Beans are great. They are full of fiber, which makes you feel full faster, and maintains a more constant blood sugar level, all of which promotes weight loss.
Unfortunately, baked beans are served in a sugar sauce, and that’s bad. You eat the beans, the sugar hits your system first, and it’s game over.
Stick with plain red kidney beans, and throw some hot sauce on them for extra flavour.
Have you ever eaten a salad and felt unsatisfied because you didn’t get to crunch anything? Croutons don’t have a lot of calories, and they add a satisfying crunch to your salad.
However, croutons are really just toasted bread, and are often devoid of anything nutritious.
Instead, try slicing up some roasted almonds, or put some pine nuts in your salad. That will give you a crunch, and provide some nutrition as well.
Tomorrow: yogurt
Have you ever eaten a salad and felt unsatisfied because you didn’t get to crunch anything? Croutons don’t have a lot of calories, and they add a satisfying crunch to your salad. And eating salad is a great step towards your weight loss goals.
However, croutons are really just toasted bread, and are often devoid of anything nutritious.
Instead, try slicing up some roasted almonds, or put some pine nuts in your salad. That will give you a crunch, and provide some nutrition as well.
Tomorrow: yogurt
English muffins have fewer calories than bread. One English muffin, both halves, has about half the calories as two slices of bread.
Unfortunately, they are so heavily processed that they have very little fiber, protein, vitamins, or anything else that’s good for you. They are high in carbohydrates, which raises blood sugar, and raising your blood sugar will not help you lose weight.
If you must eat English muffins, go for whole wheat or muffins made from sprouted grains.
Tomorrow: croutons
Granola bars are very deceiving. They are made with whole oats, which are both nutritious and high in fiber, so you would think that by eating them you would lose weight.
Unfortunately, they stick the oats together with sugar, in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, honey, and barley malt. As with pretzels, this can raise your blood sugar, which can increase hunger, not curb it.
If you must eat a bar, go for ones that are high in protein, and low in net carbs to minimize the impact on blood sugar levels.
On Monday: English muffins
Pretzels taste great, and are even better after a workout when your body craves sodium (salt) to replace the sodium you just sweated out. And one ounce of pretzels has just 110 calories, so it seems like a snack that will promote weight loss.
However, pretzels have one of the highest glycemic indexes of any food, even higher than ice cream and jelly beans. When we think glycemic index we think sugar, and that can raise your blood sugar, which just makes you crave more sugar when you come down from your sugar high.
As good as they taste, go for fresh fruits or vegetables as a snack instead.
Tomorrow: granola bars
Cutting fat may be good in some cases, because it may also reduce calories, which helps you lose weight.
Unfortunately, the way they make something fat free is to load it up with sugar, and that’s a common trick with fat-free salad dressings.
Even worse, our bodies need a certain amount of fat, and the fat in salad dressing actually helps our bodies absorb many of the vitamins in our salad, such as the beta-carotene in carrots.
The solution is to forget about the fat free salad dressing, and instead pick one that’s made with olive oil, or as a second choice canola oil, and that has less than 2 grams of carbs per serving (so you know it’s not loaded with sugar).
Tomorrow: pretzels
Unless you are allergic to peanuts, peanut butter should be good for you, because peanuts are full of monounsaturated fat, and good food helps you lose weight.
Unfortunately, many fat free brands of peanut butter are sweetened with sugar, and in particular, icing sugar. That’s right, the same kind of sugar used to decorate cakes is being pumped into your peanut butter.
The solution: stick with the all-natural varieties of peanut butter, which contain nothing buy ground up peanuts. You need to keep it refrigerated, but after a few days you will never switch back to the sugar filled kind of peanut butter.
Tomorrow: Fat-free salad dressing.
Today we begin a series of articles on health food that isn’t healthy. We all know that obesity is an epidemic in North America, and so do food manufacturers, so they now label foods as “fat free” or “low carb” or whatever.
Unfortunately, just because something is “fat free” doesn’t mean it’s good for you. A product can be fat free, but high in sugar, and we all know that excessive amounts of sugar are not healthy, and will not help you lose weight.
I’ll pick some of my favorite non-healthy health foods and write about them over the next two weeks.
In the mean-time, read the labels of everything you eat, because if we are informed consumers, we will eventually stop buying the “pretend” health food products.
Tomorrow: reduced fat peanut butter.