Healthy Surprises

There's nothing more confusing for folks new to normal eating than the whole issue of what's healthy and what's not healthy. Add to that a layer of what will make you fat, and what won't make you fat, and you have a recipe for guilt, confusion, and reverting back to the old familiar routines.

So let's sort it out. First of all, we're learning as normal eaters that no food makes you fat. In fact, those formerly evil foods (that which are high in fat or carbs) are the very foods that satisfy the appetite best. We've learned all the wrong rules about how to be thin. So let's go back to the basic of normal eating once more: NO FOOD MAKES YOU FAT.

To be a normal eater, you are learning instead to tune in to your body well enough that you know what will satisfy without much food. It's the amount that seems to matter most when it comes to a good weight. That means adding back to your diet the very evil foods you still feel guilty about. Get over that.

Need help getting over the guilt? Join a free Yahoo! group like Diet Survivors where other like-minded folks will help you deprogram yourself from your former brainwashing.

And now for the second part of the equation. Aren't those foods which you used to avoid for the sake of weight loss also unhealthy for you? No.

Think about it logically. When you eat small amounts of balanced food every day, including fats and carbs, isn't your daily overall consumption low in everything?

In fact, when you're a normal eater, (a person who eats small portions of everything), you are permanently on a low-fat, low-salt, low-carb, low-additive, low-saturated fat, diet.

Why? Because if you're only eating around 2500 calories a day, you don't have to think in percents anymore. Back when you were eating 6000 calories, it really mattered if your diet was fifty percent fat. But now that you're eating normally, fifty percent fat amounts to far fewer fat grams.

And if eating fifty percent of your diet from fat keeps you thin because it's satisfying, isn't that good for your health? Thin folks are at low risk for heart attack, diabetes, and all the other medical outcomes that result from obesity.

Now let's look at one more aspect of "foods that are evil." At the start of the low-fat craze, experts were telling us we get two bangs for our buck if we eat low-fat. First, we will supposedly lose weight, due to the lack of all that hidden fat. We all now know this was misguided, untested theory. It just doesn't work.

Second, we supposedly would benefit from a healthier body. Somehow, we could continue to eat too much, but if we lower our percentage of evil foods enough, we'd be okay. But the experts committed an egregious error, from which they've been trying to recover ever since.

Authoritative sources such as the American Dietetic Association and others now tell us we need those fats. There are three basic categories of fat: saturated, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated. Saturated fats typically come from fatty meats and whole-fat dairy products. The unsaturated fats typically come primarily from vegetable oils, nuts and fish.

According to the American Dietetic Association, we need all three kinds of fats, and the polyunsaturated fats are especially beneficial.

Olive oil, canola oil, peanut butter, nuts, salmon. avocados, margarine with no trans-fatty acids, and many other foods are not only begrudgingly okay for us to eat after all, they are ESSENTIAL for health. Chocolate has health benefits, and so does wine.

Carbs are also essential for health. We need them for fiber, satisfaction, trace minerals and more. Whole grains and complex carbohydrates are best of all.

Apply small portions to these facts, and suddenly the world is completely open to you. Unless you have some other medical restriction, you can now enjoy all these foods and more:

1. Full-fat yogurt
2. Whole milk
3. Omelettes
4. French toast with butter and syrup
5. Coffee with half and half
6. Whole grain toast with butter or margarine
7. Roast beef on whole grain with mayo, salt and pepper
8. Cheesecake

Now imagine that the above list is endless. Those are the foods you can have.