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Health & Fitness

Is it all about Balance and Moderation?

Are 'balance' and 'moderation' going to get you results in 2012 and beyond?

 

How many times have you heard “everything in balance and moderation?” Virtually any time there is a discussion about what constitutes a healthy diet, invariably the conventional wisdom espouses to eating a balanced diet and eating everything in moderation, even if it’s unhealthful.

As someone who cannot eat cookies in moderation, or smoke cigarettes in moderation, this advice is counterintuitive. When the issue is smoking, we try to get the smoker to quit, we don’t tell them cigarettes are good in moderation.

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If it’s the cigarettes that are giving us lung cancer and it’s the sugar, refined, and easily digestible carbohydrates that are making us fat and sick, which is looking more and more like it’s the case, why is it copacetic to prescribe these foods, not only in moderation, but as part of a presumably “balanced” diet?

Consider the notion that if we restrict our consumption, and, for example, try to eliminate a six-soda-a-day habit from our diet: are we going to be more likely to give in to our cravings, than if we moderated our soda drinking and allowed for one can of soda per day? A 2011 study in the journal Obesity demonstrated that people who cut out carbs craved them less than people who ate them in “moderation.”

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Think about an ex-smoker of 15 years. She used to smoke at least a pack of cigarettes a day. Now she doesn’t even give it a thought. Even when all her friends are doing it and everyone around her is smoking, she doesn’t feel the need to light up. She hasn’t had a cigarette in 15 years, but by the logic of dietitians, she should crave cigarettes more today than if she practiced balance and moderation and cut down to say five cigarettes a day for the past decade and a half.

Don’t eat the entire pizza, but don't deprive yourself, either; just have one slice and savor those bites, is the conventional wisdom. This advice is nonsensical and somewhat cruel. Telling a morbidly obese person to feed her physiologic cravings, but only in small doses, can be torturous. There are many that find little more ironic than the “Fun Size” snickers bar.

In other words, would you rather go through the pain for a week or two and kick your habit, and then not have to give it much thought, if it all, for the rest of your life, rather than walking a tightrope of balance and moderation on a daily basis?

Quality of the diet dictates quantity of the diet so perhaps the most counterproductive advice the public health authorities could have dispensed was to encourage a decrease in the quality of the diet while prescribing a conscious reduction in the quantity as well. Making bread, pastas, starches, and cereals the base of the food pyramid for the last 30 years did just that.

“Carbohydrates is driving insulin is driving fat,” is how George Cahill, retired Harvard professor of medicine and fat metabolism expert, put it. If breads, starches, and sweets drive the energy we eat into our fat tissue and we can’t use that energy for fuel, we will be hungry and tired – we will be gluttonous and slothful – as a compensatory response to the foods we eat. In this scenario, practicing temperance, moderation, and restraint is to go against our body’s biology. Our body is going to win this battle and accumulate excess fat as a result, despite our best conscious efforts.

You have a choice to make. You can tell anyone that will listen that you can't live without pasta, bread, bagels, cereal, cake, and cookies. You can’t live without cookies, and so you eat them. As a result, you may be fat, sick, and diabetic.

Or perhaps you can adopt a way of eating, a lifestyle that will rid you of these complications and cravings for these foods. You can feel better on a daily basis, have more energy, and have an improved quality of life. You can eat what our ancestors ate and avoid the foods that weren’t available to them. You can be relatively healthy, fit, and lean as a result. And at what cost? Cookies?



Bob Kaplan holds advance degrees in exercise physiology and business, an undergraduate degree in nutrition, is a nationally certified personal trainer, and owns four Get In Shape For Women locations in Bedford, Wellesley, Westford, and Winchester.


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