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Stupid Food Rules 101

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After years of fad diets being the primary way that people attempt to lose weight, crazy food rules have found their way into mainstream nutrition advice.

These rules are touted by all manner of person – actually, mostly unqualified people and unfortunately, these food rules don’t actually help us eat better.

Why? Because if you tell someone not to do something, they can’t help but do it or they obsessively think about doing it only to do it eventually. They make us rebel. And this rebellion makes us inconsistent.

Another reason why food rules don’t work is because they result in an ‘analysis paralysis’. People are so confused about the rules and the fact that they contradict each other that they don’t know where to start when they’re making changes and they fail to take any positive action at all.

Here are 10 food rules I would encourage you to ditch.

Stop eating bread

Bread, in and of itself, is not bad for you. It contains carbohydrate, protein and a small amount of fat. It also contains fibre (if it’s whole grain), folate and other B vitamins. It’s absolutely fine to include bread as part of a healthy diet and it’s not the reason why you’re not losing weight.

I’ve been eating bread and nothing bad has happened to me. I’ve also successfully lost weight while eating bread and have been helping others do the same for over 14 years.

Potatoes make you fat

This food rule lacks context! How many potatoes are we talking here? Who’s eating the potato? What else are they eating? What are their goals? How much exercise are they doing?

Potatoes, like bread, aren’t bad for you, nor do they make you fat. The best choice is a whole, skin-on potato as opposed to a processed, deep fried one (dipped in aioli) and white potato is perfectly fine to include in your diet if that’s your preference.

Don’t eat bananas for breakfast

I don’t even know what to say about this except: “No. It’s wrong”.

You can absolutely eat bananas for breakfast and at any time of the day for that matter. Nothing bad will happen to you and whoever made up this rule doesn’t have any evidence to back it up.

Bananas are rich in nutrients, a great source of fibre, potassium and other nutrients and super-duper yummy with all kinds of healthy breakfast foods like yoghurt, oats, peanut butter and grainy toast.

Don’t eat before bed

This rule does make logical sense:

You’ve just eaten a belly full of food and now you’re heading to bed and not going to need all the energy you just ate so your body will store it all as fat.

In reality, your body doesn’t make fat storing decisions based on the energy balance of short periods of time. It makes fat storing decisions based on the ongoing energy balance over long periods of time, more like weeks and months, rather than hours and days.

If you’re consuming more energy than your body needs, consistently over time, then you will store body fat, regardless of when you eat your food. If you eat food late at night before bed, if you’re consistently creating an energy deficit (less energy than your body needs) then you will still lose weight.

You need to quit sugar

It’s an utterly ridiculous notion to ‘quit sugar’ because fundamentally ‘sugar’ is in everything, both healthy and unhealthy foods.

If you truly quit sugar, you could only eat meat and oil. That’s it. Sugar is in everything else. And yes, regardless of whether you ate a cupcake or a capsicum, the sugar chemical is the same in your bloodstream. What’s important about this comparison is the nutrient density. The capsicum is highly nutrient dense with lots of fibre and vitamins and minerals. The cupcake has very little fibre and nutrients, a high dose of sugar, as well as a high dose of fat.

Rather than quitting sugar and stressing about finding this nutrient in perfectly healthy foods like yoghurt, high fibre breakfast cereals and fruit, why not aim to decrease your intake of processed foods and increase your intake of whole foods? Focussing on the bigger picture of your diet as a whole is much less confusing than focussing on sugar.

Don’t eat carbs after 4 pm

There is nothing magical about not having carbs at dinner. I have carbs at dinner most nights, have managed a healthy weight for many years, have lost weight and also helped others do so as well.

This rule works (if you stick to it) by helping you decrease your energy intake for the day by not allowing you to have a number of food groups included in your dinner. The thing is, this rule fails to cover you for the fact that you can still get plenty of energy from other foods if you overeat them.

Nuts are fattening

For this point I will just say: same answer as the potatoes.

Nuts are whole foods, nutritious, satiating and most definitely form part of a healthy diet when eaten in accordance with your daily energy needs.

Fruit has too much sugar

Too much sugar compared to what? This rule comes from a previous dumb rule that sugar is bad. Too much sugar, combined with poor diet quality, consumed consistently over time and combined with inactivity is bad for you, not the sugar in and of itself. And compared to this, fruit definitely does not have too much sugar. In fact, when you eat fruit, as a whole food, the sugar is delivered to the body in just the right way.

Fruit is unprocessed, rich in fibre and vitamins and highly nutrient dense. It is definitely an important part of a healthy diet.

Don’t pair carbs and fats together

There are so many delicious eating experiences eliminated by this rule. It’s very sad.

  • Hot chips + aioli
  • Sourdough + olive oil
  • Crackers + dip
  • Mexican food + guacamole
  • Creamy sauce + pasta

Now, eating the above foods frequently, in unmanaged portions, may result in you consuming more energy than your body needs. Do that for long enough and your body stores fat.

However, there is actually nothing scary happening in your body by the combination of these two nutrients. Metabolism (the breakdown of fats and carbs by the body for energy) is highly complicated and I’m not going to go into the details, just know that fats and carbohydrates are nutrients your body knows how to process so long as you’re not exceeding your daily requirements.

The truth is, all foods are a combination of fats, carbohydrates and proteins, we don’t eat these nutrients in isolation. What matters more is your overall diet quality, eating according to YOUR individual energy needs and doing that consistently every day.

Gluten is bad for you

I’ve come across many people touting how evil gluten is. The problem is, they don’t actually have any clear details about why it is evil and how it does bad things to your body. They make vague explanations like it causes inflammations and triggers ‘leaky gut’ but they don’t actually tell you HOW it causes these things.

A key part of science and learning anatomy and physiology is also learning pathology, which is the explanation of how disease is triggered and progresses. The theories of disease have detailed steps of chemicals, enzymes, uptake and carrier proteins, cell signalling and more and they are backed up by multiple pieces of evidence. It’s easy to make things up, throw in some science words and convince the layperson, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

For those of you who have dropped gluten and feel better for it, I would argue that dropping gluten wasn’t the only thing you changed in your diet. It’s likely that you reduced your intake of highly processed foods (often containing gluten), started eating more vegetables and, as a result, improved your overall diet quality. When so many factors of your diet have changed its poor science to single out one factor as the cause.

For my parting words…

Stop trying to stick to restrictive food rules. This is not the long term answer you’re looking for. If you’re truly wanting to make a lifestyle change and eat better long term, commit to developing healthy eating habits that suit you, your life and help you make good nutrition the easy choice, not the difficult choice.

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