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The one-size-fits-all food guides do not work for most of us. We are all different, and a diet that works well for one person won’t work at all for someone else. By listening to what our bodies are telling us, we can figure out the best way to eat for ourselves.

The USDA is working towards putting out its 2010 Dietary Guidelines, and so far based on what I’ve seen, I’m thinking they are still heading down the wrong path. For the first time the guidelines are going to be geared towards the unhealthy, obese and type 2 diabetes population, and rather than lowering the intake of grains which would make a huge difference for that population, they are lowering fat intakes even further. Surely after 30 years of food guides that have suggested high carb low fat diets along with concurrent increasing rates of obesity and type-two diabetes, it is abundantly obvious that this strategy isn’t working? Perhaps the powers that be need to review Albert Einstein’s famous quote “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” US citizens and organizations have until July 15th to submit commentary and research to the panel that is going to be putting out the guidelines. Perhaps there is still time to change them for the better. Scroll down to June 18th and find a letter sent by someone with Type 2 Diabetes. I think he is bang on with his critical commentary and kudos to him for stepping up to the plate. You will notice as you scroll through the list that much of the input and commentary for the new food guide is from the food industry pushing their agenda.

The USDA is making some positive changes, like lowering salt intake guidelines to 1500mg per day, shifting to whole grains from refined, and lowering added sugar and trans fats. But the biggest changes in the new guide look to be lowering saturated fat (hard fats) consumption from 10% to 7% and trying to get people to eat more vegetable oils instead. Olive oil is fine, but increasing consumption of omega 6 polyunsaturated plant oils will increase body inflammation and is a very bad idea. And decreasing overall fat intake further tends to increase intake of processed starch, which also diminishes health by increasing problems with insulin.

Food guides in general can't work, because we are all different metabolically speaking. We need individualized food guides. The current food guides work for maybe 15 to 20% of the population, but they are quite wrong for the majority of us. Switching the guide to put veggies as the most important (not fruit), animal foods as the next most important, and whole grains less important than both would help 80 to 85% of the population in my opinion. But even that wouldn't work for some. The only guideline that would help absolutely everyone would be to suggest a diet that consists of only unprocessed food, something that is unlikely to happen as governments need to pander to the food companies. Food politics plays a big role in what we are told to eat.

So, if one can't rely on the food guides because the one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn't work for most of us, what can one do? No problem. It really isn't too hard to figure out how to eat in a way that makes us feel great if we take the time to pay attention.

When we are hungry, our body is telling us it needs NUTRIENTS. But what we tend to do is eat anything that will fill us up to take away the hunger pangs, not thinking much about nutrients. Often a muffin or a cookie will do the trick. But there isn't much in that muffin or cookie to nourish us, and as soon as the body realizes that the nutrients it was looking for did not arrive in the snack, it makes us hungry again. So, should we repeat the process, we will be eating lots of calories, leaving the body still hungry.

A meal should last a minimum of three hours. If you are hungry before those three hours are up, either there were nutrients missing in your meal that your body needs, or there weren't enough of certain nutrients. The easiest way to ensure you are providing adequate nutrients is to only eat unprocessed food, and to make sure you have a mix of animal foods and plant foods in each meal. Then play with the ratio of animal to plant foods to see which ratio keeps you satisfied longer. Include fresh vegetables to ensure you are getting the vitamins and minerals too. By paying attention to what our bodies are telling us, we can create our own personalized food guide which might turn out to be quite different from the one the governments are suggesting.

In my experience, most people need to eat some animal foods at each meal, and some people actually need a surprisingly large ratio of flesh foods to vegetables at each meal to be at their best and to last at least three hours. And for those people, that high protein/fat diet will actually make them healthier (lower blood sugar, triglyceride levels, decrease inflammation markers, improve LDL to HDL ratio etc). I think that people that decide to become vegetarians initially do really well because they move from a diet of processed food to unprocessed food which drastically increases nutrition. But not many do well long term on a vegetarian diet as there are some nutrients in animal foods that are difficult to obtain from plant foods. Supplementing a plant-based diet with some animal foods can make all the difference.

