The 4 'Health Foods' I'd Stop Eating First After 50

I'm going to tell you four foods to stop eating if you're trying to lose weight. Every one of them was sold to you as a health food. You probably ate one of them this morning, and there's a good chance you're going to eat another one before dinner. Now before I go any further, I want to be very clear about something. There is no food that can make or break your weight loss, and there is no food that ever needs to be completely off the table when you're trying to lose weight. What matters is how much, when you eat it, and what you eat it with. So I am not going to take away any of your favorite foods from you. Instead, I'm going to show you what is missing from these four, and how to keep them in your diet in a way that works for you instead of against you. I'm Dr. Rachel Felber, an ER doctor and a health and strength coach for women. And by the way, in response to the 217 comments, I am not AI. I am a real, live, human person, and I am always wearing pajamas on bottom. Stay with me until the end, because I'm going to give you five seconds of math that you can use on any package, bag, or box that tells you whether the thing calling itself a protein food actually is one. As usual, my disclaimer, I am a doctor, but I am not your doctor. This is general education, not medical advice. And since this video is about food, let me be very clear that if you have kidney disease or diabetes, or you're on any medication that requires eating or avoiding certain foods, or you have a dietician or a nutritionist or a doctor who is already managing what you eat, nothing I say in this video trumps anything that your provider has told you. Okay, let's get into it. I want you to picture a normal day for a woman who is eating healthy. So someone who is really trying to make good choices. Let's pretend it's you. It's 7 a.m., you're having some oatmeal with a banana and coffee. Mid-morning, you grab a green juice or a flavored Starbucks latte. Lunch is a big salad with a light dressing, a little bit of chicken on it, and one of those little yogurt cups. 4 o'clock, you're having a protein bar, because we need to get all that protein in. And 7 o'clock, a real good dinner. Chicken or salmon, some vegetables, some rice. And then 9 o'clock in front of the TV, some crackers or rice cakes, or just a handful of anything out of a bag or a box. Now that day looks pretty good. I would have called that a good day for most of my life. So let's take a closer look. Food number one is the breakfast with no protein. Oatmeal, banana, coffee. That breakfast is composed of healthy food, but has almost no protein at all. Maybe 6 grams. And you're probably thinking, okay, that's fine, I'll have more protein with lunch and dinner. But let me tell you why that matters as much as it does. Unfortunately, it is not enough to just drip protein in throughout the day. Your body actually needs a big enough dose at one sitting to switch on the muscle-building machinery. Below that threshold, it takes the protein and uses it for other things, useful things. But it's not going to muscle maintenance and building. Now above that threshold, the switch flips and your body can focus on muscle. For a woman over 50, that threshold is about 30 grams per meal. After menopause, that switch got harder to flip. Your muscle needs more of a signal to build than it used to. Not less. 6 grams is not anywhere near enough to flip that switch for you. So what to do instead? 30 grams. At breakfast, ideally within an hour of getting up, to take your body out of muscle breakdown mode that it's been in overnight and put it into muscle building mode. Or at the very least, muscle maintenance, which does also need all that protein. Now I'm not taking your oatmeal. Keep the oatmeal. I eat oatmeal. Personally, I like pouring vanilla protein shake into it, but you don't have to. Just have some protein along with it in some form. So a cup of Greek yogurt is about 20 grams. Three eggs is about 18. Cottage cheese, one of those yogurt drinks, turkey bacon. Whatever you like in the morning, that will get you there. If you want help determining your actual daily protein goal and some tips on how to reach it, you can check out my free protein guide at rachelfelber.com slash free protein guide, which I'm linking in the comments. And there's a second reason that this matters, and it's probably news to many of you watching. Protein doesn't only build muscle. It also blunts the glucose and insulin response of whatever you eat along with it. So a breakfast with no protein isn't only a missed chance to keep or build muscle. It is also a glucose load with nothing alongside it to keep your body from experiencing a glucose spike. And those glucose spikes again and again for weeks and months and years is what moves you toward insulin resistance. And that is something that we definitely want to avoid. Now, I know exactly what you're thinking. You're thinking, there is no way I can eat that much food in the morning, oatmeal and a cup of yogurt. I must be totally delusional, right? Toast and