Hi, hope you’re having a great day. I know for most people losing weight and looking better is the main motivation behind eating well. But at the end of the day being healthy and having our health is the most important thing, if you don’t have your health, it doesn’t really matter what you look like does it?…

Many people will work their butts off to assure themselves and their families financial security at the expense of looking after themselves, then if anything ever happened and their health was in jeapordy they’d give every dollar they had just to get their health back again. Strange when you think about it…

So if you’re smart, you’ll be a little more proactive about things and start taking action now.  

Funnily enough, your health and how you look go perfectly hand in hand, and the healthier YOU are, the less likely it is you’ll have excess body fat, and the more likely you’ll be fit, lean and strong. So it’s a pretty safe bet to focus on your health, and the rest will follow.

With that said, here’s 3 of the worse foods you can eat for your health, and the best part is, if you get rid of these things in your diet, you’ll greatly improve how you look, feel and perform as well.

So here goes:

Sugar

 

It is bad for us, plain and simple. Eating sugar will make you fat and sick, it offers no nutritional value whatsoever and it’s actually referred to as “empty calories’. To make things worse, it is actually addictive, so the more you have it the harder it is to stop. It’s seriously like a poisonous drug.  

Every time you ingest sugar, your body has a strong reaction as it tries to deal with metabolizing it. It produces insulin, your blood sugar goes up and that’s why you get a big surge in energy before it comes crashing down. This reaction causes a lot of stress on your body, organs and glands.

Eating sugar actually leaches nutrients out of your body just to process it, so when you eat it not only are you getting NO nutrients, it is actually taking nutrients from your body.

Not to mention it will make you fat if you eat too much, and it will definitely hinder any weight loss efforts. Remember all calories aren’t created equal, and sugar will affect you on a hormonal level so it’s not just the excess empty energy you’re consuming, its wreaking havoc on your body too!   

Need I say more?

Vegetable oils / trans fats 

 

Vegetable oils are highly processed, and our bodies aren’t used to large amounts of these unnatural oils in our diets. Vegetable oils contain a lot of Omega 6 fats, which we are not supposed to consume in large amounts, in fact if anything, we want be limiting our intake of these fats and trying to eat more Omega 3 fats like found in fish oil.

It’s thought that  throughout history humans have typically eaten a diet with a ratio of about 1:1 for omega 6 and omega 3’s, but in todays modern world that ratio is anywhere from 20:1 and 50:1 due to the large quantity of man made, processed foods which are consumed nowadays. This is a big change in our diet, and it is not good for our health.

It’s like if you started putting diesel fuel in your car instead of unleaded petrol, its just not designed to operate with that fuel source and it will damage it.

Not only this, but heating these oils up (cooking with them) makes them worse. Cooking these oils will make them go rancid, creating free radicals (things which circulate around your body basically killing healthy cells and tissue).

Vegetable oils can also be processed (through heating and something called hydrogenation) and turned in to trans fats (which are really bad for you and increase your risk of heart disease). These fats are commonly found in things like spreads/margarine, pastry based food, baked goods, fast food, chips etc.

The healthiest oil to cook with is actually coconut oil, as it has a higher smoke point so doesn’t change its chemical structure when exposed to high temperatures, and it’s got a lot of other health benefits too. You can buy it from any health food store. Olive oil is a healthy oil but I’d consume as it is on salads etc, it’s still not ideal to cook with at high temperatures.

 

Grains

 

 

Human beings just aren’t designed to eat grains.

We lived for millions of years without them, and obviously got through just fine.

Grains come from the seeds of wild grasses, and humans can’t digest these seeds as they are found in nature, it has to go through some sort of processing and preparation.

Birds are the only animals who can eat them raw…

Unless you look like this, you probably can’t digest grains very well

 

So things like bread, pasta, most breakfast cereals, biscuits, pastries, crackers, etc are actually not healthy for you at all no matter what the ads on t.v tell you or how many ‘added’ vitamins it says it contains. (it wouldn’t need any if it wasn’t so processed to begin with)

Do you really think that iron men or any elite athletes actually eat Nutri Grain? Highly processed and full of sugar is not a great source of nutrients.

Because grains are so hard to digest for many people, it is common to cause digestion problems,  gut irritation (which leads to bloating etc) , which will actually block the absorption of nutrients. Many people don’ tolerate wheat and gluten very well, you don’t have to have full blown Celiac’s disease to have intolerance to gluten either.

and to make matters worse, calorie for calorie grains are far inferior to lean meat, vegetables, and fruit

So the more grains and processed carbs you eat, the less nutrients you are consuming as you are displacing a lot of healthier alternatives, and of that, the less nutrients you are actually absorbing.

So you are absorbing less, of a lesser amount of nutrients…not ideal.  

Eating these sort of carbs will also have an effect on your insulin and blood sugar levels similar to how I explained about sugar, resulting in weight gain or at least hindering any fat loss endeavors.

So….eat lots of…..

 

And don’t eat much of…

 

Because bad carbs will kill you…