The point is some people do well on a plant-based diet supplementing with a bit of meat, and others do well on an animal-based diet supplementing with some vegetables, and most of us need a diet that lies somewhere between those two extremes. We each need to figure out for ourselves what ratio of plant foods to animal foods works best for us by listening to what our bodies tell us and eating the ratio that makes us feel good and keeps us satisfied for at least three hours. The only valuable food guideline that can be generalized to everyone is that we need to eat the best quality food we can access in its least processed form, preferably from our own garden, farmer's market, food coop. Eating healthy requires time in the kitchen. Any animals or animal products we eat should have eaten their natural diet during their lifetime – stay away from factory-farmed meats, poultry, eggs and dairy. And finally, if you are not hungry, don’t eat!

Very soon I'll be offering my nutrition seminar online – people have told me they leave the course with complete clarity on how to know whether or not a food is healthy to eat. And months later when I run into those that have taken the course, I am told what a difference the information has made to their lives. So look out for it soon!

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Contrary to popular belief, hormones play a greater role in weight control than calories do. If you are trying to lose weight, it would make sense to focus your efforts on controlling the hormone responsible for your excess weight.

Most people that decide they want to lose weight try the “eat less, exercise more” approach, and a few people get results. Many others just feel hungry and tired, not to mention frustrated.

Eating less calories than one burns might work for some, but if the diet is not sufficient in protein, vitamins and minerals, the body will reallocate its resources eating up your muscle tissue and taking minerals from your bones in addition to burning that body fat in order to keep the body functioning.

If you are hungry, your body is telling you it needs nutrients. Losing muscle mass will decrease your metabolism and make it easier to put on weight once you go off the diet.

And we also probably all know of someone who eats next to nothing yet simply does not lose any weight despite consistent effort. Controlling calories is usually not the answer. So rather than starve yourself, why not look at which hormones might be responsible for your fat pattern, and work towards controlling those hormones in particular?

There are primarily three hormones that control fat deposition, and where one carries the excess weight can be a clue as to which hormones are involved. Often more than one hormone is involved, but the description below can give a starting point.

1. Insulin: People that tend to get fat all over – fat neck, fat ankles, fat wrists, fat back of the hand – tend to be fat due to a problem controlling insulin.
2. Cortisol: People that tend to get fat around the trunk and belly yet have skinny legs and arms are likely to have an issue with cortisol. A distended belly without too much excess fat around the back of the ribs is more likely due to a food sensitivity. (Of course one can have a food sensitivity and have a cortisol issue at the same time.)
3. Estrogen: People, usually women but not always, that tend to put on fat around the hips and upper legs, yet are relatively slender in the waist and upper body tend to have a problem of excess estrogen, or a problem of estrogen not being balanced adequately with progesterone.

Insulin is the easiest of the three hormones to control, but it requires strict diet change to do so. Because insulin's job is to take sugar out of the blood stream and store it as fat, the obvious way to control insulin is to stop eating foods that convert into sugar quickly, including all foods that contain sugar and flour.

Read labels and avoid foods that contain ingredients that end in "ose" like glucose, fructose, sucrose, lactose, galactose, maltose, dextrose etc., and ingredients that end in "accharides" like disaccharides or monosaccharides.

Many processed foods including frozen diet meals contain sugar, so even though they may be low in calories and fat, they will still make you fat. Avoid products that contain flour, like bread, pasta, crackers, cakes, cookies etc.

Make sure every meal and snack also contains protein and fats in order to slow the sugar into the bloodstream and to blunt the insulin response.

Doing some exercise, even simply a walk after meals can help burn off the blood sugar so it is not stored as fat. Going on a strength-training program to increase muscle mass will also improve insulin sensitivity.

If you have this fat pattern, do what you can now to alter how you eat, because you are on your way to Syndrome X and Type 2 Diabetes. If you already have Type 2 Diabetes, talk to doctor about keeping you off insulin, as injecting extra insulin may lower blood sugar, but it will just make you fatter and less healthy in the long run.