coffee usually does the trick for you. You're just not that hungry in the morning. And many women think that they are actually doing themselves a favor and they consider themselves lucky that they're not that hungry in the morning because then they don't eat that much and fewer calories means weight loss, right? Wrong. You are keeping your body in muscle breakdown mode longer than it needs to be. And you're starting the day off by putting your body right at the top of that glucose roller coaster that will go up and down all day and dictate your hunger, mood and energy over the next 15 hours. You're not hungry in the morning because you trained your body to not be hungry in the morning. You don't give it food until 10 a.m. long enough and it will learn not to expect food. Well, you can train your body to expect food in the morning just as easily. Start slowly increasing your food intake in the morning and you will see within a couple weeks you will be hungry enough to easily get that 30 grams in. And you'll also see that your late morning cravings and your mid-afternoon energy slump will improve dramatically because you're off that godforsaken glucose roller coaster. Food number two, the green health juice. It sounds healthy and while it does typically have lots of awesome micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, the problem is that juicing takes the fiber out and throws it away and you end up drinking the sugar of a bunch of fruits and vegetables, which is the same problem as your breakfast of oatmeal and a banana. The fiber in the fruit and vegetables is what slows the sugar down. Just like protein slows the digestion of the carbs eaten with it, fiber does the same thing. So you remove the fiber and your body just gets this massive dump of glucose, which is exactly what we're trying to avoid. Yes, but isn't fruit healthy? Yes, it is healthy when it's eaten as fruit with its fiber. So what to do instead? If you love the juice, drink the juice. Those antioxidant, immune-boosting fruit veggie juices have lots of incredible nutrients. Just don't drink it alone. Have it with protein and some fat. Or if you're not married to the juice, have the fruit instead. The fiber that naturally comes with the fruit usually does enough to control the glucose load entering your bloodstream, so you don't have to manage it by pumping out a ton of insulin. Okay, that is two of the four. The next two are big ones and number four is the one I think is doing the most damage to women because it is particularly sneaky. But before that, a quick reminder. If you want to see more of my videos, please be sure to hit subscribe and also tap that bell next to the subscribe button so YouTube actually shows them to you. Food number three is fat-for-sugar. This one is going to surprise a lot of you. Number three is any food that says light on the front or low-fat or fat-free. The little single-serving yogurt cups, the light salad dressing. I get it. We have all been told that when you want to lose fat, you need to eat less fat. But here's the problem with that. When the fat comes out of a food, often the taste goes with it. Fat is often what makes food taste so good. So if they're taking out the fat, they're almost always replacing it with something else that tastes good. And I bet you can guess what that is. Sugar. So you picked up the light version thinking you were doing yourself a favor. And in a lot of cases, what you actually did was trade the fat, which supports your hormones and helps you absorb certain vitamins and also helps slow the digestion of glucose, just like protein and fiber do. And you traded that fat for more sugar. Now I want to be very clear about something because I am not saying that low-fat or fat-free is the problem. That is not the problem. I eat non-fat Greek yogurt or low-fat cottage cheese almost every single day. Those are actually two of the best things you can have in your fridge when you're trying to lose weight, because they are very high in protein, they're filling, and they are nutritious. So low-fat is not the problem. Sugar going in to replace it is the problem. So the next time you're at the grocery store looking at yogurt or condiments or peanut butter, baked goods, granola, coffee creamers, ice cream, turn it over and look at the nutrition facts and the ingredients. Did they just dump a bunch of sugar or corn syrup or often both in there and call it the healthy option? Probably. Okay, so what to do instead? Two options. One, get the version that doesn't have a ton of sugar dumped into it. You can add a flavor yourself from real foods like fruit, cinnamon, other spices, walnuts, lemon, whatever fits the food you're working with. And two, if you love the version with sugar, have it. Just don't have it alone. That cup of healthy, low-fat granola with 22 grams of added sugar and 4 grams of protein with sugar as a second ingredient, in reality, is just not that healthy. But if you put a small handful of it into a cup of Greek yogurt with 20 grams of protein, that's an awesome meal. The protein won't let your bloodstream