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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.

Like the carbohydrates we discussed last week, fats also have gotten a bad name, and it’s easy to see why. We all want to lose fat, so it makes sense that eating fat makes us fat, right?

Yes and no, because there are different types of fat. There are three dietary types of fat: saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated, and your body needs a balance of all three to promote weight loss. The key is balance, and the key is to consume approximately 1/3 of your fats from each source.

Saturated fats include all animal foods, like beef, pork, eggs, butter and milk. Monounsaturated fats come from avocados, nuts, and olive oil (which is why cooking with olive oil is good for you, and why you should have avocados in your diet). Polyunsaturated fats come from fish oils, flaxseed, nuts, and vegetable oils.

So the skinny on fat is this: keep your body in balance, and promote weight loss, by consuming the correct types of fat, in equal balance.

Followers of the Atkins Diet were taught that carbohydrates, or carbs for short, are bad. Carbs are converted by the body into sugar, sugar turns to fat, body fat is bad, therefore carbs are bad. As with most things in life, it’s not that simple.

Yes, some carbs are quickly digested, which gives you a boost of energy. We all know what that’s like: you eat a chocolate bar, and immediately get a sugar rush, and then you crash. However, energy is a good thing if you are exercising, so guess what? The key to carbs is timing.

If you eat carbs during or immediately after exercise, carbohydrates give your body quick energy, which aids in recovery after exercise. And that is the secret to carbs. Consume starchy carbs that are converted into energy, like breads, grains and pasta, during the two to three hours after exercise to aid in recovery. Carbs that are high in sugar, like fruit juices and sports drinks, should only be consumed during or immediately after exercise. Carbs that are high in fiber, like vegetables, beans, and some fruits, can be eaten any time, because the fiber content slows the absorption into your body, which keeps blood sugar stable.

Next week, a word about fats.

Protein, which is found in meats and some plant based foods, is necessary for weight loss because it makes you feel full, it burns calories while it’s digesting, and with proper exercise it helps build muscle mass.

Vegetables have fiber, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals and lots of other nutrients, and I don’t think there is any sane person on the planet who doesn’t believe that vegetables are an important part of every healthy diet.

The amazing thing is that by combing both proteins and vegetables at every meal, your body will be even healthier.

It’s important to have balanced pH levels in our bodies. pH (what the scientists call ‘potential of hydrogen”) is the balance between positively charged (acid-forming) ions and negatively charged (alkalinizing) ions.

Our bodies want to maintain a pH balance of around 7.4, so it deposits or withdraws alkalinizing minerals and other products from our body tissues as needed. This may result in decreased muscle mass

If you eat a lot of acidic foods (like proteins) without balancing them with more alkaline foods (like vegetables), you will slow down your metabolism.

By eating veggies with proteins, you boost your metabolism, neutralize acid, strengthen your bones, and encourage muscle growth.

We’ve talked about proteins and vegetables; in my next weight loss blog entry I will discuss carbohydrates.