Eating Fruits and Vegetables Won’t Help You Achieve Your Weight Loss Goals

As we rapidly approach the summer swimsuit season, that seasonal American obsession with weight loss is already cranking into high gear. Words and phrases like weight loss, diet, and diet pills, among many others, abound all over the internet and grace bikini clad tabloid covers in supermarket checkout lines from coast to coast. It can be tough to distinguish what really works from what doesn’t.

We can help dispel at least one myth today as Tech Times reveals eating more fruits and vegetables has virtually no impact on a person’s success in losing weight. A research team at the University of Alabama conducted a weight loss study on a sample of 1,200 subjects in seven controlled and randomized experiments.

After the study concluded, the leader of the research team, Dr. Kathryn Kaiser, stated:

“Across the board, all studies we reviewed showed a near-zero effect on weight loss.” Dr. Kaiser further stated that, (regarding eating more fruits and vegetables) “…so I don’t think eating more alone is necessarily an effective approach for weight loss because just adding them on top of whatever foods a person may be eating is not likely to cause weight change.”

On a positive note, the same study found that even though eating more fruits and vegetable won’t help you to lose any weight, it won’t cause you to gain more weight, either. Ultimately, the secret to accomplishing your weight loss goals, at least in part, seems to have more to do with decreasing serving sizes and daily caloric intake.

Because of this fact, Medical News Today tells us that David B. Allison, Ph. D., Associate Dean for Science at the University of Alabama School of Public Health, has suggested that public health communications should be amended.

Dr. Allison states:

“In public health, we want to send positive and encouraging messages and telling people to eat more fruits and vegetables seems far more positive and encouraging than just saying ‘eat less.’ Unfortunately, it seems that if we just get people to eat more fruits and vegetables without also taking explicit steps to reduce total food intake, lower weights are not achieved.”

In short, the University of Alabama weight loss study tells us that changing our diet alone isn’t always effective in helping us achieve our weight loss goals. Real weight loss requires changing not only how we eat, but also how much we eat, and how we choose to burn off extra calories to achieve our goals. Think it can’t be done?

I’ll leave you with a story from the Inquisitr about Cearra Swetman who lost an amazing 128 pounds and ended up landing a job at Hooters despite being told that she couldn’t make it happen. Your weight loss goals can happen, they’ll just require more than eating fruits and vegetables to come to life.