During the New Year many people make resolutions. According to proactivechange.com, “40 to 45% of American adults make one or more resolutions each year. Among the top new years resolutions are resolutions about weight loss, exercise, and stopping to smoke. Also popular are resolutions dealing with better money management / debt reduction.” However, even though many people who make new years resolutions do break them, research shows that making resolutions is useful. “People who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t explicitly make resolutions.”
Since weight loss is one of the most common resolutions, one of the best mantras for losing is “out of sight, out of mind.” Purge your pantry and household of the top foods to avoid to begin the road to a healthier and slimmer YOU!
Top five foods to avoid while on a weight loss plan:
1) Sugar
Sugar can overload the body and causes blood sugar levels to rise rapidly. Sugar can cause the body to go into storing mode causing it to store extra fat and burn fewer calories. To prevent this, you need to reduce your intake of refined sugars. This means cutting down, or even better, eliminating the candy, milk chocolate, cakes and cookies. For the persistent sweet tooth try eating some fruit. Unlike refined sugars, most fruits contain fructose which does not cause your blood sugar levels to rise.
2) Alcohol
Alcohol is full of sugar and calories which restrict your metabolic rate. Alcohol is also known to have a dehydrating effect; if you are not fully hydrated your metabolism does not work as effectively. Prevention Magazine said in the article, Diet Blunders that Slow Metabolism, “Skip the second cocktail. When you have a drink, you burn less fat, and more slowly than usual, because the alcohol is used as fuel instead. Knocking back the equivalent of about two martinis can reduce your body’s fat-burning ability by up to 73%.”
3) White bread
White bread has low nutritional value and is low in dietary fiber because the process removes the bran and germ from the wheat flour. White bread is bleached to remove any color, which destroys many of the vitamins in the wheat, additionally, it is full of sugar. When processing white bread your body burns very few calories and it also causes your blood sugar levels to rise. Whole grain should be substituted for white bread to boost your metabolic rate. Whole grain bread is harder to digest (so burns more calories). It also has a greater nutritional value and does not cause blood sugar levels to rise wildly.
4) Fried foods
Like white bread, fried foods offer little nutritional value and are too easy to digest. Remember foods that are harder to digest like raw vegetables burn more calories. Fried foods are also very high in calories and saturated fats. Saturated fat is a fat that is solid at room temperature and comes mainly from animals. Examples include butter, lard, meat fat, solid shortening, palm oil, and coconut oil. These fats tend to raise the level of cholesterol in the blood and also slow down your metabolic rate.
5) Processed foods
Processed foods include pre-prepared frozen and canned foods, chips and chocolate bars. Our fast-paced society made processed foods popular because of speed and convenience. However, a majority of processed foods lack nutritional value, contain dangerous trans fats and include chemical preservatives, which slow down your metabolic rate. For a healthy family time saver try cooking in large batches and freezing the leftovers.
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