When it comes to the question: What not to eat to lose weight? The answer is easy: Highly Manufactured Food

There are no magic wands or pills to lose weight but avoiding highly manufactured food is the single most effective step you can take if you want to lose weight. 

The problem is that we have become puppets. You no longer control what you feed your body. The food industry is doing it for you, and you need to learn what not to eat to lose weight.

The food industry has brainstorming sessions to study the best way to hook you up to specific flavors, textures and states of mind. Then, they manufacture the products in a specific way to make you addicted to all those feelings and, finally, they develop great commercial campaigns to make you believe that is what you need. They also try to make it as cheap as possible to let you think you are drawing huge pleasure by spending little money, while experiencing great flavors. Soon we will be calling the process of eating unhealthy, highly manufactured food: “a pleasant experience” or as the food industry calls it, “entertainment.” And “voila”, they have created the most powerful weapon against your body: fast, highly manufactured food.

When you eat highly manufactured food from a fast food chain, you have no idea about all the unhealthy ingredients that have been included in that food and how it has been cooked.

 When you eat from a package, you are also eating those unhealthy ingredients, but at least you know them—or most of them—by reading the labels. But chances are you don’t have time to read the label or you don’t know how to interpret the effect of 90% of the ingredients on your body.

Let’s study an example: Monosodium Glutamate (MSG). This is a flavor enhancer used widely in processed foods and restaurants. Its consumption in high quantities is associated with higher chances of being overweight. The reason is not clear. Maybe there is just an effect on you eating more because of the enhanced taste, or maybe MSG impacts the way you metabolize fat. Either way, you should try to avoid its consumption as much as possible, but it is very common in seasoning sauces, snack foods, salad dressings, and food in some restaurants. For more information on MSG (Monosodium Glutamate), you can read this post about MSG from Heather Solos’ BLOG: Home EC 101.

Don’t let the marketing of the front of the box trick you with the “healthy” advertisement. Don’t believe it unless you see it for real in the composition and food label. You REALLY need to read the food label to be able to make the right decisions. Once you start reading the food labels, you will start buying less of the bad options and more of the good ones. Even the same product—let’s say tomato sauce—can have a really different composition. And probably the taste of the healthier one would even be better and not necessarily more expensive.

 As I said before, there is no way you can control your weight, your figure, and your health until you are able to control what you put into your body. And that, my friends, is not going to happen until you start taking control.

Take control of what it is used to prepare your food

Let’s say, for example, you love cookies or muffins. Most of the manufactured cookies, muffins and similar, are made with nasty fats, including trans-fats. That makes them not only very caloric but also very unhealthy. It doesn’t mean you can’t eat them anymore… you can always cook them at home, controlling the ingredients you are using. If you don’t like and/or don’t have time to cook, you can use one of the high-quality organic mixes or an already cooked organic cookie, usually lower in fats, trans-fat free and lower in sugars. The same will apply for any other foods you absolutely love but are highly caloric and unhealthy. You can always find a healthier, less fat, sugar and calorie choice. You simply need to look for it.

Re-educate your taste buds

Work with your taste buds to get to love other textures, flavors and senses in order to win the battle against the food manufacturing industry. One example of succeeding in this is moving to whole grain ingredients or new products. By learning how to nourish your body with adequate foodstuffs, you will be in control of the battle.

Get the real thing!

The food industry learned long ago that what people really like is food that is easy to be consumed, and therefore it has refined your food to extremes. When my mom was young, she used to eat brown bread with a piece of chocolate as a snack. In my generation, we had the soft bread packed with horrible fats to make it more palatable and with soft chocolate inside the bread with terrible trans-fat in its composition. Later on, they removed the lateral crust to make kids eat it more easily. Nowadays we—consumers—are recognizing again the power and need for fiber, so the food industry has invented the very refined, white, soft bread still full of fats and sugars but with fiber added! Isn’t it ridiculous we are eating this instead of a piece of whole-wheat or multi-grain bread? Keep the chocolate please!!!!! 

Food is so refined, so easy to eat, that you eat too much quantity, packed with thousands of calories without even realizing it. Think about the difference between eating an apple and applesauce. How long does it take you to eat one and the other? What about apple juice? Sugar is added to sauces and other food to make it even more desirable and easier to eat. Exactly the same happens with any other extra refined food.