see a gigantic glucose load or eat it from a bag mixed with nuts and seeds. That is a great snack. The fat will do the same thing as the protein does. So this is a really important point. That actually goes for any food you love. None of the foods that you enjoy have to be off-limits when you're trying to lose weight, improve your metabolism, or improve your insulin sensitivity. You love pasta. Everyone loves pasta. Have pasta. Take half of what you would normally take and add a ton of chicken or beef or shrimp. You get the yummy pasta, you get all the protein, and you'll stay full much longer so you won't be back in the kitchen two hours later, rummaging through the fridge. So remember, this is not about taking things away. It is about adding things and adjusting things that will make it all work in your favor. Now, if you want all of this in one place, how to do the food, the protein, the fiber, as well as the daily movement and strength training and sleep and data tracking, all made super simple and straightforward, check out my book, Your Metabolic Reboot. That is at rachelfelber.com slash book, rachelfelber.com slash book. Number four and the final one is the protein bar. I bet no one guessed I was coming after the protein bar. And it's probably not for the reason you think. I bet that most of you watching this who have had a protein bar in the last week didn't really have a protein bar. You most likely had a candy bar with a little bit of protein in it with the word protein splashed all over the packaging in bright letters. Next time you're in the store and you see a protein bar or anything packaged with the word protein or high protein food on the front, turn it over and look at the nutrition facts and see how much protein is actually in it. Now, here's the problem. There is an FDA rule that says that if a food has 10 grams of protein in it, the manufacturer is allowed to print high protein on a package. 10 grams. Now, I really want you to start to have context for these numbers. Remember that we want at least 30 grams in each meal. So this is not getting anywhere near that. And that's to be able to call it high protein. A food product only needs to contain five grams of protein per serving to legally put a claim like good source of protein or contains protein or provides protein on its packaging. So you pick up a bar, see good source of protein on the front with pictures of happy muscular people and you think, oh good, this is what I need. This is protein. And you buy it. You spend your hard earned money on that product, which has 38 grams of carbs, 28 grams of added sugar and five measly grams of protein. No, ma'am. That is not helping you and your fat loss efforts at all with its high fructose corn syrup and 25 other ingredients. So stop just reading the front of the box. I promise you, your health is not their biggest priority. Your money is. And they will write whatever they can legally get away with to get it. So what to do instead? How do you know if something is really a high protein food? This is what I promised you at the beginning, the five second math trick that tells you exactly that. And I want to really drill this in. Just because something has protein, doesn't give it the right to sit up high in the protein VIP section with foods like chicken breast, eggs, shrimp, beef, soy. Peanut butter is the one I always use for this because so many people think that peanut butter is a protein. It has protein, but it is so high in fat and so high calorie that to get a real dose of protein out of it, you have to consume a huge number of calories. Two tablespoons is almost 200 calories with only eight grams of protein. So now that doesn't mean don't eat peanut butter. It just means don't see it as your protein source. Okay, so here is how you tell. And it takes five seconds. Take the packet, turn it over, find the number of grams of protein and add a zero to it. Now compare that number to the total calories in the product. If the protein with a zero on it is equal to or larger than the number of calories, you can call that a high protein food. If it's less, it's not. So a protein bar with 12 grams of protein and 360 calories is either a fat bar or a carbohydrate bar. It is not a protein bar, no matter what they print on the front of the box. Now a protein bar with 20 grams of protein and 180 calories, that is a protein bar. At the very beginning, I told you I was going to share four foods that you should stop eating to lose weight. But now you know the truth. Food is not inherently good or bad. It is just food. What we really care about is how your body responds to what you put in it. And if you choose thoughtfully, you can lose weight and improve your metabolic health without giving up a single food that you love. I'm Dr. Rachel Felber, ER doctor and women's health and strength coach. Thank you for watching. And if you found value in this, please share it with a friend, mother, daughter or aunt who will too. I make new videos every week for women looking to trade fat for muscle, improve their metabolic health and age with strength.