MYTH: The healthiest diet is a diet low in fat and high in carbs and grains.
For decades we have been told that a well-balanced healthy diet should consist of lots of carbohydrates and grains, a little protein and even less fat. If we look at the food pyramid that most of us learned in school, it shows that 60-70% of our diet should be made up of carbs including pasta, rice, and bread etc, protein around 15-20% and fats around 10-15%!
However if most of us were to eat this way daily we would gain weight, instead our food intake should be closer to 40% carbs, 30% protein and 30% fats. With the majority of our carbs coming from fruit and veg with some grains and limiting the amount of simple carbs such as white flour, table sugar, honey etc. This is vitally important if we want to lose weight or stay lean, ideally we want to think of our bodies as a furnace and turn our bodies into a fat burning machine. When we are constantly eating carbs our bodies will use these sugars as a source of energy and won’t use its fats stores.
In order to allow our bodies to utilize more fat we need to ensure that our insulin levels remain steady, when we eat a lot of simple carbs our insulin levels spike, which tends to make us eat more once these levels drop, we feel a slump and need a quick pick me up. However when our insulin levels are steady our bodies are forced to use up fat as an energy source.
To allow this to happen we need to make sure we are eating the right type of fat, we need to remember that healthy fats do not make us gain weight, sugars do. Great sources of good fats include; oily fish like mackerel and salmon, nuts, seeds, eggs, avocados and oils like olive, walnut, flaxseed, macadamia, coconut.
Turning this myth of eating a high carb-low fat diet around, instead, think of avoiding simple carbs, eating more healthy fats and incorporating good sources of protein into your diet. Eating lean meats, chicken or fish, fresh fruit and veg, nuts, seed and oils. While avoiding or at least limiting cereal grains, refined sugar and oils and processed foods, keeping everything we eat as natural as possible.
MYTH: Coffee is unhealthy and should be avoided.
To say that coffee is unhealthy is untrue, in fact more and more studies are showing that coffee has many health benefits, as it contains anti-oxidants and nutrients which helps decrease the risk of developing certain diseases and improves physical performance, such as; riboflavin, pantothenic acid, manganese, potassium, magnesium and niacin.
Recently it has been shown that coffee drinkers lowered their risk of all cause mortality compared to non-coffee drinkers. Due to the anti-oxidants in coffee, research indicates that there is a lower risk in developing certain cancers, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. This is probably because coffee can increase the amount of good cholesterol in our bodies and also can improve our body composition by encouraging fat burning. It has been shown that coffee can increase our metabolism therefore allowing us to burn more calories and cause a shift to allow us to use fat rather than our carbs as an energy source.
Other than the health benefits of coffee, caffeine found in coffee can also have a positive effect on physical performance. Caffeine causes the release of epinephrine, which is a hormone that allows are bodies to respond to physical exertion, caffeine also promotes the release of fatty acids into our bloodstream, allowing us to reserve our carbohydrate stores for later, therefore helping to improve performance.
Although there are many benefits to drinking coffee we do need to be careful not to drink too much, if you begin to suffer from insomnia, irritability and restlessness it may be an indicator that you are having too much. For most people drinking 2-3 cups of coffee a day is a safe amount, however we do need to be aware of the little extras we are putting into our coffees such as milk and sugar. These extras can boost a coffee to 500 calories plus, if were consuming 1500 calories a day, that’s a 1/3 of our daily caloric intake gone in one coffee.
Ensure that you are not drinking more then 4 cups a day, avoid using sugar and milk, have it black and finally avoid having coffee at night in order to prevent a sleepless night.