A List of Foods You Should Avoid When Trying To Lose Weight

Losing weight can be a challenging endeavor. There are plenty of factors that influence your weight; therefore, there’s no one solution that fits every person who wants to reduce their weight. However, there are general natural methods that help do it: staying physically active and eating the right foods.

Combining exercise with a healthy diet is the most used and recommended approach to losing weight. And rightfully so, because no matter how young or old you are, it’s essential, and it’s been proven to work. There’s no weight management program out there that doesn’t include having a healthy diet on its checklist.

For dieting, eating foods with nutrients that keep the body healthy is always highlighted. However, the ones that people shouldn’t include in their diet don’t always make the headlines. With that in mind, here’s a list of foods you should avoid when you’re trying to lose weight.

A List of Foods You Should Avoid When Trying To Lose Weight

Processed meats

Processed meats are mostly prepared in ready-to-eat and easy-to-cook manners. Most kinds of food options prepared like that contribute to excessive weight gain when consumed regularly. Unfortunately, the convenience that comes with buying processed meats makes it difficult to resist them.

The most effective and credible medical weight loss clinic will advise you to eat lean meat and cook them into a healthy dish. It will also likely have you avoid eating bacon and hot dogs until you step on a weighing scale the next few times. Fermented, smoked, or preserved meat are processed meat, and they’re mostly dense in calories, making them unsuitable for people who want to lose weight.

Restaurant hamburgers

Hamburgers from fast food restaurants are often high in calories and fat. When you’re dining out, you should back away from hamburgers because they have added fats and oils that’ll only add to your weight. So hamburgers are a no, but lean ground beef isn’t necessarily detrimental to your weight loss objective.

Lean ground beef can be a part of your diet if it’s not cooked like the ones in fast food restaurants. A homecooked hamburger minus the fats and oils are a great source of protein, a nutrient with major weight loss benefits. You can enjoy those, but the restaurant hamburgers are going to have to wait.

Potato chips

While potatoes are healthy vegetables, you can’t have them as chips if you’re trying to lose weight. Snacking is part of your everyday diet, so it must also be improved if you want to reduce body weight. Potato chips are popular and common snack options, but you can’t have them because they’re fattening.

A four-year study conducted by Harvard found that weight gain was associated with the regular intake of potato chips within the study period. As delicious as they can be, you have to avoid them to achieve your ideal weight. Instead of potato chips, snack on healthier alternatives like celery with hummus or toasted nuts without sugar or salt.

Sweets and other sugary food

Unfortunately, you’re going to have to keep your sweet tooth in check until you’ve shed and held the weight off successfully. This is because food high in added sugar is often very high in fructose, an ingredient that makes you hungrier. In fact, a study in 2015 found that fructose makes people hungrier than glucose, which is another type of sugar.

Baked goods like premade desserts, cookies, and pastries are often high in added sugars. Other than those, you should also avoid milk chocolate, pretzels, ice creams, and donuts. If you crave sweets, you can go for dark chocolate.

Sweetened beverages

Aside from baked goods and other foods with sugar, you should also avoid sweetened beverages. Drinking sodas, sports drinks, and other sweetened beverages won’t do you any good if you want to lose weight.

Even low-calorie drinks like diet sodas are a no. That’s because manufacturers add artificial sweeteners to them, and those ingredients give your body the same reaction to refined sugar. It confuses the body to think that no calories cause the sweetener to add to belly fat.

Alcohol

Alcoholic beverages are on this list because they’re mostly high in sugar and are calorie-dense. For example, a regular 12-ounce beer contains about 153 calories, while a 5-oz glass of red wine contains close to 125 calories. Besides the calories, drinking alcohol also tricks the body into eating more.

Conclusion

Now that you know which foods not to eat, your path to becoming physically fit just got a bit easier. Keep in mind that weight loss is also about discipline, having the right mindset, and the resolve to live healthier. So stay on course and you’ll be feeling better physically in no time.

Author bio: Though not a medical expert, Hodge Racter appreciates a lot regarding medical matters, including hormone replacement (having supported the procedure himself) and medical weight-loss operations. Today, he continues spry & active despite his age, and when he has not performed the freelance task, he has had feature time with his wife and 2 dogs.