Wanting to be slim and healthy is one thing. But to live like this in everyday life is completely different. It's hard to eat healthily. Much harder than eating the next bag of fries with ketchup and mayonnaise. We would like to have both: the healthy body - but also the fast food, the lemonade, and the cake. That is why many people are looking for healthy solutions that do not require them to change their diet.
Some of these are long outdated beliefs to which they still cling. Sometimes they trust the latest trend, which is supposed to fix it now after everything else has not worked. Then again they replace one unhealthy food with another that supposedly is better. And quite often they simply buy the products that resourceful companies put on the supermarket shelf. It's like simply replacing the vegetables on your plate with a diet powder.
All of these solutions have one thing in common: They are alibis. They drive away from the guilty conscience but have nothing to do with healthy eating. They trick you into thinking that you can continue to live as you have before and still stay slim. I would now like to introduce you to seven such alibis:
1. YOU BUY PRODUCTS WITH A HEALTH PROMISE
The healthier people want to live, the more “healthier” products companies bring to the market. They are developing so-called functional food, i.e. foods enriched with additives such as probiotic yogurts, cholesterol-lowering margarine, or protein bars. If that's not enough, you can use numerous dietary supplements. There are canned vitamins, protein from plastic buckets, protein flakes, turbo diet packages, and Almased powder, with which you can “lose weight quickly and healthily”. If you don't want to know exactly, it all looks really healthy.
With other products it is clear from the start that they count in the unhealthy corner, but clever marketing should make them appear healthier, such as Stevia Cola, diet cookies, milk bars with “fresh milk” or Knoppers, “the breakfast”. I find the Weight Watchers product range particularly worrying. In their online shop as well as in some supermarkets there are whole milk biscuits, chocolate spreads, potato chips and peanut flips. You can eat all of this for just a few Smart Points . But is it really that smart? You can find out here how we are misled by the industry when it comes to food .
None of this has anything to do with healthy eating. These products are just alibis for people who want to stick to their bad habits with a clear conscience.
2. YOU ARE HIDING BEHIND A PHILOSOPHY
Paleo, low carb, high carb, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free. There are many nutritional philosophies. I understand their appeal because they bring structure to (nutritional) chaos. It can help to hold on to them. Therefore, at least at times, it almost doesn't matter which philosophy you believe in. If you follow it with vigor and common sense, it will work.
But it's not the nutritional philosophies that are healthy, it's what you make of them. Unfortunately, people tend to switch off their (human) minds as soon as motivation wanes and is replaced by comfort. Then he goes in search of solutions that correspond to the philosophy but are no longer healthy. What's the use of Paleo when you eat the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Protein Bar? What is the meaning of the Weight Watchers imprint when you smear the chocolate spread on your bun? How healthy is a gluten-free pizza really?
At the latest when companies bring their pseudo-healthy products onto the market and consumers jump on them, every nutritional philosophy is reduced to absurdity. Then it is nothing more than an alibi.
3. YOU TRUST IN SUPERFOODS
Exotic foods with a particularly high proportion of healthy nutrients are booming: chia seeds, acai and goji berries, hemp seeds, maca, quinoa, cocoa, coconut oil, avocado. Some of them have already made it into every supermarket and have become mass products. Other superfoods are expensive to buy in specialty stores and on the Internet. I have nothing against this real food. Some of them are also in my pantry.
However, you shouldn't fool yourself that you are eating healthy because of the superfoods. They probably only make up a small proportion of your daily energy intake. I add these foods to my diet because I like their taste or consistency, and because they add a little variety. But how many goji berries can you eat?
You cannot compensate for an otherwise unhealthy diet with superfoods. Just because there's avocado on the pizza doesn't mean it's healthy. Neither do a few chia seeds make the sugary ready-made muesli any better. From a health perspective, superfoods are only marginal optimization. They do not make a significant contribution to a healthy diet, but they can be used as a good alibi.
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4. YOU REPLACE SUGAR WITH SUBSTITUTES
Word has long got around that sugar is unhealthy and that it contributes a lot to the fact that mankind is getting fatter. People just don't want to move around. At least not in such a way that it hurts. You would like to keep eating cakes, desserts, ice cream, and chocolate. Just without sugar. As a result, they are really hot for substitutes. The industry has responded and offers a whole range of sweet alternatives.
They have long been contained in finished products, and they are also increasingly available in supermarkets for home use: natural alternatives (honey, syrup, coconut blossom sugar), sugar substitutes (xylitol, erythritol) and synthetic sweeteners (aspartame, saccharin, stevia). Many of them are insanely expensive, others are cheap, but insanely artificial. Some are high in calories and some are not.
