Firstly…. to set the benchmark of this post, I believe that ALL grains are bad for you and should not be eaten….. at all!!
It blows me away how often I get asked how I lost my weight, and when I tell them how, and what I changed in my diet, people say to me “Ohhh I couldn’t POSSIBLY give up X” (Where X is one (or several) of the grain based foods like bread, pasta, rice etc… I’m not even referring to sugary filled rubbish we all already know is bad for us)…. Then I constantly hear them say “Yeah, well… I can have it sometimes right? Everything in Moderation?”
Ummm…. no actually, I do not believe that is the case, and I do not believe that eating grains, even “in moderation” is healthy.
Think about it this way… We all know smoking is bad for our health… We also know that it just isn’t possible to give up smoking with “Everything in Moderation” by having a couple of ciggas each day, or maybe a pack of smokes one day a week.
You are probably rolling your eyes at this point thinking “Pfffft… What a twat. He’s comparing eating bread, pasta and rice to smoking!” but I am saying that YES, carb addictions are real, and they are just as hard to give up (often harder in a lot of cases) as smoking.
Once you realise how damaging products made from grains are for us human folk (Read Grain Brain by Dr David Perlmutter and have your mind truly blown) then you will realise that you should cut them out.
“Everything in Moderation” is the addiction talking, wanting you to feed the addiction, not feed your body. A little bit now, turns in to a little more the next time, or it turns into a little sooner than last time. Before you know it, you have blown out of your healthy eating, or you have stacked on the weight again, or your poor skin is back etc etc…. Just like one smoke here, leads to another there, leads to a few more… and before you know it, you are smoking every day again.
Cutting the grains out of your diet is something that cannot be achieved by the “Everything in Moderation” farce. This saying is one of the most damaging nutritional lies we have all been fed for decades. Everything in moderation doesn’t work. Learning what foods you should be eating, and eating lots of only those foods… THAT is how you improve your health, lose weight, feel better, and KEEP feeling better for the rest of your life.