Does it matter whether you eat Vancouver whole foods or are the calories from packaged foods the same?

All calories are NOT equal!

Therefore there is a huge difference whether you eat Vancouver whole foods as opposed to any ole food you will get in the store.

You see the majority of foods we eat as North Americans now is heavily processed. What does this mean?

Essentially our Vancouver whole foods are not whole anymore.

They have been broken down, processed, refined, other processed and synthetic ingredients have been added to add substance or flavour. Or they have been genetically modified.

All this processing and refining leads to the nutrient density of foods being reduced dramatically and therefore much of them become what you may have heard before, “empty calories”. So you are adding calories into your diet with no nutritional value and therefore your body treats them that way and ends up storing them as fat on your body. If there is nothing in it that the body can use it just gets stored as a potential energy source for the future.

If you take the alternative however and eat Vancouver whole foods and foods that are in their natural, unprocessed form the body has something to utilize and will make use of the nutrients it is ingesting.

So all calories are definitely not created equal. This is exactly why with any of my clients my first focus is not to reduce the number of calories they are eating but to change the types and quality of the food they are eating. Reducing the number of calories off the bat will work but only for so long and you will have to change the types of food you are eating to continue seeing results.

The more Vancouver whole foods you can have over anything that comes in a bag, box or plastic or metal container the better (aside from pre-packaged whole grains).