But the basic problem remains: they all increase our craving for something sweet. Sometimes the body reacts to them in the same way as to sugar and sometimes the substitute makes you even hungrier. By replacing sugar in this way, you bring exactly the problems into your home that you actually wanted to avoid, but with a better conscience. Ultimately, agave syrup, erythritol & Co. have nothing to do with a healthy diet. They are alibis. You can find out more about sugar substitutes here.
5. YOU FIXATE ON CALORIES
Until a few years ago, I counted the calories at every meal. I also assigned a number of calories to each forest run. It just didn't help me because instead of maintaining my weight, I gained weight again.
Measuring something makes us feel good at first. The feeling of being in control of our diet. However, I now believe that calories are leading us on the wrong track. After all, what use is it to measure something if the value has hardly any meaning? The amount of calories says nothing about whether we eat healthily, whether we are full after a meal, and how our body uses the energy it has absorbed.
Much more important than the quantity is the quality of the calories, because not all calories are created equal. Energy from a croissant with jam is used differently than energy from eggs with avocado. You can find out how big the difference between good and bad calories are and what makes them different in our article: Quality instead of quantity - why this also applies to calories.
Those who count calories but eat unhealthy foods do not automatically stay slim. The counting is just an alibi to keep eating everything. Instead, we would need a qualitative measurement, but that is not practically possible. Therefore, many people stick to the bare numbers, even if they make life unnecessarily difficult for themselves.
6. YOU ARE STARVING YOURSELF SLIM
Skip breakfast, skip dinner or the FdH diet: Many people try to lose weight by starving or at least not gaining weight. But starvation is not a healthy diet either. Starving is starving.
Starving is uncomfortable, but comparatively comfortable. You don't have to worry, you don't cook, you can continue to eat your favorite dishes and it doesn't cost any money either. If you eat less, you even save some. In some ways, starving yourself is therefore easier than changing your diet.
However, something so uncomfortable can never be a permanent solution, because starvation is based on willpower, and it is finite. You can only hold out for a limited time. A week, a month, a year. At some point, it's over, and then the yo-yo effect waves. Only after starving do you realize that not only was everything in vain but that you also harmed yourself. Because with diets, the body reduces its energy consumption. After a while, the body adjusts to the reduced energy and gets along with less. But if you eat more again - sooner or later everyone does that - you gain weight.
In the end, the disadvantages of any diet catch up with you. Diets are not a healthy diet. They are just an alibi to keep eating unhealthy foods.
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7. YOU JUSTIFY YOUR SINS WITH EXERCISE
“I am allowed to sin, because I was jogging today.” - Everyone has probably uttered such justifications. I as well. A few years ago, I ran up to 20 kilometers on weekends. After that, I would often treat myself to a large sundae. Pretty much everything is wrong with this logic. (Why you can't lose weight while jogging)
Exercise is important for a healthy body, but it doesn't make up for poor nutrition. Diet is mainly responsible for the slimline - it accounts for up to 80 percent. The rest is movement. So if we do sports and eat the sundae afterward, we not only tear down all successes with our buttocks but also pull our health account deep into the red.
Even if you could add up calories from food and exercise, it would never work out because we burn very little extra energy during exercise. We're talking about 250 calories for 30 minutes of jogging. That's a couple of slices of wholemeal bread.
Sport is still important because it has a long-term effect. If we build muscles during exercise, they will continue to burn energy long afterward. In order for them to be able to do this, however, the diet has to be right, because chocolate does not nourish muscles, but fat cells. You can read more about this in Jasmin's article: Why burning fat is not so important in exercise and what really counts when losing weight.
So if exercise is an excuse for you for a lack of discipline in your diet, you are on the wrong track. Exercise cannot compensate for an unhealthy diet. The best effects are achieved when exercise and healthy eating go hand in hand.
BOTTOM LINE: DON'T DECEIVE YOURSELF
I used to get some of these alibis myself. I was good at glossing over them, only they didn't help. I worked on the symptoms a little but didn't get to the root of my problems.
Do you also recognize yourself in these alibis? That wouldn't be objectionable. Almost everyone is tricking their diet and hoping to miraculously stay slim and healthy despite their vices. But of course, it is a deception on yourself. As long as you eat mostly finished goods, pasta and pizza remain the first choice, you consume sweets and high-calorie drinks every day, you will run into problems.
There is no solution that lets you eat any junk you want and still stay healthy. No matter what powder you swallow, how many kilometers you jog or whether you add chia seeds to your breakfast: To stay really slim and healthy, you have to eat the way lean and healthy, people do. These have their healthy habits.
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