Healthy Foods that Can Make You Fat

by Jari Love

How many times have we heard this story, or could relate to it ourselves? A woman was trying to lose weight. She had been living for many years on a steady diet of less than ideal foods. She cut out the soda, chips, cookies, cakes, pizza, and other take away meals and replaced them with whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, lean proteins, healthy fats, and lots of water.

She didn't begin with any calorie counting or other "technicalities" of dieting because she had read that all of her healthy food choices were going to help her shed weight very quickly. However, although she began to feel better and her mind was clearer than ever, she didn't see much of a difference in the scale. After three weeks, she had lost a bit of weight, but nothing like she had hoped.

She spoke to friends about the issue and they too said she should have definitely dropped a lot more than the few scant pounds she had seen on the scale.

What was going on? Was it because she wasn’t exercising? Yes, she was exercising. The woman in the story had started with thirty minutes of comfortable walking and over three weeks had built up to 40 minutes of very brisk walking. Yet she wasn't losing weight.

Naturally, the solution was to be found in the healthy diet. Was she making all of the right choices? It was only when she sat down with a friend knowledgeable about food and fitness that she discovered her mistakes.

Consider: The woman in question was eating a product described as granola for breakfast each day. She had it with yogurt and a glass of orange juice. Her midday snack was a store bought fruit smoothie. Her lunch was a tin of soup, a whole grain roll, a piece of fruit, and some bottled green tea. Her afternoon snack was a fiber muffin with a low fat bottled coffee treat. Her evening meal was a small green salad, a baked sweet potato and a piece of chicken.

Can you see the flaws? If you said too much sugar, you are right. If you said too little fiber, again you would be correct. If you also added that many of the healthy foods she chose were not healthy at all, you would be correct again. Too often we hear that granola, fruit smoothie, low fat foods, green tea, and other "healthy" foods are great for us to eat every day. However, many of these foods are full of fat, calories, additives, sugar, and more.

The key to losing weight is to eat foods that won't lead to weight gain. The ideal way of doing this is to eat whole foods, not pre-packaged, and to read labels rigorously to understand the fat, sugar, and calorie counts of all that we consume. Doing this would have helped the woman in the story to lose weight quickly and see dramatic results sooner.