HOW TO EAT MORE AND HAVE LESS BODY FAT
How to eat more and have less body fat.
At ALPHA THREE we absolutely love food. It brings us joy, refuels us and energizes! So therefore we’re sad to see some misconceptions about food. With as a results very restrictive diets of very few calories per day, loosing strength, loosing endurance and a very grumpy mood! So we quickly tackle one big misconception, with the research linked. Oh and these pictures are just for reference of how nice food is – and that you can eat that while working towards a fit & healthy lifestyle.
A calorie is not a calorie
So contrary of what most diets would have you believe, the human body does not recognize all calories as equal. Some foods are used to boost brain power, fuel metabolism, and heal the body – while others are simply stored as fat. Imagine eating 100 calories of candy to 100 calories of a broccoli – it is not the same. Eating high-quality foods balances the hormones that regulate our metabolism. When we eat these foods, our body naturally maintain a healthy weight. But when we eat sugar, starched processed fats and other poor-quality foods, the body’s regulatory system gets ‘confused’ and prevents us from burning extra calories. So those extra 10 pounds are not necessarily the result of eating too much – just eating the ‘wrong’ foods.
High quality food
Let’s look at some data to support this:
#1 Harvard researchers looked at the eating patterns of more than 50.000 people, divided into fifths, according to the quality and quantity of calories they ate. This large sample demonstrated two points:
- Eating more correlated with less body fat
- Higher-quality food correlated with less body fat (see image on the right)
Wait what? Yes read that again.
#2 Another study of Women’s Health Initiative tracked 49.000 women for 8 years. The women in one group ate an average of 120 fewer calories a day than the other group. Over the years this adds up to 350.400 calories. How much lighter were the women who ate fewer calories? Only 0.88 pound. Not what you’d otherwise expect if a calorie was a calorie.
So how is that possible? Eating more low-quality processed foods causes us to gain body fat. But that does not mean eating more high-quality whole food produces the same results. Interestingly enough: eating more of the right foods has been clinically proved to help us burn fat over the long term. Consider even more evidence:
- A study at the University of Connecticut found that people in the eating more-high-quality-food group ate 300 more calories per day and burned more body fat (find the full article here at NCBI)
- A study ate the University of Pennsylvania found that people in the eating more-high-quality-food-group ate a total of 25,000 calories more over six months and lost 200 percent more weight (find the full article here at The New England Journal Of Medicine)
- A study published in Obesity Research found that people in the eating-more-high-quality-food group ate a total of 25,000 more calories over three months without gaining any additional weight (find the full article here at Researchgate)
So what to do now?
So eat high quality food. We’ll give more examples of that in the future – for now enjoy some recipes upon our blog!
Like the super crunchy chicken with rice or sticky tempeh noodles.
Tag us when you make it – enjoy!
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