Welcome to the Food Facts section. Here we want to shed light on the first key to your weight loss success: Eat right!

There are some nutrition basics we need to cover in order to understand how to best lose weight. Your food contains lots of different things; it gives you energy and supplies the body with vitamins and minerals so that it can function properly.

We want to quickly touch on these things here in the food facts section, as we will throw around words like "multi-vitamins" or "low-carb" throughout the site.

Your body gets energy from food! The fuel that keeps your body running is commonly called calories. You can get calories from four sources that make up your food:

• Carbohydrates: 4 calories per gram
• Proteins: 4 calories per gram
• Fat: 9 calories per gram
• Alcohol: 7 calories per gram

All foods give you energy, don't get distracted by the Negative Calorie Food diet myth.

Have you noticed that there are a large number of different diet programs around? Yep, we know, how can anybody miss that...?
The main difference is their opinion in how much energy (calories) you should get during the diet and what the energy should be made out of. So, how many carbs in relation to fat or protein is always debatable...
Jump to the free diet plans section for an overview of diet programs!

Find out what the new Food Pyramid has to say about the subject...

Food Facts: What your body does with too much fuel...

Well, our body is really quite clever. If it gets too much fuel (calories) it stores them and the fat cells of our body increase in size. And so do we...
Our body does that because over thousands of years it learned that there are good times (lots of calories around) and bad times.

So, yes... the body still stores the excessive calories of the good times for the bad times...
and that is a big problem for our weigh loss program, because:

When you go on a diet your body could think: bad times ahead!

And that is not a good food fact... well, body fact at all! Your body has also learned that the bad times can be quite long. Once it recognizes that bad times are coming, it seems as if it has very clever defenses here as well, in order to not use too much fuel.

That means:

1.) Your body can go into defense mode and refuse to use lots of fuel.
Your metabolism shuts down. Weight loss might be zero even if you eat very little. We must never let our body shut down. Losing weight by starvation does not work because you will most likely lose the mental game (hunger!) before your body loses the weight you wanted to lose.

Instead, eat right to lose weight and use the other success keys! Your body is quite an opponent...so, fight the enemy in the best way...

2.) Your body wants to regain its original weight after the bad times
After any weight loss, even if you avoided a body shutdown, the body realizes that the fuel storage rooms (the fat cells) have decreased in size. So, yep, clever body..., it wants to fill them right up again!

And that is why so many people, including us (of course...) have gained their weight right back and even gained a few pounds extra(!) after a diet.

Our recommendation: use a diet-after-the-diet for quite a while to stabilize your weight. Watch your weight very closely. Never go immediately from a weight loss program to free eating again. That nearly never works...after all – your body is quite an opponent...

Let’s get into some detailed food facts: Good carbs vs. bad carbs; good fat vs. bad fat

Food Facts: Carbohydrates

All Carbs are sugars. They get your body to release the hormone insulin. Insulin transports the carbs and proteins throughout your body and stores energy in your fat cells.

When you eat bad carbs they call up large amounts of insulin for a short time. This makes your body store more energy in the fat cells. Good carbs are sugars that call up less insulin transporters and over a longer period.

The G.I. (glycemic index) is used to decide which carbs are bad and good. A low G.I. value is associated with good carbs.

Good carb foods are for example vegetables, fruits, whole wheat and unprocessed foods.

Bad carbs are for example sugar, white bread, white rice and potatoes.

Food Facts: Fat

Not all fat makes fat! At a time it was a mystery for science that the people of Crete in Greece eat a relatively large amount of fat in their diet and still remain slim, super health and live extremely long. The reason was the power of the olive oil health effect. The only energy in olive oil comes from fat. However, it comes mainly from good fat.

Good fat foods are for example olive oil, flaxseed oil and other vegetable oils. Also fats contained in fish are generally good fats.

Bad fat foods consist mainly out of animal fats. Examples are sausages, whip cream, fatty meat, chicken skin and bacon among others.

Food Facts: Protein

The body uses protein to build up muscles. Proteins also seem to have the extremely positive characteristic of suppressing hunger. And they fire up the metabolism.

Proteins are therefore always considered good for weight loss purposes. Of course we must not eat too much, or only proteins as your kidneys would have to work too hard. A good rule of thumb is a maximum of 1 gram per pound of lean body mass per day. You can roughly find your lean body mass by checking your theoretical weight in pounds if your body mass index is between 20 and 25.

Great protein sources are foods like fish, poultry, lean meats, low-fat cheese, beans, eggs and milk as well as protein milkshakes.

Food Facts: Minerals and Vitamins

Your body needs vitamins and minerals to drive chemical reactions. If the calories are the fuel for your body, the vitamins and minerals are the oil for your engine.

You need to have enough vitamins and a healthy balance of minerals. Certain vitamins and minerals may not be consumed in too large quantities.

However, when you are on a diet program, you reduce the level of calories and amount of food that you consume. In which case you are most likely not getting enough vitamins and minerals in your diet. And if your fat-burning engine does not run properly, well, you might not get the proper weight loss effects!