Remember that high insulin levels, whether secreted by the body or injected, not only store excess blood sugar as fat, but also increase blood pressure, increase the body's fight and flight response, and decrease thyroid function by decreasing T3 production, all of which makes one more prone to cardiovascular disease. No matter what the fat pattern, everyone can improve their health by controlling for insulin.

Cortisol is our stress hormone, and if cortisol levels remain chronically high, fat tends to be deposited around the organs, which is a particularly dangerous fat distribution pattern.

Many people that have been put on corticosteroid type drugs like prednisone, probably notice that they put on weight and can't take it off no matter how little they eat and how much they exercise.

First step would be to ask your doctor for another kind of drug, or better yet, work towards getting off all drugs by finding the causes of the problems and addressing those rather than treating the symptoms with drugs.

Cortisol is released as a response to any kind of stress, from physical stress such as pain, to nutritional stress such as too much or too little of particular nutrients, to emotional stress, so anything that can be done to eliminate causes of stress should be addressed.

Going to bed too late is an example of a stress that will increase cortisol levels, and studies show that those that tend to burn the midnight oil tend to be fatter than those that don't. Stimulants like coffee, tea and sugar also increase cortisol levels.

The type of exercise that works best for this fat pattern is lower intensity long duration exercise like walking, yoga, tai chi, and qi gong. Running and other very intense cardiovascular exercise will probably make the situation worse.

And having a coffee after your exercise session is a bad idea. Examine all aspects of your life for stress inducers and do what you can to reduce or eliminate them. Have those difficult conversations so you can move on, and learn to only concern yourself with things that you can control.

Cortisol levels should be high first thing in the morning, and should gradually diminish as the day goes on. In order to address a poor circadian cortisol rhythm, it can be very worthwhile to seek out a Functional Medicine doctor for a circadian salivary cortisol test.

Once your cortisol rhythm is known, a treatment protocol can be suggested to help you. This is a long process, so do not expect overnight results. Please note that low calorie, low fat diets are more likely to negatively impact cortisol levels rather than improve them, which might explain why some people on these diets do not lose weight.

Estrogen dominance, either from excess estrogen or estrogen unbalanced by progesterone tends to cause fat to be deposited in the hips, buttocks and upper legs, and people with this fat pattern are more sensitive to estrogen than others.

If this is your fat pattern, you need to do all you can to limit your exposure to estrogen by avoiding use of oral contraceptives, plastics which are high in xenoestrogens, soy products which are very estrogenic (soy is in many processed foods so read labels carefully), as well as meats, eggs and dairy from factory farms where hormones are used to fatten up the animals and to increase milk production. Finding non-medicated, pasture-fed meat, dairy and eggs would be a priority for this fat pattern.

Seeing a Functional Medicine Doctor to get tested for estrogen and progesterone balance might be a good idea. Sometimes bioidentical hormone creams can be helpful although they are very difficult to dose correctly which in my opinion is a problem.

It should be noted that children are particularly susceptible to estrogen which can cause severe problems later in life, so reducing exposure to endocrine disruptors that mimic estrogen is extremely important.

This post is undeniably very simplistic. As becomes obvious when the studies below are examined, all the above hormones affect the others, and most of us have more than one hormone imbalance; we are indeed complicated beings.

However working towards improving our hormone function will lead to greater weight loss as well as overall better health than going on low calorie, low fat diets which may indeed stress hormonal systems further.

If you are in the Vancouver area, my colleague Judy Chambers is doing a seminar entitled "Hormone Hell-p" June 7 from 7-8h30pm. Click here to register.

If you want to share this article, scroll to the very bottom and click the “share” icon to post on Facebook, Twitter etc. If you want to subscribe or search for other posts by title or by topic, go to www.wellnesstips.ca.

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Is going to bed too late making you fat?
Exercise, the autonomic nervous system and fat loss

To subscribe go to www.wellnesstips.ca