The most common misconceptions about nutrition

But is it really your fault that you still believe the wrong things?

I got asked the following question: “Is your program OK for pregnant women? How about women who are breastfeeding?”

I was surprised to receive this question. I perceived it in a wrong manner. It sounded like there was something potentially dangerous in our recommendations.

Like the program would be about malnutrition and undernutrition. Like we would recommend eating very little and exercising a lot.

Then I realized that maybe there are people who are maybe following me for 2 days and have no idea what we’re doing here. 🤷‍♂️

Don’t be one of those people. Keep reading.

✅ WHAT IS THE WEIGHTLESS PROGRAM?

Our Weightless program is not a weightloss program in itself.

I have 40+ video modules in which I help you identify and change habits that have led you to chronic exhaustion, the gain of extra pounds, muscle atrophy, bad medical test results, lack of energy and drive and so on.

Weightless is a program in which you are encouraged to change key habits that together converge towards achieving your short, medium and long term goals.

Weightloss comes as a natural consequence of changing certain habits.

✅ EXAMPLES

Let’s suppose the following:

1. You are sedentary: you work for 10 hours in a chair, you sit in traffic, you don't have the energy to do physical exercise (and for good reason);

2. You don’t pay much attention to your nutrition: you either don’t have enough knowledge or you don’t have the time to buy the proper things.

3. Likely you are living off of ordering food: you say you don’t have the time, that you can’t cook, that it’s more convenient like this;

4. You are constantly tired: maybe you have a baby, you’re going to bed late, you eat sugar and drink alcohol, maybe you even smoke, you eat processed foods (which require extra effort on the part of the body to process – ironically).

5. We can also add other elements constantly wearing you down (chronic stress): debt, sick parents, bank payments, arguments with your spouse, low income.

Let’s call this “normal living” – or something similar.

✅ “IT’S MY FAULT”

I don’t want to burden you with something like: “It’s my fault I’m fat”.

I’ve done the same thing to myself. That is until one day 14 years ago when I started to study and research. After acquiring knowledge, I freed myself and gave up obesity.

I don’t think that on top of what I wrote above you should also carry the burden of guilt.

✅ MAYBE

If you’re still reading this, I am assuming you are just a little bit like me:

1. You’re not complacent with your current situation (extra pounds, sedentary lifestyle, debt or anything of the sort);

2. You like putting in the effort knowing you’ll benefit from them in the future.

✅ BUT IS IT REALLY YOUR FAULT?

You’re being told constantly that if you want to lose weight and be healthy, then you should:

• have 3 meals and 2 snacks;

• eat on fixed timetable;

• weigh all your food;

• follow ready-made menus from your specialist;

• eat immediately after waking up – breakfast – even though you’re not hungry then;

• eat dinner no later than 6 pm (all the food will become fat after that specific time);

• eat like a king at breakfast, eat like a prince at lunch and like a beggar at dinner – even though your natural habit is to eat little in the morning and more in the evening;

• break your back at the gym for a minimum of 45 minutes at least 3 times a week;

• you’re not allowed to combine 2 protein sources at the same meal (for example: no calamari and feta in the same plate);

• eat wholewheat cereal because they are healthy and they aid digestion (even though this is something you feed farm animals with so they can get fatter);

• not eat more than 1 egg per day or 2 eggs per week (even though you love eggs);

• avoid eating meat because it can give you cancer and increase your risk of contracting diabetes and cardiovascular disease;

• not eat a lot of protein because they will destroy your kidneys and you will cause you to contract gout (especially if you dare eat eggs and vegetables in the morning, a soup for lunch and fish in the evening).

I “respect” none of these “rules”.

✅ THEN WE HAVE NUTRITIONAL…MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Lots of people say they stopped eating sugar for X amount of years. They have, however, replaced sugar with “natural” honey, agave syrup or maple syrup.

Meaning they are probably eating just as much sugar as before, maybe even more.

✅ NATURAL SUGAR

A good part of the people who have replaced sugar with honey or maple syrup are still obese.

Most of them have a fatty liver, pre-diabetes, high levels of triglycerides and uric acid and they can’t figure out why – remember, they “stopped” consuming sugar a long time ago.

Simple: because they are actually still consuming (at least) just as much sugar.

• Honey is 82% sugar; the rest is water.

• Agave syrup is 76% sugar; the rest is water.

• Maple syrup is 68% sugar; the rest is water.

Within the same category: “sugar-free jam”. If that jam is sweet, it means it contains “natural” sugar.

Natural sugar – meaning sugar extracted from beetroot or sugar cane – is actually solar energy captured via photosynthesis.

I used to think in the exact same way before doing my research.

I used to also confuse between what was healthy and what was useful for my endeavors.

⭐️ FUN Fact: did you know that 80% of the brown bear’s diet over the summer consists of fruit? So fruits aren’t fattening?

✅ WILD RICE

The Japanese are known to eat a lot of rice, having low obesity rates and the highest percentage of centennials on the world. So eating rise is heathy. Right?

You actually have no clue about Japanese culture and diet, but you definitely cherry-pick what you want from the information you get.  

Just like alcoholics will justify drinking that bottle by “it helps me sleep better” or “I drink for the resveratrol in the wine” or “the French drink wine every day and they’re slim”.

It’s like saying “my grandpa died at 95 and he smoked all his life”. So it means it’s OK, you can smoke too, right?

