Seven foods you must avoid for weight loss
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By Ari Snaevarsson, Features Editor
In case you were starting to think that dieting is about gradual, sustainable, long-term changes in both eating patterns and mindset, I have devoted this week’s article to something a little different.
Below you will find the seven deadly sins of weight loss foods, so to speak. Drop these foods from your diet and watch the belly fat burn away in front of your very eyes!
- Foods you are allergic to
This is a big one. People often get so caught up in the micronutrient profiles and digestibility and whatnot of their food choices that they forget one of the biggest obstacles to weight loss: being dead.
The literature is quite clear on this one. While it is true that as the body disintegrates underground, weight is technically lost, there is another factor at play which might deter you from eating those peanuts you know for a fact will kill you on contact. When you are dead, you will no longer be able to lose fat or build muscle. So do not forget to keep this one in mind!
- Foods you don’t find tasty
If you have just devised what you consider to be a near-perfect diet plan, give it a second read-through before fully committing to it, to ensure there are no foods you will need to eat that you do not find tasty.
An interesting thing happens when people resolve to stick to diets that include foods they are not fond of. When the dieter begins to realize that eating said foods is an unenjoyable experience, and maybe even makes them ill, sooner or later their brains will tell them (in so many words), “Please stop doing this.” And us humans tend to listen to our brains, so this is not a great approach to dieting in my opinion.
- Foods so calorie-dense that willingly eating them would make no sense (i.e. entire sticks of butter)
The second biggest obstacle to weight loss, after being dead, is being in a caloric surplus. Weight loss is the direct product of net caloric expenditure exceeding intake, and weight gain is the opposite. So, if you are eating too many calories, you will not lose weight.
For this reason, I always highly caution people who wish to lose weight against consuming foods that are so high in calories that actually eating them would be weird or would only make sense as part of some extreme eating challenge. For example, deciding to see how much olive oil one can chug in five minutes, although hilarious, would be bad for weight loss (as well as the integrity of your GI tract and your reputation as a mentally sound human being).
- Foods that are expired, dirty, poisonous, or too raw for human consumption
Again, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of being alive if you want to lose weight. Dieting requires some effort on your part, and that means if you really want to shed those pounds for the summer, you are going to have to start looking at expiration dates, cooking meats to their designated safe internal temperatures, and resisting the urge to eat that poison ivy leaf you picked up on your walk today.
- Food of an unspecified origin
I do not mean gummy worms here (what the hell are those things anyway?) but rather any food you find out in the open which you cannot identify some key features of, which are:
-How this food got here (see #6)
-What food this is
-What state of matter it is in
-Why it smells so off-putting
- Food that is stolen or not yours
Please do not steal food.
- Spinach and other “healthy foods”
This is becoming endemic in the dieting crowd. The prevailing notion upon starting a weight loss diet is that you should be eating whole, satiating, nutritious foods to confer health and other metabolic benefits.
Yeah, no. Sorry, but unless you want to be a walking cliche, please just do yourself a favor and skip the green veggies and healthy fats and whatnot.
It is an established fact that people who are perceived as cliches with no personality fail their diets, 100 percent of the time. I am no statistician, but those are not odds I would bet on.
I hope this divergence in content type I have produced for you was enlightening. But more than that, I hope that the flashy, sensationalist style of this void-of-substance article tapped into your masturbatory, lower-level thinking. Because God forbid a health/fitness article tackle the pressing issues from an impartial and actually useful, while somewhat challenging, manner.
April Fools Day Special
