Hi everyone - I’d like to share a brief anecdote about my father which illustrates an important point about nutrition and dieting: foods that are widely regarded as ‘healthy’ can still be bad for you in some cases.

My dad is 54 years old, healthy, and has been a weight lifter since he was a teenager. Although he’s not a personal trainer or nutritionist, he’s very knowledgable about lifting weights and eating properly for gaining muscle mass and building strength in the gym.

However, during the last 2-3 months of 2020, he gained about 4-5 pounds of bodyfat. I asked him about his diet and this was what he ate most days:

Breakfast: scrambled eggs and oatmeal
Mid-morning: protein shake with bananas
Lunch: chicken, green beans, and rice
Mid-afternoon: another protein shake with bananas
Dinner: chicken or fish and vegetables
Before bed: a third protein shake with bananas

Now, that looks like a very clean and healthy diet, right? If he was gaining unwanted belly fat, it was hard for me to believe that he was truly eating just those foods. Yet, he assured me that he was only cheating on his diet once or twice a week. So I asked for more details: how much of each food was he eating?

Well, each of his protein shakes contained 3-4 whole bananas, meaning that every day he was eating 9-12 bananas - that’s over 130 grams of sugar each day!

So even though bananas are commonly regarded as healthy, in excess, they can be detrimental for our health. In my dad’s case, he was simply eating too many bananas, which ended up being about the same amount of sugar as 3-4 candy bars per day, more than enough to cause him to gain extra body fat.

So, if you’re truly eating healthy foods for most of your meals and you still cannot lose weight, pay attention to the serving size of each food so that you don’t overeat any single food - even the healthy ones.

-Shane

'Healthy' Food Can Make You Fat