Good Foods V. Bad Foods

How often do you think about food in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’?

You have a 2,000 calories to eat in a day.

You eat 2,000 calories of pizza and chocolate.

You eat 2,000 calories of oats, chicken, salad, fish, rice, vegetables, fruit and nuts.

Either way you’ve eaten 2,000 calories.

So really there are no good or bad foods.

There are foods.

Now that isn’t to say you’d feel the same after eating nothing but pizza and chocolate than if you’d eaten the same number of calories from a variety of largely unprocessed foods.

Generally your body will probably react more positively to the unprocessed foods.

But sometimes you’ll feel better for picking the pizza!

Overtime a diet of nothing but pizza would probably start to make you feel pretty bloated and lethargic.

There was a man who lost weight by eating nothing but McDonalds for 30 days.  He was still in a calorie deficit.  Another experiment involving McDonalds, Supersize Me (which had a a different focus and was designed to shine a spotlight on the American Fast Food Industry) highlighted how aside from weight solely eating this type of food affected the participants cholesterol, sex drive, skin, mood and so on.

The point is you aren’t likely to eat nothing but McDonalds.

Nor are you likely to never eat it EVER. AGAIN.

A happy diet isn’t that polarised.

Some days you’ll eat chicken and brocoli from a Tupperware box.  Sometimes you’ll eat fried chicken from a bucket.

There’s that saying you’ll see on memes about this being called balance.

Also realistically.

Most people struggle because they haven’t got to grips with energy in v. energy out.

They eat too much or not enough.

It isn’t that they aren’t eating the right sort of foods.

If you have this down 100% then looking at what you eat and the specific nutrients in those foods could enhance how you feel.  If you want to compete in a show or top-level sport you perhaps need to do this.

For the rest of us (and I include me in that) just hitting those calorie goals (and protein goals if you want to go one further) will be enough to make us feel pretty good and bring results.

So actually from this logic there are no good or bad foods.