6 traditional diet rules that could actually be bad for your health

There are reasons why certain traditional cooking and eating practices have been passed down generations—hereditary practices are often supportive of our body’s constitution and champion local ingredients, so following your grandmother's recipes and sticking to what you've always known could be helpful for your body and lifestyle. However, as new research, lifestyles and experience change what we know about nutrition, it's probably wise to break some of those rules. We asked the experts to list the directives you could stop paying attention to now. 

1) You should never skip breakfast

“Breakfast might be considered the most important meal of the day, but it is also important to listen to your body and feed yourself only when you really feel hungry. If you have eaten a late dinner, chances are that you will not wake up feeling hungry,” says Luke Coutinho, holistic lifestyle coach of integrative medicine. “Force-feeding yourself to eat a meal during the traditional breakfast-lunch-dinner periods can put a burden on your digestive system," he says. Instead, start the day with water and eat when you feel hungry. 

2) You should eat ‘good foods’ and skip ‘bad foods’

Labelling food items as good or bad does not help a healthy lifestyle, and can even be the cause for eating disorders. “It is not just the food, what matters is how much is the person eating, how frequently, the quality of thoughts when eating it, and several other factors. When we label some items as bad, it instils fear in us and ruins our relationship with food, which could cause the cortisol levels to shoot up, and then the so-called bad food will actually be bad for us,” reveals Coutinho.

Nutritionist and lifestyle educator, Karishma Chawla gives an example of potatoes and rice, which many try to skip for fear of it being ‘bad’. Instead, change your mindset about the way you relate to food. “The Swiss eat on an average of six to eight pieces of chocolate every day. They’ve grown up with that and their body adapts to it completely well. They have a good relationship with chocolate so it doesn’t impact them. If believed that every piece of chocolate is going to negatively affect you, that’s what will happen. Make peace with food. Food is to nourish you, not stress you out,” explains Coutinho. 

3) You should eat three square meals a day

“Listen to your body and eat according to your hunger cues. For most, three balanced meals a day, eaten mindfully without distractions and with the right amount of water intake works. But this may not be true for everyone,” says Coutinho, suggesting that if you need a mid-meal snack, eat one. If you skip the snack, you're more likely to overeat at your next meal, which could put the digestive system under more stress. If you think you're ‘saving’ calories by waiting till your next meal, you may make those up (and then some). 

4) Carbs are bad for you

Carbohydrates are the main source of fuel for our body. What matters is the quality and quantity of carbs, says Chawla, who prefers whole grains and cereals and counts them as a must-have for sustained blood sugar and energy levels. Skipping carbohydrates—the body’s primary source of easily accessible energy—sends the body looking for it for different sources, including utilising fat stores for energy. For those thinking that carbs at night are an absolute no-no, Coutinho says it may be a good addition to your diet. “A small amount of carbohydrates for dinner, especially when the dinner is eaten within time, helps produce feel-good neurotransmitters (serotonin) and improves mood and sleep quality,” says Coutinho.

5) You can eat whatever you want if you work out

Chawla warns that exercising is not a free ticket to have processed foods or foods high in sugar and trans fat. “Faulty eating can increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, PCOS and obesity. Regular exercise helps to burn the stored fat and not the calories eaten in the last meal. Hence, the concept of eating a “wrong” meal followed by exercise does not work,” says Chawla.

6) You should eat the same amount of calories every day

“Just focusing on calories can lead to unhealthy weight loss and compromised health. It’s the composition of calories that we need to consider,” says Chawla. Also, the amount of activity we do each day a week is dynamic, some days are active and some sedentary. So your diets cannot have the same calories every day. “The human body has dynamic needs and our nutrition should be designed accordingly. This is why strict calorie counting and macro counting doesn’t always work. The body is not based on maths, it’s based on biology and chemistry,” says Coutinho.

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