The difference is you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day while stuck in traffic, while our grandpas used to smoke a few cigarettes a day during 10 hours of hard manual labor in the field all day.

✅ WILD MISCONCEPTIONS

I also used to believe that wild rice is healthy until I really began studying.

Discover the most common of them in the premium area

Did you know that 125 grams of raw rice contains exactly 100 grams of powdered glucose?

Just as a general idea, that liquid used to perform glucose tolerance tests contains 75 grams of glucose.

See? Maybe you weren’t aware that when you eat a bag of rice you are actually eating a tablet of glucose.

I have done multiple glucose tolerance tests in the past, so I speak from experience.

Ladies, if you’ve ever done that test yourselves for your pregnancies, how was it? I know what you’ll say: horrible.

So is glucose actually “sugar” or not?

✅ BACON AND BREAD

Bacon from a farm-raised pig is healthy, right? It’s also “keto” – so it MUST be healthy.

If you already have tens of kilos of “bacon” under your skin already, do you think it makes sense to eat more bacon? Unless you don’t want to lose weight. Then it’s OK. 🙂

10 years ago I used to believe that bacon is OK for human consumption, but after researching the topic properly, I now know better.

So is bacon healthy? My grandfather used to eat bacon and bread and onion for all his life and he was healthy as a horse until very late in his life.

After lots of hard manual labor every day, you bet it’s healthy.

Or maybe the whole ensemble was healthy. You know: stress-free living, 10 hours of hard manual labor in the field, going to bed at 9 PM and sleeping until 5 AM.

Maybe what was healthy was the fact that sweets were only consumed on Sundays.

One more thing: how come our grandparents from the countryside were so healthy if they didn’t have olive oil to pour on their salads?

Weird, my grandparents didn’t have olive oil in their backyard. They used to cook using lard.

✅ OLIVE OIL

Anyone who is someone in Romania travels to Greece on vacation.

Anyone who cares about healthy living knows that the majority of olive oil found in shops is “laced” with soy or rapeseed oil.

As a consequence, anyone who wants the good stuff will buy tens of liters of healthy original olive oil from Greece – straight from the source.

Anyone who has self-respect will pour olive oil by the tablespoonful in their salad because:

• it’s regarded as being very healthy;

• it comes straight from Greece;

• it’s first press oil;

• It’s organic, extra virgin, bio, eco, yada-yada;

And here is how we have people around who “drink” tens of liters of olive oil annually and they are tens of kilos overweight with no clue as to why. I was the same 10 years ago.

Their perception is that they don’t exaggerate, they don’t eat junk food, don’t consume sugar too often and they are 100% right.

Just that most people confuse “healthy” with “useful”.

Just because olive oil is healthy it doesn’t mean those calories don’t count.

When pouring from the bottle, you’ll easily pour 3-4 tablespoonfuls. That’s 500 calories right there. Add some nice feta cheese in there and you’ll get a 1000-calorie salad.

“What, isn’t cheese healthy?”

Cheese is perfectly healthy, just as healthy as extra virgin, organic, cold-pressed olive oil. However, both come with lots of healthy (extra) calories.

✍️ I wrote more about cheese: CLICK.

✅ THE CLASSIC EXAMPLE

Think about this: you are a sedentary woman, you eat 2 pretzels in the morning on your way to the office (800 calories), then at lunch you’ll have a healthy salad with olive oil and cheese (800 calories) and then something sweet at 5 PM (200 calories).

Maybe in the meantime you’ll also have a glass of fresh orange juice. It’s “healthy”, because it contains natural sugar so it won’t make you fat.

Until you reach home, you would have already eaten 1800 calories. And you know what the problem is? You don’t even think there is something wrong here.

And then in the evening when you get hungry again, what do you do? You eat, of course.

Then you’ll hear yourself complain to your girlfriends: “I have eaten very little this whole week and haven’t lost any weight”. And that is 100% true.

You ate very little – but the food was very energetically dense (lots of calories). You know what?

If you still have nutritional misconceptions, if you don’t know what to eat, I don’t consider it to be your fault if you can’t lose weight.

⭐️ FUN Fact: did you know that 2 liters of Coca Cola (with sugar) have as many calories as 2 hot pretzels?

Hot pretzel 200 grams - 814 kcal / Coca-Cola Classic 2000 grams - 740 kcal

Of course, you wouldn’t drink Coca-Cola with sugar when trying to lose weight. However, those 2 pretzels would disappear in the blink of an eye.

✅ UNDERESTIMATING

I believe you are aware that 2 liters of Coca-Cola per day will not help in your endeavor to lose weight.

200 grams of sugar (800 calories) per day is way too much. It’s absurd.

But you are probably underestimating the massive caloric power of 2 pretzels. Yes, 800 calories.

You can read my article about pretzels here: CLICK.

You are probably underestimating that 125-gram bag of rice – that bag amounts to 400 calories, just as much as a hot pretzel.

✅ OVERESTIMATING

You go to the gym and walk for an hour on the treadmill and believe you just burned 800 calories because that’s what the machine is showing you.

Most people believe that 2 pretzels have 200 calories and that you can burn 800 calories within one hour on the treadmill at the gym. In reality, it’s exactly the other way around.  

In reality, 2 pretzels amount to 800 calories, while one hour of walking amounts to 200 calories.

Are you prepared for emotional damage?