Foods to Avoid For Weight Reduction

The following is a list of foods that you must avoid if you desire to achieve rapid weight loss or even maintain your weight at its current level. You need to make a concerted effort to avoid these foods in order to make any headway in your weight loss program.

Doughnuts, Pastries
These are some of the worst foods that you can eat. They are deep fried, made with refined sugar, and full of saturated fats/trans fats. They have a negative nutritional value and not only make you fat but also destroy your health.

French Fries, Potato Chips
These are sodium-loaded, enzyme-dead foods. In addition, the latest research now shows that they are high in acrilimide, a known cancer-causing agent. French fries from fast food restaurants have 300 times the acrilimide content allowed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for one glass of water. This means that they are highly toxic to your body, as well as fatty, with a medium order of fast-food fries containing more than 500 calories.

Juice and Fruit Drinks
Most fruit drinks contain 10% or less real fruit juice and mainly consist of artificial flavoring and sugar (sucrose). If they contain sugar, corn syrup, or high fructose corn syrup, avoid them like the plague.

Fried Fish and Fried Seafood
Frying adds insult to injury, making them full of trans fats and not a great combination for healthy weight loss. Broil your fish and avoid the trans fats.

Raw Clams, Oysters
Shellfish are also scavengers that scour the ground for anything and everything. Toxins become concentrated in shell fish. The toxins then become concentrated in your fat cells. If your fat cells contain a lot of toxins, the fat becomes very difficult to lose. Additionally raw clams and oysters quite often contain harmful bacteria.

Lunch Meat, Smoked Meat, Hot Dogs, Bacon, Sausage
These are all processed meats, not quality meat. They are a mixture of fillers, sodium, and nitrites used to cure meats and preserve them. If you want to talk about calories, how about 130 calories per strip of bacon and 13 grams of fat? Nitrites have been shown to be carcinogens. Too much sodium leads to heart disease, and the fillers are synthetic chemicals that are hard on the digestive system.

Alcohol
Alcohol actually suppresses fat burning. When you drink alcohol, your liver has to detoxify it right off the bat. This takes priority over carbohydrates, fats, and protein. Since fat is the hardest to metabolize and break down, it gets pushed down the chain. When most people drink alcohol, they usually do so with a meal, taking in its excess calories. Alcohol has the second highest calorie content next to fat, with seven calories per gram compared to nine calories per gram of fat. When alcohol is in your system, your body will convert more of the foods you eat into fat. To achieve quick weight loss, you definitely need to avoid alcoholic beverages.

Soda
Soda is a major contributor to obesity in this country. Studies show that drinking soda increases the risks of diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, tooth decay, caffeine dependency, and nutritional deficiencies.

The major ingredients in soda are:
 • Phosphoric Acid: Mixes with the hydrochloric acid of the stomach and interferes with digestion. It is also responsible for leeching minerals out of the bones.
• Sugar and High Fructose Corn Syrup: Sugar in liquid form is dangerous, because so much can be consumed in so little time, sending the body into a blood sugar frenzy.

When insulin levels spike, fat burning ability plummets. This leads to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, premature aging, heart disease, and, of course, weight gain. Studies show that people who drink sodas do not cut back on the regular foods they eat. This adds at least 200 calories a day, or 1,400 calories per week, to their intake.

Diet Soda, Diet Drinks
Diet drinks give you all of the bad effects of drinking soda, plus artificial sweeteners that have been shown to alter brain chemistry, increase cravings, and cause cancer. The main artificial sweetener used is aspartame. It has numerous adverse health effects including:
• Brain tumors
• Birth defects
• Diabetes
• Emotional disorders
• Epilepsy/Seizures

If you ask me, anything that has this many life altering side effects is worth staying away from. There have been entire books written about the dangers of aspartame. If you go to Medline on the internet, you can find hundreds of research articles on this subject. Diet soda will actually cause you to crave more food, even though they contain no calories. In the end, you will poison your body and still not lose weight.

Pizza
Pizza is one of my most favorite indulgences. Unfortunately, it is far from healthy, especially if you go with the meat lovers’ version, which is a smorgasbord of processed meats: sausage, pepperoni, ham, Canadian bacon, and bacon. In addition, pizza is full of sodium, fat, and refined flour dough. This makes for a high calorie meal that you might as well just pack straight onto your mid section.

Ice Cream
Ice Cream is loaded with calories, fat, sugar, and dairy, which contains lots of hormones and antibiotics. Ice cream is close to the top when it comes to being the most unhealthy food. It also contains artificial flavors, colors, preservatives, emulsifiers and stabilizers. All of these, combined, make ice cream one of the most fattening foods on the planet.

White Bread, Pasta
White bread and pasta react, in the body, like white sugar, which is refined and processed, with no nutritional value. Bread gets a bad rap for putting weight on people. It really isn’t the bread, however, it is the type of bread. White bread is made from white flour, which is a refined carbohydrate, just like corn syrup and white sugar. This equates to no nutritional value and empty calories. Whole grain breads are a much better choice. Sprouted grain breads are the best. Stay away from breads that are enriched, bleached, or white in color. Eat more whole grain.

Sugary Breakfast Cereals, Candy
This is a great way to start out your day with barely any nutrition at all. Cereal is mostly white sugar in a box. BUT it has vitamins!! That is the joke and equally great advertising. The truth is that the quality of the vitamins listed on the cereal box is poor. Basically, any major brand of sweetened cereal is simply vitamin-fortified sugar. If you buy cereal, look on the ingredients label for whole grain and avoid white flour or high-fructose corn syrup.

Candy is straight sugar and some fat. This will go right into your bloodstream, mess up your hormone levels, and sabotage your fat-burning capability for a few hours.

Vegetable Oil, Shortening, Margarine
These aren’t substances that you would actually eat alone; at least, not in most cases. They are used in many fried foods and baked goods and contain trans fats. Trans fats will not only cause you to gain massive amounts of weight, but they also lead to rapid aging, cause joint inflammation, followed by arthritis, and predispose you to heart disease, cancer, and other diseases of lifestyle (self induced diseases). You don’t need to deprive yourself of the ‘bad’ foods all of the time.

This information is meant as a guide, so you are aware of which foods will help you lose weight and which foods will be detrimental to achieving your weight reduction goals. However, if you consistently eat the ‘bad’ foods it will make it exceedingly difficult to achieve your goals. A heart attack waiting to happen would be eating a hamburger on a white bun with French fries and a milkshake, followed by an apple turnover for desert. This combination of high sugar, high fat and high calories puts your body metabolism into a terrible state. Your insulin levels go way up, your fat-storing enzymes go up, and your fat-burning enzymes go down, causing you to pack on the body fat.