So what is one to do? First don't approach losing the weight as something that you are going to do for a few weeks, then go back to the same old ways. Don't "diet", learn to change your attitude towards foods you eat. Learn to read the labels on foods, become aware of the foods that are good for you, and the foods that give you nutritionally empty calories. High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), starchy vegetables, foods high in sugar all appeal to our taste buds, but according to research and studies are behind the obesity epidemic. So we need to begin to go back to more natural unprocessed foods. Buy more fresh fruits, and vegetables. Find the organic ones if you can, but buying the canned, and processed products add sugar, preservatives, and other ingredients which appear to cause weight retention. Convenience food items really should be avoided. Snacks like potato chips, corn chips are full of empty calories. For instance a popular brand of potato chips have 140 calories per serving. But exactly how much is a serving?? In this case for this particular brand of chips it is 1ounce, or roughly only 14 chips. So if you eat the whole bag ( not uncommon) which is 8.5 ounces you are consuming 1190 calories. Average daily caloric intake for women is about 1500 to 1800 calories, and 1800 to 2200 for men just to maintain current weight. That is also about128 grams of carbohydrates or roughly 43% of your daily recommended carb intake. But it is not that simple. There are good carbohydrates, and those that are not so good. The good one are the complex variety, the ones that are not quickly converted into sugar. The not so good are quickly metabolized into sugars, from HFCS, starch, and sugary foods. When you are taking in the bad carbohydrates over time it causes the body to either not produce insulin or the cells to ignore the insulin leading to diabetes. Part of the problem with this whole food issue is that the better foods are more expensive, and economic issues creep into the factors of obesity, and food choices. Plus the advertisers in media telling you how good some of these products are for your health. Don't believe what you hear or read or see. Do your own research on nutrition, and make better choices in selecting food products. Start a garden in your back yard where you can grow your own fresh green veggies to save money. Plant fruit trees in your yard for fresh fruit, you'll be amazed at the difference in the taste of a tree/vine ripened fruit over store bought produce.
The truth about diets, & dieting is that weight loss is simply consuming less calories than you use, or using more calories than you consume. It is about the combinations of the foods that we eat, and what we eat. It is about nutritional education. If we are knowledgeable and we make good choices then we can win this battle of the waist line, but the choices are between how much and what we eat, vs. how much exercise or calorie burning we accomplish. There is no simple quick fix to the long term problems of poor eating and exercise habits we have developed in life. There are programs, & diets that will help you lose the weight, but if you want to keep it off, you must have a paradigm shift, an attitude adjustment to make it permanent.
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