Wednesday, March 27, 2013

All Food is Weight Loss Food

A quick search of the internet yields thousands upon thousands of websites dedicated to the topic of weight loss food. If you peruse these sites, one thing becomes glaringly evident – that there is no single magic food that will, on its own, cause you to lose weight.


So why do all of these websites seem to want you to think that weight loss food exists, when, in reality, it does not? The answer is actually rather simple. Money.

It is very easy to sell a product, or weight loss guide, when your customer believes the claims that you make. In order to sell such things, companies have increasingly turned to the notion of solving obesity struggles through the use of a single product or guide – their own.


Not So Fast
Before you become disillusioned and opt to give up on losing weight for good, there is still hope. Just not in the form of two pills a day, or one super fruit from Africa.

This hope stems from an understanding that EVERYTHING that you eat can be considered weight loss food. While it may be difficult to comprehend how chocolate cake could be considered a weight loss food, the explanation in the paragraphs below should help to make this concept make sense.


Weight Loss Food(s)
Instead of thinking about specific foods as crucial to your success at losing weight, think of your diet as a whole. Now, in this sense, diet does not mean what you may think, but rather, all of the food that you consume on a daily basis. When thought of in this way, chocolate cake magically – or not – becomes a weight loss food.

If you typically eat 1500 calories per day while attempting to lose weight, and choose to eat a 400 calorie piece of chocolate cake, simple deduct 400 calories from your total of 1500. This leaves you with 1100 calories left to consume for the given day. If you stay within your 1500 calorie target, vs. your normal 2000 calories, per day, when not trying to lose weight, the chocolate cake you just ate has become a weight loss food – albeit an unhealthy and inadvisable one.

The Complete Picture
Our example of chocolate cake as a weight loss food is, admittedly, a bit of a stretch. However, it does dramatically illustrate the fact that no one food, alone, can be considered a diet food, weight loss food, or any other combination of similar terms that companies often like to throw around to entice well-intentioned consumers.

The best advice you can get, with regard to claims made by companies pitching their so-called weight loss food, is to use your common sense. If a claim appears to good to be true, it probably is. In the end, the best weight loss food is a well balanced diet.