What is healthy eating for weight loss?

Having a meal can be healthy and delicious when you avoid processed food and focus on real food nutrients.

Understanding the difference between processed or ultraprocessed food and real food

What are essential nutrients?

To understand what is healthy nutrition for weight loss you first have to identify what is not healthy nutrition. Unhealthy foods are obesogenic meaning they promote weight gain and fat storage. Pizza, toaster strudel, granola bars, frozen meals, french fries, pancakes, mac and cheese are obviously comfort foods that people love to eat because they taste good but these are not health foods. You would be hard pressed to find a doctor or dietitian or fitness competitor who consumes these and is calling them healthy food. Food is healthy as it should provide nutrients to the body for the growth and development and cellular function. Food should drive the metabolism with energy within the mitochondria. In order to achieve adequate nutrition and avoid malnutrition there are specific essential dietary nutrients that you have to eat such as essential fats and essential amino acids, vitamins and minerals or else you will become sick and possibly die.

Essential Fats include: omega 3, omega 6, and C15.

Essential Amino Acids include: histidine, isoleucine, leucine, valine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, and tryptophan. These come from protein. Leucine for example has been shown to increase muscle protein synthesis, which means new muscle growth, when people add it to their diet. Valine, isoleucine, and leucine are called branched chain amino acids and make up 35% of the protein structure in muscle

Essential vitamins include: fat soluble vitamins such as vitamins A, D, E, and K and water soluble vitamins such as vitamins C, B1 thiamine, B2 riboflavin, B3 niacin, B5 pantothenic acid, B6 pyridoxine, B7 biotin, B9 folate, and B12 cyanocobalamin.

Essential minerals include: calcium, phosphorus, sodium, potassium, chloride, magnesium, iron, zinc, copper, selenium, molybdenum, manganese, and iodine.

A diagram of essential nutrients that your food should be rich in

What are processed foods?

To put it simply. Eating food that does not contain a rich source of the above essential nutrients will lead to malnutrition and sickness. Drinking a lot of alcohol or sugary drinks and glasses of juice do not provide nutrition, it simply provides calories that are devoid of nutrients. Therefore: the turkey sandwich as depicted below made with soybean oil, wheat flour, gluten, corn, brown rice, barley, flax seed, honey, dextrose, and sorghum syrup is in fact more similar to cake than it is to turkey. It is a mixture of flour, sugar, and seed oils designed to increase your body fat storage and designed to make you crave it more and increase your hunger hormones.

Ultraprocessed foods have complex ingredient lists where food especially bread is created to taste good and be addictive but lack simplicity in delivering nutrients

This sandwich by definition is called an ultraprocessed food. Just look at that label!

Processed foods as depicted here have many ingredients that promote body fat storage and weight gain.

Processed food are the opposite of real food ancestral nutrition to which humans' stomach and digestive tract are accustomed to.

Processed foods shown in the picture above increase blood sugar and disrupt the normal satiety hormones that would routinely make you feel full. They promote fat gain by increasing insulin resistance and leptin resistance.

What does healthy eating look like?

Usually healthy food is one ingredient low carbohydrate real food such chicken, fish, eggs, beef, pork, game, and non starchy vegetables. These foods are nutrient dense and packed with the essential elements of nutrition while minimizing blood glucose changes. Note: carbohydrate is not an essential nutrient. (Please reference the National Academy of Sciences publication 2005 Dietary Reference Intakes Page 275 https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/10490/chapter/8#275)

An excerpt from the National Academy of Sciences Dietary Reference Intake Guide which is written by the Institute of Medicine which explains the lowest limit of dietary carbohydrate is zero.

Examples of real food nutrition promoting fat loss.

This in fact correlates with the newest US Dietary Guidelines. RealFood.gov You will notice that fats were to be avoided in the previous guideline, but now in the newest guideline whole grains like bread are to be avoided as well as fruits such as bananas and grapes and oats and rice and cereals which are high in sugar and starches also known as carbohydrates make up the smallest portion of the dietary guideline.

Times have changed. Learn about the newest dietary guidelines with a trained obesity medicine expert.

This dietary pattern also provides the highest nutritional content to the individual.

Meat sources of protein are richer in nutrients and bioavailable nutrition compared to plant sources.

Highest values are highlighted in green. Nutrient table as furnished by myfooddata.com

Conclusion

Healthy eating for long term weight loss involves eating foods that are nutrient rich to suppress leptin levels in your body and reduce fat storage, but these foods also provide satiety and reduce hunger and cravings. When we eat foods that are processed the normal digestive signals and hormones that tell us to stop eating are hijacked and that is precisely why food companies can make a profit by selling empty calories and non nutritious snacks labeled as "food." Your healthiest option is to eat foods at the top of the new dietary guidelines food pyramid of 2026 which are rich in nutrients usually single ingredient whole foods.