“I love toast and sandwiches. Since I found out that processed foods like white bread are bad for me, I’ve started baking a whole grain, seed, nut and flax bread in my bread machine and just love it. Problem is, once I went off the bread you said was bad and started eating healthy I’ve started gaining weight. What’s the deal?”
If only it were as easy as cutting out one food and eating “healthy”! There will always be those granola eating skinny-minis who proclaim the glories of eating fruits, nuts and twigs. The truth of the matter is that if they didn’t run 13 miles and swim 100 laps a day in training for their next triathlon, they’d be just as fat as the rest of us.
Fruit, though loaded with fiber and flavor, is loaded with natural sugars which are just as calorie laden as processed foods with processed sugars.
Nuts, though they have healthy fats and fiber also have all the calories associated with fats. Fat is fat and calories are calories. Too much fat, even the good fats, means lots of extra calories and that is a bad thing.
Whole grains are great. They are heavy with fiber and flavor and a crunchy, whole grain bread is definitely far more satisfying than a well-processed white bread but that satisfaction comes at a huge caloric cost.
The deal is that although you are eating a much healthier bread, you’re probably eating just as much of it as you were the processed, white bread. If you consider that the healthy bread probably has triple the calories of the processed stuff then that will make the situation pretty easy to understand. Kudos to you for eating a much more healthy bread but the fact that you’re still eating lots of bread is causing the problem.