Eating Healthy

This is a really broad topic and I don't know where to begin, but lots of people have different ideas on what's healthy to eat and what isn't. Carbs, calories, trans-fats, GMOs, etc. There's a lot of conflicting information. So, PCers, what's a healthy diet and what isn't?

A healthy diet is working off what you took in.

This is a discussion, I agree with it being here.

What is healthy and what isn't depends on each person. No calories helps me lose weight, yet I never have enough protein so I need to eat meat constantly. I also need tons of Vitamin D, as does nearly everyone in the world according to medical science's determination of what the "proper amount of VD" is. But taking in dairy and related things either make you fatter or hurt you in the sun - and since this is a day society, that's not at all a good thing.

You also have to determine water weight, how "full" your color looks, blood sugar, etc. What is good and bad is not universal to a specific person. Heck, people with high metabolisms that get fat have an even worse problem - people tell them not to eat as much, but that isn't the issue!

Then, you have exercise with heart problems or asthma, etc. I don't think there's a 100% truer answer than "find out for yourself, what is healthy for yourself".

Scarf said:

This is a really broad topic and I don't know where to begin, but lots of people have different ideas on what's healthy to eat and what isn't. Carbs, calories, trans-fats, GMOs, etc. There's a lot of conflicting information. So, PCers, what's a healthy diet and what isn't?

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My issue with Calories is that people have it all wrong.
They're just measurements of heat. If you don't have any Calories, you die.
What you hafta cut out is:
FAT
(some) carbs
sugar (technically, sugar IS a carbohydrate)
preservatives

I've heard people tell me that Calories are bad. There are far too many misunderstandings in today's diet-obsessed society.

So...if a cold drink has calories...that means it's actually hot?

#commonsenseisnotsocommon

"Calories are energy stored in the chemical bonds of food, which are broken during digestion, releasing the stored energy in the food.
Heat is the measure of how quickly a substance's molecules are moving - a hot food just has faster moving molecules, not extra chemical bonds.

When you digest hot food, supposedly the heat increases your metabolism, because your body doesn't have to work as hard to keep warm. The opposite is true for cold food - they cause you to burn more calories so your body temperature doesn't dip.
All in all, neither have more calories, but they have opposite effect on digestion."

- Hans, on Yahoo! Answers.

So yes, calories do affect you. Please don't confuse people...

Rezilia said:

So...if a cold drink has calories...that means it's actually hot?

#commonsenseisnotsocommon

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Heat is energy, and energy can be stored. That cold drink will turn into heat that you burn off with exercise, or you can store it again as fat. HA I GET IT, TIS A JOKE XD

Too many calories are bad. If you take in more energy than you use, you'll store it as fat. If you take in less energy than you use, you'll burn off the fat. But it's a lot more complicated than that, as humans are primarily living beings that try to survive - and as a result it's not so easy just to cut as many calories as you want.

Thanks for supplementing that! :3

So yeah, I have a calories problem. Whenever I take in less calories, I get slimmer faster. Cuz that's how mah bodeh wurkz. :P

Scarf said:

This is a really broad topic and I don't know where to begin, but lots of people have different ideas on what's healthy to eat and what isn't. Carbs, calories, trans-fats, GMOs, etc. There's a lot of conflicting information. So, PCers, what's a healthy diet and what isn't?

Click to expand...

Give into your cravings, that's step one ... as long as your cravings are not skewed by things like candy you can safely assume that craving potatoes and fat is probably something your body needs.

EVERY food we consume today is genetically modified, though many of our old methods are primitive, such as cross breeding and selective breeding, our newer methods are much safer and produce more viable organisms. There are more myths in the media about GMOs than facts, the old adage, you can't believe anything you see on television. A banana that is not genetically modified is difficult for humans to eat, more seeds than meat in it, and the genetically modified variety you buy in the stores is sterile, it cannot reproduce through it's own means. That's the most glaring example.

Carbohydrates and calories are required to survive, those are chemicals humans need for energy and cell repair. "Trans-fats" are not as bad as people make you think it is, if you consume too much of any fat it will harm you, but then you have to consume enough or risk some medical conditions that no media outlet tells you about.

