When should you eat fruit to lose weight

Carbohydrates have taken a beating the last few decades.

Oats, sweet potatoes, fruit, and added sugar are very different forms of carbs, but they all find themselves lumped together as “evil.”  They’re flatly dismissed by some experts and banned from many popular diets.

Related: The Better Man Project: Men’s Health’s Step-By-Step Guide To Living a Fitter, Healthier, More Awesome Life

But can fruit, Mother Nature’s sweet treat, really hurt your waistline or even your health?

What Happens to Your Body When You Eat Fruit

The confusion lies in the fact that fruit contains sugar, a carbohydrate that spikes your blood sugar. Your blood sugar naturally rises and falls during the day, but constantly elevating your levels can lead to weight gain—and the ills that come with it.

But fruit sugar is naturally occurring, and—perhaps most importantly—fruit is also loaded with vitamins, minerals, fiber, antioxidants, and tons of other nutrients.

Fruit’s fiber helps blunt the increase in blood sugar you experience after eating it. That’s why eating, say, an apple or banana won’t produce the same blood sugar spike as eating candy and cookies, which typically contain little fiber.

In fact, overwhelming numbers of scientific studies show that people who eat fruit weigh less, and have lower rates of heart disease, blood pressure, cancer, and virtually every other disease.

Related: Why You Should Stop Worrying About Carbs, and Start Eating More Of Them

Plus, fruit contains water. “Just 1 cup of blackberries, which are 80 percent water, can assist in daily hydration requirements,” says, Jim White, R.D.N., spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Even “high-sugar” fruits like watermelon aren’t the threat some fruit-phobes want you to believe. Watermelon, while it does contain sugar, is primarily water. As long as you’re not eating an entire watermelon in one sitting, your blood sugar will fair just fine.

So, yes, you should eat fruit—whether you’re watching your weight or not. And you likely need to eat way more than you currently are.

In fact, according to the 2015-2020 USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans, only about 11 percent of us are eating the minimum amount of recommended fruits daily—about 2 cups of the stuff.

It’s also important to remember that frozen is just as good as fresh. In fact, one study from the University of Georgia actually found frozen fruit (and vegetables) had more nutrients than their fresh alternatives.

Related: How Steaming Your Vegetables Actually Makes Them Healthier

3 Ways to Add More Fruit Into Your Diet

1. Pair them.
Cheese and fruit go together perfectly—flavor-wise and nutritionally. Fruit contains fiber and cheese has protein, both of which help to fill you up.

Try an apple with a single-serving snack cheese. Or stir berries into some plain cottage cheese. Crumbled blue cheese and fresh figs are also an incredible combo.

2. Blend them.
Add frozen berries to your daily protein smoothie. They make it cold and refreshing, and are loaded with nutrition. It’s the perfect post-workout meal.

3. Grill them.
The natural sugars in fruits sweeten further on the grill. Just brush watermelon, peaches, plums, or even bananas with a little oil and toss them on the grates until grill marks appear.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

When you are trying to lose weight, and deciding what foods to include in your meal plan, there are two key points you need to understand:

  1. There is no such thing as a ‘fat-loss food’. All foods add at least some calories to your daily total, no foods subtract them.
  2. There is no such thing as a ‘fattening food’. If you are in a caloric deficit, you can technically include any food in your diet and lose weight.

The bottom line here is that overeating any food, even those labelled as ‘healthy’, has the potential to lead to weight gain.

So, where does fruit fit into a fat-loss diet?

Put simply, if you eat so much fruit that you are in a calorie surplus, your body will store some of the fruit calories as body fat. 

However, if you are in a calorie deficit, then you have no reason to fear fruit turning into body fat.

An important part of developing a healthy relationship with food is understanding that no food is naturally ‘bad’ for you. 

But, when restricting your calories on a fat-loss diet, limiting your intake of certain foods can make it easier to stick to your nutrition targets.

