Foods Can be Delicious
If you happen to be a kitchen warrior, know that with some creativity you can whip up a delicious low-fat meal that just might be tastier than those artery-choking, high-fat ones. There are zillions of low-fat cookbooks on the market and gazillions of low-fat recipes on the internet. Test it out on the net: Keyword “low-fat chicken and Spanish rice” into the search box of your favorite search engine. You get mucho recipes.
When one flavor dominates, it’s often less enjoyable than meals that offer a variety of tastes. The flavors in many packaged foods, for example, are poorly balanced so that the dominant flavors - salt, barbeque sauce, cheese, hot sauce — prevent you from distinguishing subtle nuances. This can lead to overeating as you unconsciously search for a greater variety of tastes.
Make your meals flavor intense. The best recipes are those that give you balance in flavor and nutrition. Do a little research on cooking low-fat meals to see how you can combine different flavors to create a delicious meal without consuming volumes of calories.
Low-fat Foods are Best for Losing Weight
Along with herbal and natural products, low-fat foods have — as a result of clever marketing — taken the world by storm. Today, virtually every type of food on the market has a low-fat version. The smart marketers slap on appealing labels, such as “low-fat,” “light,” “fat-free” and “reduced-fat” and then charge more than their fat counterparts. However, all this creative verbiage about the product’s fat content ignores or deliberately hides one important question: Exactly how low, how light, how free and how reduced is the fat in the product? Five percent? Ten? More? Less?
These are vague labels (deliberately so?) and their meaning varies from one product to the next. The food industry might have a mandate as to how foods are labeled, but it’s still incredibly confusing to consumers. You might find a good tasting low-fat candy bar that contains only two-percent fat, while another brand, also displaying a low-fat label, contains a higher percentage. Not only might there be a difference between two low-fat candy bars, it could be a significant difference. This is why it’s important that you always check the nutrition value table on all products. While the terms low, reduced and light are not consistent from product to product, the labeling laws are strict as to the quantity of carbs, fats, protein, calories, and micronutrients in the products.
Make special note of the calories in the low-fat products. Remember, your body doesn’t care whether the excess calories came from carbs, protein or fat. Any unused calories get stored somewhere on your body. Know that low-fat, reduced-fat, and no-fat, doesn’t necessarily mean low calories. Co-author Christensen learned this about three months after he discovered no-fat, frozen yogurt, sold in a quaint little shop a few blocks from his home. Since it had no fat, he naively assumed he could have an industrial-sized cone once a day, sometimes twice, sometimes dipped in chocolate. By the end of summer, his training uniform fit snugly and his martial arts moves had become sluggish, a result of about 15 pounds of unused calories — no-fat calories — surrounding his waistline.
One low-fat commercial cupcake, for instance, contains the same number of calories as a regular, high-fat cupcake, but because it’s labeled low-fat it sells like, well, hotcakes. No doubt the naïve even eat two or three extra believing it’s okay to do so. Learn from Christensen’s discovery, the same sad one made by thousands of others, and don’t overeat low-fat foods under the assumption that they contain fewer calories. Check the labels, check the labels, check the labels.
How They Still Get You
One reason why there aren’t fewer calories in some low- or no-fat foods is that the manufacturers have added things to get you to eat them. Fat-free desserts, for example, often contain extra sugar, sometimes a lot of extra sugar, to compensate for the lack of rich taste lost when the fat was removed. What this means is the calories saved by eating a low- or no-fat desert come back to haunt, laugh and mock you in another form.
We aren’t saying that you shouldn’t eat these foods, but we are encouraging you to read the labels and keep your portions in check. Low- and no-fat products are a valuable addition to your diet, but they aren’t a quick fix to losing weight. The manufacturers have spent a lot of money to fool consumers into believing that fat is the bad guy in your diet. While it’s true that too much saturated fat can have detrimental effects on your health (we talk about this later), it’s also true that eating too many calories, no matter where they come from, causes you to gain weight. This is a fact the admen haven’t been able to change and almost always fail to mention.
Keep this fact in mind and hopefully it will help you remember to check the labels: We now have more fat-free foods than ever before in history, but the population is growing ever more dangerously fat with each passing year.
Don’t let the ad men win. You are a warrior. Keep your guard up.
By now you know that it’s all about calories and anything you hear that claims otherwise, you should suspect immediately that they are evil, stinking low-life liars. That might be a little strong, but you get the point. Here are 10 diet cons that slim and trim — your bank account.
The program is effortless Sure, and a kick in the groin is a lot of laughs. Losing weight takes time, effort and discipline. It’s not always easy, but it’s definitely worth the effort.Your weight loss is permanent Not if you resume eating and training the way you were before you began the diet. If after you lose the weight you maintain a sensible, calorie conscious eating plan and a good training regimen, the weight stays off. Eat more calories than you burn, however, and your old self comes back to strain your waistband.Eat all the sausage and bacon you want Even if this worked, do you really want to feed your heart and arteries all that fat? Along with a sensible reduction in calories, eat lots of fruit, veggies and lean meat to slim down healthily.You need a Masters degree in chemistry to figure it out This diet claims that you must eat only protein at one meal, carbs at the next and fat only on Sunday. Nonsense. There is no scientific proof that you can lose weight by not combining certain foods. It’s okay; your body can handle bread and turkey at the same time.Certain food groups are banned Anytime you neglect a food group you risk suffering from a lack of nutrients. Your objective is to drop those unwanted pounds, but do so with lots of energy and with vibrant health.They show before and after pictures of a guy who lost 50 pounds eating a brand name fast food The more sensational the ad, the more you need to scrutinize the fine print. By law, the weight loss claimed from an advertised diet must be representative of all people, not just one person. If it’s not, there must be a disclaimer that says something about the results not being typical.You have to trace your ancestry There are even wacko diets where you tailor your eating according to your blood type or where you eat similarly to your cave dwelling ancestors (this ignores the fact that few cavemen lived to see 30). Avoid these plans like a charging T-rex and spend your efforts on training hard and selecting healthy, low-cal foods.Eat only watermelon and cheesecake Hmm, this one sounds pretty good. But for six meals a day? While you might at first lose weight on a diet that allows you to eat only one or two types of food, such restriction is unhealthy because it lacks a variety of nutrients. Also, few people can remain on a diet that is so boring, and when they go off, it’s — hello pizza.Foods you have always known to be healthy are now bad for you There are diets that claim nutrient-rich foods, such as beets, carrots and apples cause you to store excess sugar as fat. Nonsense. The only thing that causes you to store fat is too many unused calories.You see it advertised at 2 AM on cable Always keep in mind that the spokesperson’s giddiness and dripping enthusiasm are part of an act. The pretty person is getting paid to get you excited over their wacky diet plan. Don’t fall for it. Besides you should be sleeping, anyway.Infomercials
Infomercials