But here's the trick of it all .... there is no "normal" for living organisms, and no two organisms, even of the same species, will need the same things. The generalizations of "this is bad for everyone" was bad for the species, because everyone will be different. Different chemicals will react differently in the organism, often in extreme ways, food allergies are a very good example of this. Cravings are how your body communicates what it needs to your brain, ever notice that sometimes you crave a food that you don't like? Every once in a while I crave a steak, I don't like steak, but I crave it sometimes. But you have to understand your cravings, often when you are craving candy you are not craving the actual candy but something that tastes like it ... or is in the candy that could be found in a much better form.

If you are attempting to alter your weight, that's pretty much best left to trial and error, find what works. Some of us can eat anything, literally, and as much as we want without ever gaining a pound. I have to sit idly a lot just to raise my weight by 5 pounds, but my first three mile hike and ... it's all gone. Multivitamins can help people as well, though you may find all food less appealing if you use multivitamins too regularly, just ... do whichever you prefer in that case. Some of us are ultimate carnivores, we survive on meat more than anything. Others will be herbivores, loving their vegetables. Just ... whatever you prefer ... don't try to kill people by outlawing certain food stuffs, that's just mean.

There's a lot more to eating healthy than calories in < calories out. You have to take nutrients into account. It's possible to be a zombified wreck with bad depression if you're vitamin B deficient, for example.

...I'm not very knowledgeable about it though, I just wanted to make a comment after seeing the emphasis on weight loss/maintenance.

I'm curious as to why so many people are just calorie-counting. Calories just mean energy and they can indeed be "empty" with no nutritional value.

Eating healthy is eating a good balance of unprocessed food from natural sources in the right quantity for your age, height, weight, and body-type, and also how active you are.
Of course you are allowed some treats in that diet, but for a healthy diet, your food should be mostly unprocessed and from natural sources and a good balance of all your vitamins, minerals, fats, carbs, sugars, fibre, protein, iron, and more.

It's simple really. Look at your body, and look for signs of where you may be lacking nutrients (grey tongue, brittle nails, etc.) Even taking a blood test can determine what you need to cut out or take in diet-wise (cholesterol, etc.)

And of course, lots of water.

I've also heard that the best way to eat healthy is to consume unprocessed foods. Part of that includes sugars and fats and all the stuff that gets a reputation as being bad for you. So, like avocados are full of fats, but they're a good kind of fat (from what I hear) since they're in their natural state.

KittenKoder said:

EVERY food we consume today is genetically modified, though many of our old methods are primitive, such as cross breeding and selective breeding, our newer methods are much safer and produce more viable organisms. There are more myths in the media about GMOs than facts, the old adage, you can't believe anything you see on television. A banana that is not genetically modified is difficult for humans to eat, more seeds than meat in it, and the genetically modified variety you buy in the stores is sterile, it cannot reproduce through it's own means.

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My understanding was that people are wary of newer modified foods because they haven't had hundreds or thousands of years of being eaten by people. That they haven't proven themselves not to harm us.

I don't think anybody here is calorie-counting to the exclusion of everything else. It's important to understand the functioning of how nutrients work in the body. Get at least your minimum intakes for all the nutrients, as well as maintaining a good mix of your macronutrients - fat, protein, and carbohydrates. That's all there is to it basically. If you follow that theoretical guideline, you'll inevitably eat a healthy diet. A lot of diet advice is based on practice rather than theory - so you have people being informed with how to do things without understanding why they do it. My advice is know what your body needs and understand how it works, and everything else should come naturally.

There's nothing wrong with sugars or fats per se. You can do a ketogenic diet in which you're taking in minimal amounts of sugar, or you can do a low-fat diet. People in Southern and Western Europe at relatively high amounts of fats, and Eastern cuisines is way higher in carbs than what North Americans are used to. What I'm saying is at the end of the day, exercise matters more than how much sugar vs. fat you're eating as you can have it either way.

I don't think theres anything as a healthy diet, it matters to you, one person will react well to one, and be worse off with the other. There are plenty of diets to choose from though.
I think most people do think fasting is dieting, or switching to raw veggies, fish, and nuts are the only options. I mean as long as you eat what your allowed minus say a 20% deficit you'll loose weight without excercising.
And theres healthy and not healthy calories like the bad kind of fats, or too much sugar. But its all important. Say TDEE says you need 3120 calories, you eat that much, eating less will destroy you.

Rezilia said:

So...if a cold drink has calories...that means it's actually hot?

