4 ‘Facts’ About Weight-Loss That Are Wrong
You know that whole Bulletproof coffee thing that everyone is talking about (including us)? Well, today we have a guest post on weight-loss from the inventor, Dave Asprey! A Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur who spent 15 years and $300,000 to hack his own biology, losing 100 pounds, upgrading his IQ and lowering his biological age, he runs the The Bulletproof Executive blog about using “biohacking” to increase human performance. You can learn more about biohacking, the art of changing your environment and your biology so you perform better in his new book The Bulletproof Diet and also on The Bulletproof Executive website Facebook and Twitter.
4 “Facts” About Weight-Loss That Are Wrong by Dave Asprey
Take everything you know about diets. Now completely forget it. Chances are, it was all wrong. So many of our so-called diet experts have no idea what they’re talking about yet they continue to spread misinformation that has no scientific merit. Let’s take a look at some of the top mistruths about diets and why they’re wrong and what you can do instead.
1. False Fact #1: If you want to lose weight, ignore your hunger. In its simplest form, hunger is the urge to eat. It’s an instinct that keeps humans from starving to death. Hunger decreases your performance, saps your energy and makes you cranky, tired and unproductive. Sustained hunger is not a sign of toughness or resolve, and it’s definitely not Bulletproof. Feeling intense hunger or “I need to eat now or I’m going to crash” is a sign that whatever you ate earlier in the day wasn’t actually satiating.
The goal of a diet shouldn’t be to ignore hunger or to sate it by eating a low-calorie snack every 90 minutes. The goal should be to eat foods with high-quality fats and plenty of calories, such as grass-fed butter or avocados, in order to avoid the performance-robbing, brain-sapping problem called hunger while losing weight more quickly.
2. False Fact #2: A low-fat diet is healthy. In the 1950s, a scientist named Ancel Keys rocked the world of nutrition by claiming, with some pretty convincing research, that saturated fat caused heart disease. The low-fat diet craze immediately stormed the scene. The problem is we later learned Keys threw out data that didn’t fit his model. The science didn’t support his theory at all.
Food chemists immediately began concocting low-fat foods and to remove the fat from foods, they had to replace it with something. Sugar and/or corn syrup were pumped into most low-fat “diet” foods. Not only are these low-fat foods actually terrible for you because they lack nutrients, but they also make your brain believe a famine is coming. Instead, if you eat real foods full of healthy fats, your body will be able to hear your brain when it tells it to stop eating because you’ve had enough. You won’t want more food than your body needs so your weight will naturally regulate.
3. False Fact #3: Cutting calories is the best way to lose weight. Many diets claim that the magic formula to weight-loss is, “calories in versus calories out.” This is sort of true in a famine situation, but we now know that crash diets mess with your hunger hormones and your metabolism, making it easier for you to gain weight later when you begin eating normally again.
Also, you will not function in an optimal state for very long if you aren’t eating enough calories, and consuming as many calories as your body demands is a critical part of the Bulletproof Diet. As long as they come from the right sources and you’re listening to your hunger, the more calories you eat, the more calories your metabolism will use.
4. False Fact #4: Salt is a hazardous substance. In 1979, the U.S. Surgeon General stated, “salt is a clear cause of high blood pressure.” The problem is that human beings cannot live without salt. Much has been made of the supposed negative health effects of salt, but the science shows that low-sodium diets are actually the ones that cause harm.
What actually matters is what kind of salt you consume. The commonly referred to “table salt” is actually a mix of chemically extracted pure sodium and toxic aluminum anticaking agents. Switching from table salt to a high-quality sea salt provides the sodium the body needs and helps maintain mineral balance without the toxic aluminum agents that are found in regular table salt. This will help you combat stress and leave your body feeling more powerful.
Stop letting wrong diet information damage your health and your life. The Bulletproof Diet can give you a clear roadmap to make better decisions for your diet while also teaching you the science behind those decisions. If the diet industry only followed these same strict standards, we’d be living in a much healthier world.
Dave, we so couldn’t agree with you about diets more! Thanks for the fab info! —Jenn