Among the messages we hear the most when it comes to trying to lose weight is that if we simply keep everything in moderation, it will help to keep with weight loss and to stop any lost pounds from coming back. As much as we’re ready to believe this type of rule, a new study has taken a deeper look into the truth of the matter, and it looks as though doing everything in moderation may not provide the balanced results we’d expect.
Recent research published in PLOS ONE has actually revealed that if you don’t hold yourself back from having whatever you want but if you make sure not to have too much of it, then you are still increasing your risk of both weight gain and diabetes over a span of ten years from getting started with that mindset.
The researchers who conducted the study asked more than 7,000 participants about their eating behaviors, including the variety of foods they eat in a typical week, the number of calories in their meals and how nutritionally similar all the most commonly consumed foods were.
What was discovered was that among the participants who consumed the widest variety of foods, there was a 120 percent greater risk of increasing waist size and a higher risk of gaining weight than was the case among people who ate a small range of foods that they loved very much, regardless of the fact that those foods were not necessarily healthful ones.
The study surmised that tasting many different kinds of foods made a person less likely to pay attention to whether or not they were hungry and made them more likely to continue eating simply for the sheer pleasure of continually trying something fresh and new. Among the study respondents, people who ate a larger variety of foods were typically eating the same as those who ate a smaller spectrum of foods, except they would also add more healthful foods, as well.
Therefore, while they would be consuming many foods containing lots of nutrients, such as vegetables and whole grains, any of those nutritional benefits were negated by the high levels of sugars and fats that they were still eating just like their counterparts who ate a smaller variety of foods.
That said, it is still not recommended that people simply skip the healthful foods and eat the junk food they love. The research also discovered that people who were more open to eating healthful foods that were “weird” would weigh less after the same length of time.
The lesson here: Everything in moderation doesn’t mean to eat everything in moderation.
