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Now that you’ve read all about the major macronutrients — fat, carbs, and protein — you’re probably wondering how the heck you make, like, meals and stuff. After all, foods aren’t just “nutrients”.

Here’s a little chart that might be helpful. Here are common foods that are good sources of the major nutrients.

In our culture, body fat is associated with particular meanings, many of them negative. You may be asking, “Krista, why are you talking about fat on a woman-positive site? Aren’t we supposed to, y’know, be freeing ourselves from the beauty myth and all that?” Yes! Of course. And I get pissed off as hell with people and social institutions telling me how I should look. Yet we also have to live in a society where there is substantial negative reinforcement for excess body fat, as well as quite real potential health consequences from carrying around a lot of additional fat.

However, just because society is screwed up doesn’t mean you should be too…

The scale is only one tool for measuring fat loss, and it’s not the best one. Here’s why, and here are some better methods.

Just like saving money for a rainy day, our body stores excess calories as fat. How fat loss/gain works, and why “spot reduction” is a myth.

Body fat. The words can send otherwise rational women into fits of paranoia and hushed, ashamed discussion of their failures.

In this article, I bust out the F-word and explain how fat works.

Many weightlifters badmouth cottage cheese, whining that it tastes bad and can’t be used in any recipes. I henceforth declare them crybabies. To overlook cottage cheese is to do without a great source of lean protein and a versatile food.

Thus, I have made it my mission to convert the heathen.

Are carbs all-or-nothing? Do you have to give up bread for all eternity just to see your abs? Well, you could, if you wanted. Or you could find a carb intake strategy that works for you. Here are some options.

In the first part of this series, The Carb Myth Part I, I pointed out that people often replaced the fat in their food with carbs, primarily in the form of refined sugar. I also stressed that controlling carb intake was critical to ensuring successful fat loss and appetite management. I’d like to expand on this a little bit because currently, the low-carb mania is echoing the stupidity of the low-fat mania ten years ago.

The bottom line: refined carbs—processed sugars and simple starches—are still bad for you.

Ah, the 1980s and early 1990s, the era of ultra-low-fat diets. We were told that we could eat anything we want, as long as it didn’t have fat in it. Calories were irrelevant! Just purge the fat and you can eat everything with impunity! I don’t know about you folks, but I chowed down a whole lot of plain rice and brownies made with applesauce. Well, at the end of it all in early 1997, I was still overweight. Desperately, I tried to purge every last living fat molecule from my life. And through it all, I happily scarfed “fat-free” treats: Snackwells, hard candies, Jello, gelatos and sorbets, fat-free salad dressings with a weird chemical aftertaste… Are you doing the math by now, dear reader? It wasn’t the fat in my diet that was the problem, it was the carbohydrate intake. In other words, I had replaced some negligible fat calories with tons of sugar and starch calories.

Food is generally regarded by bodybuilders not as an experience of organic and sensual enjoyment, but as fuel or a substance which contributes to the achievement of a particular physical goal. Bodyfat, in “fitness culture”, is the physical manifestation of overindulgence. Eating, for many people in this culture, is something to be brought under control, and to be done within a clearly defined regimen of bodily discipline.

Enjoyment of food and control of the body are thought to be incompatible; after all, who gets brown rice and lentil cravings? Thus, if the pleasure of eating is antithetical to control of the body, it stands to reason that foods deemed appropriate for “health” goals must be-symbolically or actually-separate from those kinds of foods which are enjoyable.

Prefab protein bars are expensive crap. Make your own instead!

Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof… –Ezekiel 4:9

Hey, those Old Testament chefs were on to something.

Fat has become an obsession in North American society. As a society, we revile fat people, we eat too much fat but profess adherence to low-fat diets, we say some fats are bad but others are good (and this designation changes regularly), and we buy products that are fake fat or supposed to absorb fat (or suck the fat out of our bodies… as if). Many people, especially women, fear and avoid all fat in hopes of staying slim. In other words, we don’t have a clue about fat. There is so much confusion about fat that I could write 32 volumes of the Encyclopedia Fatannica about it.

Consider this your helpful Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Fat Galaxy. And, just like Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the words “DON’T PANIC” are written on the front.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that fruits and veggies, aka F/V, are good for you. They contain valuable vitamins and hundreds of other chemical compounds, as well as soluble and insoluble fibre. Also, they taste good! When I meet people who say that they don’t like F/V, it usually means that a) they have only tried a limited range and/or b) they don’t know how to cook them properly.

This just in from the Department of Duh: fruits and vegetables are good for you. Also, sky is blue and water is wet.

The short and sweet conclusion I promised? Drastic diets or diets without exercise chew through muscle. Less muscle means lower BMR and more relative bodyfat. Lower BMR means eventually putting on additional bodyfat in the long run. It puts your hormones out of whack and disrupts your appetite and eating patterns. Essentially your whole metabolic environment is screwed up.

It also means that short-term, drastic caloric restriction is not a good solution for long term weight maintenance and bodyfat loss.

Aside from the physiological effects, possibly the biggest reason why diets don’t work is that people regard them as short-term solutions to a long-term issue. The issue is usually insufficient activity/sedentary and poor nutrition. In some cases it can also be an underlying medical condition such as polycystic ovary syndrome or thyroid disorder. However building muscle can help in both those cases, as it improves insulin resistance as well as adding lean body mass.

Hardcore crash dieters are probably familiar with this phenomenon. They diet stringently, purging all unnecessary calories, for a few days. Maybe even a week. Then, suddenly, appetite becomes overwhelming and the dieters lose control. They binge on whatever they can get their hands on: a bucket of chicken, an econo-size bag of cookies, or what the hell, a block of Crisco. They feel like the biggest, most out of control pig in the world, and indeed they have temporarily lost control of their eating behaviour.

When people drastically reduce their calories, as in most crash diets, the body first turns to muscle breakdown to make up the difference. The same thing happens in most cases of caloric reduction where exercise is not performed in conjunction with dieting. In other words, if you diet without exercising, or if you diet too stringently, your body eats through its muscle tissue.

Most products promoted as weight-loss supplements do not help the body lose fat. So save your money.

In terms of cultural history, there has never before been a society like ours in North America. We sit in the midst of plenty, yet we obsess about starving ourselves. Our supermarket shelves groan under the weight of every conceivable kind of food, yet it is considered grossly self-indulgent to consume too much of it. Our cravings are not proudly declared, but furtive, embarrassed: we cram a fudge brownie or two on the sly, we make midnight runs to the convenience store for Oreos, we secretly fantasize about cheesecake. All the while we lament our lack of willpower, our inability to stay “on a diet”, our ballooning midsections. We say that we hate the Celebrity Model Du Jour for being so skinny, but privately we know we would walk over broken glass to spend even an hour in a slender body, because that is what our culture values. With these contradictory messages it’s easy to see why so many people have very complicated feelings around food, fat, and dieting.

The worst part is, the damn diets don’t even work! How is that for wasted effort?

Skinny Minnie looking to be She-Hulk? Don’t despair. Just belly up to the bar and start eatin’.

Some helpful terminology and an explanation of some of the basic approaches.

Think of a good diet as simply assembling blocks of Lego. These blocks are macronutrients, portion size, overall caloric intake, and meal frequency.

Lowcarb diets, no-carb diets, low-fat diets, Atkins, Protein Power, cabbage soup diets, grapefruit diets, Paleolithic diets… can’t a girl just get some plain old eating any more? How to separate the sheep from the goats and the wheat from the fat.

“Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food.”
—Hippocrates

The basics of how to eat nutritiously. Meet your friends, the macronutrients!