When you decide to lose weight, you commit to many changes in your life. You change your eating, sleeping, and exercise habits because of your goal of a fitter body. You even give up your favorite and comfort foods just to get the body that you want. You say “no” to many party and dinner invitations because you do not want to get tempted into eating foods that you want to avoid.
You may have been eating right, exercising regularly, and making sure that you get 7-8 hours of sleep a night. However, after many months of hard work, you do not see the results that you’ve been looking for. How can this be, when you’ve been strict with your habits?
You may not know it, but there are foods that you’ve been thinking to be okay and safe for weight loss but are in fact undermining your efforts. You have already been cleared of endocrine and hormonal disorders that may be causing your weight gain, and you’ve had a go signal from your nutritionist and fitness trainer to lower your caloric intake. You keep a food journal and make sure you write every morsel of food that you partake. But no matter what you do, you fail at losing weight and even gain at some point.
It is frustrating especially when you do not know what else to do. You try to search for answers, but you are not getting the answers that you’ve been looking for. When you ask around, people tell you that you just lack discipline, lack exercise, and lack motivation. It can be hurtful, especially when people do not know all the effort that you put into achieving your goal.
If all your weight loss efforts are not going anywhere, you may want to give your diet a second look. Are you eating the right foods? Are you eating foods that you think are okay but in fact, are fattening?
Here are the most common foods that many people think as healthy but are in fact stopping them from achieving success in their weight loss journey. Have you been eating any of these offenders?
- Anything “low-fat” or “low-sugar”
Foods that are labeled as “low-fat” and “low-sugar” mean one thing: you are eating artificial foods. There is nothing in nature that is undeniably sweet that is low in sugar; and a fatty food source that is low in fat. Take caution when indulging in these kinds of diet foods because they cannot help you in the long run. Aside from numbing down your body’s ability to digest sugar and fat, artificial fat and sugar are accumulated in your body which then becomes toxic for your body to process. You then end up having hormonal and circulatory disorders that become difficult to cure.
- Processed foods (meats, chips, bread, drinks, etc.)
How do you know if something is processed? Simple. The food is packaged. It may sound like common sense, but many people are fooled into believing that buying calorie-counted food is better than preparing their meals. While calorie counting works for others, eating fresh produce weighs far better in quality than eating off a can or plastic package. However “healthy” they are marketed to be if food is placed in a box, then you should have every reason to back off.
It is interesting that you can quickly revert your weight loss plateau by going back to reconsidering what you put on your plate. It is these simple changes, like avoiding processed, low-fat, and low-sugar foods, that can help you achieve the body that you’ve always dreamed of.