#commonsenseisnotsocommon

"Calories are energy stored in the chemical bonds of food, which are broken during digestion, releasing the stored energy in the food.
Heat is the measure of how quickly a substance's molecules are moving - a hot food just has faster moving molecules, not extra chemical bonds.

When you digest hot food, supposedly the heat increases your metabolism, because your body doesn't have to work as hard to keep warm. The opposite is true for cold food - they cause you to burn more calories so your body temperature doesn't dip.
All in all, neither have more calories, but they have opposite effect on digestion."

- Hans, on Yahoo! Answers.

So yes, calories do affect you. Please don't confuse people...

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That is not what I said in any way.
And Yahoo answers is not the greatest of sources.

Definition of Calorie said:

a unit equivalent to the large calorie expressing heat-producing or energy-producing value in food when oxidized in the body

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Maybe I should've worded it more correctly- "a unit of energy"
I never said Calories don't affect you, I said that they're not the most important thing to count in a diet, which they're NOT.
Again: fat, carbs (and sugar), cholesterol, etc. are what you should track.

I don't know where you got your info, but it must not be from experience.

Why I say this:

I've cut down on many things in my life: fat and carbs being most obvious but not all, and NOTHING worked - not even the Protein Diet.

That is, until I started cutting calories. And then I lost weight faster than a hare crosses a tortoise! In other words, the only thing that helped me lose weight AND get healthy was cutting calories.

Passive learning is a weakness, my friend. You should learn actively instead.

Well calories aren't the only thing important when eating healthy. I may consume 2000 kcal a day (recommended amount for my body) on soft drinks alone, but that will destroy my guts sooner or later and I'll feel the consequences. Many fat people are actually malnourished because they mostly consume a ton of what they call "empty" calories (that is, calories easily absorbed by the body, mostly carbos).

However! Like Rezilia said, the calorie count is the most important thing when losing weight. You need to spend more than you gain. Whether you do so healthily still depends on what you eat, though. There are plenty of skinny people with heart diseases caused by high cholesterol. So the external appearance may not be telling the whole story.

Rezilia said:

I don't know where you got your info, but it must not be from experience.

Why I say this:

I've cut down on many things in my life: fat and carbs being most obvious but not all, and NOTHING worked - not even the Protein Diet.

That is, until I started cutting calories. And then I lost weight faster than a hare crosses a tortoise! In other words, the only thing that helped me lose weight AND get healthy was cutting calories.

Passive learning is a weakness, my friend. You should learn actively instead.

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Calorie counting may have worked for you, but we've all got different bodies that react differently and process food differently so that same approach isn't necessarily going to work for everyone. And like Kura said, you've got to take nutrients into consideration. Eating 1200 calories a day may make you loose weight, but if all you're eating is one variety of food, or eating something not very healthy, you're missing out on things your body may need like iron or calcium or whatever.

Rezilia said:

I don't know where you got your info, but it must not be from experience.

Why I say this:

I've cut down on many things in my life: fat and carbs being most obvious but not all, and NOTHING worked - not even the Protein Diet.

That is, until I started cutting calories. And then I lost weight faster than a hare crosses a tortoise! In other words, the only thing that helped me lose weight AND get healthy was cutting calories.

Passive learning is a weakness, my friend. You should learn actively instead.

Click to expand...

And cutting fat, some carbs, and sugar helped me more than Calorie counting ever could.
I went from 180 lbs to 163, and put on some muscle in a couple of months of going to the gym.
My diet: less fat, mainly. I never bothered with Calorie counting.

As a vegetarian who is trying so desperately to be a vegan, I believe, without bias, you cannot say that eating meat is part of a healthy diet. While I am at the moment quite lazy, there are numerous studies that prove just this. So while I do not want to be that condescending non-meat eater, if one wishes to eat healthier one should eat less meat. Naturally substituting almond milk for cow's milk is too a good idea, if not on behalf of the virtue of morality than do so for the health benefits--it tastes better as well!

I say "trying so desperately to be vegan" because I have a penchant for salmon and sushi.

Eating healthy is very basic, there is really no need to convolute the matter as modernity has done and I believe everyone knows what they should and should not be eating and doing, and yet...

Meat isn't required but it IS known as one of the best, if not THE best, source(s) of protein. But as long as you find a way to get enough protein, then like you said - you don't NEED meat.