Staying in shape is not always easy. Many people will put on a few pounds without even knowing what they did wrong.
After all, making the wrong food choices can greatly impact the size and shape of your body, in a very short time.
While most people understand that eating smaller portions of healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables will maintain weight easier, there are certain foods that can be very tricky. Avoid these foods if you want to maintain ideal body weight.
Avoid Bulk Foods
While buying in bulk can be cost effective, eating in bulk can be damaging to your waist line. If you don’t want to pay the extra cost for prepackaged foods, you need to divide the food into portion sizes, as soon as you get it home. Sitting down with a whole bag of chips will lead to eating more than you need.
Instead read your food labels carefully and determine which amount is healthy to consume in one sitting. This goes for cooking in bulk as well.
Cooking a large pot of chili or stew is simply easier. However, to maintain portion control you need to divide the meal into healthy portions, rather than just grabbing a bowl and hoping you get it right.
Late Night Snacks Are the Enemy
Eating a snack during your late night movie or television show can be very tempting. However, late night snacks should always be a “no-no”. When you eat right before bed, your body will not have time to process the food, and most things will turn into fat.
For this reason it is best to never eat after seven PM. However, if you are running late, and eating after seven is the only option, the best thing to do is exercise afterwards. Make sure you burn enough calories to cover what you consume.
Health Drinks Are Not Always Healthy
While it may seem that you could easily lose weight by drinking health drinks, it is not always the case. Many health drinks and juices contain large amounts of sugar. A half gallon bottle of juice or a sports drink may contain over two cups of sugar. If you drink two bottles a day you might as well eat four cups of sugar outright.
Drinking these drinks during your workout could actually leave you only burning off the drink. Instead, you need to make low calorie choices such as water or a diet drink. If you really like juice or sports drinks consider a diet or sugar free version. You could even make your own juice from fresh fruit.
As you can see it is easy to be fooled, and quickly put on the pounds. You need to be cautious and read the labels of everything you drink or eat in order to keep the weight off. Don’t just trust labels that say healthy or low fat. Items that contain healthy ingredients and are low in fat can still have other ingredients that cancel out all the good properties.
