Finding Freedom From Diets To Get the Body of Your Dreams with Cassie
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Today we’re talking to Cassie, a registered dietitian and author of Why Am I Still Fat? Cassie helps people figure out how to stop counting calories, and end the unsuccessful dieting cycle, and create the freedom in their life and get the body of their dreams.
After her own battle with sugar addiction and weight gain, Cassie developed a deep passion for helping people unlock the hidden barriers that keep them from losing and maintaining a healthy weight. It all starts with re-educating ourselves about healthy foods and how the body really works.
Ending the Vicious Dieting Cycle
Cassie emphasizes that failing at diets isn’t our fault – we’ve been misled and manipulated with loads of misinformation in the diet community so that, even when we follow all the rules, we aren’t successful.
Cassie helps people to see the full picture of health and metabolism and to end the vicious cycle of dieting once and for all. She challenges many of the accepted truths of dieting, pointing out that most of these supposed truths conflict directly with research studies.
Cassie herself was taught so many rules in dietician school that led her to her unhealthiest point in life; these included cutting out meat, drinking soy milk, using margarine instead of butter, only eating the whites of eggs, and treating bread and pasta as the foundation of a healthy food pyramid.
All Calories Are Not Created Equal
The most commonly accepted yet false truth in the diet community is that weight maintenance comes down to a simple balance of calories in and calories out. However, this oversimplifies things immensely and doesn’t take metabolism into account.
The theory boils down to the belief that if you consume too many calories, it is stored as fat, and if you consume fewer calories, your body will burn the excess energy and you’ll lose weight.
But the reality is that every molecule in foods is different and each is metabolized differently. For example, your body metabolizes broccoli differently than it does a cheeseburger. In other words, all calories are NOT created equal.
The Role of Healthy Fats
Cassie explains that healthy fats act as a buffer in the body by slowing down the absorption of carbohydrates. And this can actually help you to lose weight because a fat burning hormone is released when your blood sugar levels are stable.
Insulin, on the other hand, which stores fat, is released when your blood sugar levels are not stable — this is exactly what happens when you eat carbohydrates by themselves. And, as calorie counters know, we tend to eat lots of carbohydrates in place of fats when we’re dieting because fat has the most calories per gram. And that’s exactly how we get ourselves into trouble.
Cassie also explains that the more fat you eat, the less hungry you are, and that healthy fats also release a hormone that tells you you’re full. Once your intake of fat increases, your intake of carbs decreases, naturally leading to weight loss.
She has a couple of tips for people who aren’t sure how to get down on all the carbs they’ve become used to eating:
- To eat less bread and pasta at lunch and dinner time, make a big salad with plenty of olive oil and avocados for healthy fat.
- Add more protein into your diet – many dieters don’t eat enough protein.