We typically recommend limiting consumption of calorie-dense foods, which are those that contain a high number of calories per unit of volume.

Examples include the obvious things like alcohol, sweets and fast food, but you also have to be careful with certain ‘healthy’ foods like nuts and oils (fat loss does not necessarily follow healthy eating, and vice-versa).

The problem with calorie-dense foods is that while eating a large proportion of your calories in one sitting may taste great in the moment, it can cause big fluctuations in your energy levels and leave you feeling hungry later in the day.

Importantly, whole fruits do not fall into this category. Instead, the high water and fibre content of most fruits mean that they contain relatively few calories per serving.

The table below shows the nutritional information for a variety of fruits.

When should you eat fruit to lose weight

We have based the table on a 100g serving size to make comparison easy, which is also the average serving size of most fruits.

To help put all this into context, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends consuming a minimum of 400g of fruit and vegetables per day to capitalise on the associated health benefits, which totals roughly 100-200 kcals, based on the fruits listed.

While this does not make fruits a ‘free food’, it does mean that they are much more difficult to overeat than a chocolate bar, for example.

An additional benefit of eating fruit on a diet is that the naturally sweet flavour can help satisfy sugar cravings for relatively few calories.

Fructose, the primary carbohydrate in fruit, is the sweetest tasting sugar molecule and a key ingredient in food sweeteners.

But what about the sugar content of fruit?

One of the main reasons people tend to avoid fruit is because of concerns over its sugar content and the impact this may have on their health.

An important distinction to make here is between natural food sources of sugar, like fruit and refined sources, such as non-diet soft drinks, cakes and sweets.

True, both natural and refined carbohydrates contain sugar, but their overall effects on the body are different.

While the sugar molecules found in fruit are chemically identical to those found in refined carbohydrates, they also come packaged alongside a host of vitamins, minerals, fibre and other key nutrients.

Consider the example of an orange, which provides around 15g of carbohydrate, but also 12% of your daily fibre requirements, and nearly all the recommended amount of vitamin C.

In comparison, a tablespoon of sugar contains an equivalent amount of carbohydrate, but nothing else. As a result, they are an example of ‘empty calories’ in that they provide energy, but little or no nutritional value.

Fruits and hidden calories

Not all fruits are equally as diet-friendly, and you should pay close attention to your serving sizes for dried fruits and fruit juices.

Dried fruits are more calorie dense and therefore easy to overeat due to the removal of the water content. 

A simple rule of thumb is that the caloric density of a food increases as the water content decreases, and vice-versa. 

For example, the table shows that 100g of grapes contains 66kcal, whereas an equivalent serving size of raisins (dried grapes) contains 295kcal.

Fruit juices, like most liquid calories, are calorie-dense, digest very quickly and do not send fullness signals to your brain.

Like with dietary fat sources such as nuts and oils, we strongly recommend measuring your serving sizes of dried fruit and fruit juice, rather than eyeballing them.

So, what do U.P. recommend?

In summary, there are several practical benefits to including fruit as part of your fat loss diet. 

Fruits provide a quick (albeit small) burst of energy, contain several key micronutrients, and help improve dietary adherence by satisfying sugar cravings and promoting a feeling of fullness due to their high fibre and water content.

  1. Aim for one to two servings of whole fruits a day as part of your total carbohydrate intake.
  2. If following a low-carbohydrate diet, you can still include options like blueberries and watermelon for very few calories.
  3. Always measure your serving sizes of dried fruit and fruit juice.
  4. Prioritise including fibrous vegetables, fruit and starchy carbohydrates in your diet above refined carbohydrates.
  5. Supplement with a high-quality multivitamin like UP Complete Multi to make sure you are getting all the micronutrients that your body needs.
When should you eat fruit to lose weight

UP Complete Multi is a full-spectrum multivitamin with high doses of several vitamins and minerals supplied in chelated form for maximum absorption and bioavailability.