that by reading this blog and subscribing to my ezine. 

Sign up here: ezine

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