Diet Foods Can Make You Fat

Sounds crazy doesn’t it? But it’s true, foods marketed to help you lose fat can make you either not lose fat or even actually gain fat. Diet soda, low fat muffins, low fat yogurt and rice cakes are all foods that are sold to you under the impression that they are a good choice over others. It really is too bad that we are so mislead by food companies, as smart nutrition choices are so very important in terms of our long term health. There are many reasons why certain diet foods do the opposite they claim to your body.

Rice cakes are eaten for usually one reason; they are supposedly a healthy choice. Sad news is they are not at all. In fact they are actually eaten at bodybuilding shows right before going on stage to “fill up” the body, hardly sounds like a healthy snack now does it? The reason behind this is that even though many snacks such as rice cakes are low calorie, they are actually high sugar and sugar is by far the worst enemy of the two. Even though the package may not state there is much sugar in the product, it is due to the fact that the other carbohydrates not listed are simple starches which are actually sugar as the body breaks it down into sugar immediately so this is really what all the calories in this and many snack foods are. This is not clear to the average person who may know enough to look at how many grams of sugar are on the label, unfortunately that is not often reality and the products are misleading.

The sugar factor is the very same reason why low fat yogurt is actually misleading us as consumers to believe it is a diet food. Fat is not our enemy. Low fat diets are very old school and have been proven to be not only ineffective for weight loss over and over again, but they actually cause weight gain many times. We need all types of fats in our diet, even including saturated fats. Whenever fat is removed from a product it has to be replaced with something for taste and that is sugar 99% of the time. Sugar makes us fat for many reasons but the main reason being that it messes with our insulin levels. People that eat high carb diets are on the path (or already there) to being insulin resistant which is usually the reason why people become overweight. Low fat muffins and almost any other low fat products are misleading as healthy food choices for the same reason. It is not our fault as the companies that produce these products mislead us by promoting them as good choices. But these days we need to self educate ourselves about nutrition in detail so we don’t fall prey to them.

Now you are probably thinking that diet soda has to be a diet food, it has zero calories, how can it not be? You are correct in that it contains no calories but it does contain artificial sweeteners. Anything that seems too good to be true most likely is just that. We want to believe that we can have foods that taste sweet and yet not contain any sugar and be good for us but that is impossible. Artificial sweeteners are just that – artificial. They are a chemical not a food and there are consequences to consuming chemicals in place of real foods. Without going into detail about how these chemicals have been proven to have harmful effects on the body, even proven to cause cancers, I will explain how they can make you fat or stall your weight loss.

Diet foods with artificial sweeteners cause your insulin to spike just as sugar does. Perhaps not always to the same degree (it depends on a few factors including how much sweetener is in the so call food), but it does react in your body in a similar way that sugar does. This is not proven yet but many studies lead this to seem true. But the real reason why diet soda makes us fat is due to the sugar-like taste causes our brains to crave more sugar and many times we end up eating real sugar, which spikes our insulin levels and packs on the pounds this way.

All of this to say, please don’t be mislead by the diet foods out there, they are there to make the manufacturing companies rich, not to help you towards your long term health goals. Eat real foods, eat little and often and get proper exercise while you are at it!

Sources:
http://www.charlespoliquin.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=980&Itemid=10194

About the Author:

Chelsea is a figure competitor, certified personal trainer and nutritional advisor and the co-owner of Free Form Fitness (www.freeformfitness.ca). Free Form Fitness is no bull - just results personal training center in Ottawa, Ontario Canada.