Cassidy Morrison Dailymail.Com Senior Health Reporter
20:05 07 November 2023, 20:07 07 November 2023 Updated
- Demonizing certain foods and praising others is not based on scientific fact
- That posture can lead to eating disorders and increases your risk of heart disease
- Read more: Here’s what the co-inventor of the Mediterranean diet eats in a day
Categorizing foods as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ won’t help you lose weight, a nutritionist has warned.
Eating certain foods won’t help you lose weight or improve your health, and it can increase your risk of developing an eating disorder, according to a recent debate written by clinical nutritionist Shaila Cadogan. It is said that there is a possibility.
She explains that all food has beneficial properties, even if it just provides energy on an empty stomach. And research shows that individual foods don’t predict poor health, but rather that diet has an overall effect.
Even worse, dualistic thinking about food is associated with overeating behavior, which can lead to weight gain.
“A pattern of restricting all cravings is the quickest path to a binge-restriction cycle,” says Cadogan.
She added that including cravings in your diet “removes the desire to have it all the time and potentially end up bingeing at some point.”
Furthermore, she writethe guilt and stress that result from negative self-talk such as “I’ve had such a bad week” can be even more harmful when eating dessert in moderation, leading someone to restrict food or starve themselves. increases the risk of eating disorders such as
Other experts told DailyMail.com they echoed Cadogan’s concerns about the number of Americans who have this attitude toward food.
Kathleen Lopez, a registered dietitian in New Hampshire, says, “Each of us has an individual biochemistry, culture, and genetic make-up that responds differently to foods and causes us to eat and not eat certain things.” That means,” he said.
Food is not good or bad. They either work for you or they don’t!
Cutting out entire food groups to lose weight, such as carbohydrates, sugar, and ultra-processed foods, rarely works.
And this is backed by science.
In 2012, researchers at Tel Aviv University found that obese adults who ate a high-protein breakfast and dessert later in the day lost the same amount of weight as adults who didn’t eat dessert.
Additionally, unlike those who didn’t eat dessert, they continued to lose weight after the eight-month study ended. Experts say this is because eating one large sweet snack satisfies the craving, making the volunteers less likely to snack later in the day.
The moralization of food also carries serious risks to our mental health.
It is a major risk factor not only for eating disorders but also for clinical eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.
Eating disorders fall somewhere between normal eating and eating disorders and usually involve restrictive eating, compulsive eating, or irregular eating patterns.
Experts believe that eating disorders pose the same risks for heart disease, digestive problems, high blood pressure, weight gain, and stroke as eating large amounts of highly processed, fat- and sugar-rich “bad” foods. Emphasizes what causes it.
“If you’re blaming yourself for eating ‘bad’ food, you’re hurting yourself more than the actual food,” Cadogan said.
“We put so much pressure on ourselves to eat the ‘perfect’ way, which will never happen and is completely unrealistic.”
Experts say people with underlying health conditions such as type 2 diabetes or obesity are advised to avoid added sugars and saturated fats.
But nutritionists say you shouldn’t necessarily avoid these things completely.
Lopez says many Americans have this attitude toward food because of a fear of gaining weight, which some activists call “fatophobia.” Say.
Men tend to think that overweight begins at a BMI of 26.1, whereas women tend to consider themselves overweight from a BMI below 23.7; It suggests something. rate yourself as more overweight than in reality.
A 2012 study published in the journal obesity reported that about 16% of women said they had been discriminated against because of their weight, compared to 10% in 1995.