I read an intersting comment from a personal trainer on facebook the other day. He was giving fitness tips and advised that to loss weight the best way was to calorie constrict (take less calories in than what your daily expenditure is) and not worry to much about what you are eating. So basically his message was that you can eat processed crap and bad foods all day but still loose weight. This is bad, bad advice and wrong on so many levels.....for me its like which angle will I take on this first to correct this misguided information.
So this is the angle I have taken for this certain post..... Food should only have one purpose, too make you healthy. The food you eat either makes you more healthy or it makes you less healthy. It is simple as that, it is not about total calories in versus calories out. If we only took this approach then yes you may be a healthy weight but I can guarentee you are anything but healthy. You probably are suffering major hormonal imbalances, have lost all your muscle mass, have a high level of visceral fat (also known as organ fat), have systemic inflammation and generally feel unwell (oh and this is just the start).
What else is interesting is if you do eat crap all day then you probably need to count calories as your built in calorie regulatory mechanisms has gone haywire. See we don't need to count calories if we are eating good food, your body has a built in hormonal mechanism that knows how much you should be eating. If you are making good food choices your body will tell you how much you need. If you are not making good food choices, signals in your body have been put totally out of commission, your body will tell you to eat when you are full, that you're hungry when your actually not, send you cravings for foods that you know will not make you healthier.
Etc, etc, etc. really I could go on and on, take another angle. However I want this to be short and get a direct point across. That point is good food choices equals good health.
So whats healthy? a good start is vegetables, fruits, nuts and meats.