7 Healthy Sounding Foods to Avoid

Sugar-free! Low-fat! Full of antioxidants! These labels scream out loudly at the average dieter as healthier versions of the foods that they love. Sometimes they really are, but more often than not they are just part of a marketing ploy to mislead consumers into buying products that are full of calories and not diet friendly. Here are 7 healthy sounding foods to avoid buying the next time you go shopping.

1. Sugar-Free Chocolate and Cake – Sugar Free sounds great because we all know that many high calories foods also have high sugar contents. But in reality some sugar free products have almost as many calories as their normal counterparts. For example, 2 normal peanut butter cups have about 230 calories for 45 grams of chocolate while 2 sugar free cups are still 182 calories and offer a smaller 36.4 grams of chocolate. Not much of a difference at all.

2. Haagen-Dazs Light Ice Cream – Light Ice Cream sounds great, but for the premium brands their ‘light’ versions are still calorie laden and can ruin a diet. Even for vanilla, the simplest of flavors, a single ½ cup serving will set you back 200 calories. Why not try the much healthier slow-churned type for about half of the calories?

3. Chain-Smoothies – Smoothies can be great for diets, but only if they are made correctly. Many smoothie vendors play off of perceptions of the heath benefits of fruit while adding loads of sugar into the mix. Before heading out for a smoothie it would be best to look up the calorie counts online and pick one that isn’t full of fat and calories. Or better yet, follow my recipe for a quick homemade low-calorie smoothie.

4. Dried Fruits – Fresh fruits are great diet foods, but there are two reasons why their dried versions are not. First, when a fruit is dried it shrinks and all the calories and sugar get concentrated into a small snack. Think of it this way, a prune is a dried plum, so if you eat 10 prunes that is the same as eating 10 whole plums! Second, on top of all that concentrated natural sugar many manufactures add even more sugar to enhance the taste. If you really want some dried fruit make sure to find some with no added sugar and monitor your portions carefully.

5. Light Beer – At about 100 calories a can light beer really isn’t going to break your diet, but how many people really only drink one when they go out? The problem here is not the product itself, but the lack of control that many people have while drinking it. The mindset is ‘Oh it’s light so I can drink as many as I want without guilt!’ 5 cans of light beer still total 500 calories and, if not factored into a diet, those can really hurt weight loss efforts. Enjoy if you want, but be careful!

6. Light dressings – Salads are probably the number one thing to eat on a diet. Filled with vegetables they have the potential to full you up without adding too many calories. That is, until someone goes and drenches it in high-calorie dressings. There are many great options for truly low-calorie dressings, but more often than not you cannot trust the ‘light’ label. 2 tablespoons of light ranch, for example, still have 70-80 calories and can seriously ruin your otherwise healthy salad.

7. ‘Bran’ or ‘Nutri-grain’ Breads – Just because it says bran or nutri-grain does not mean that it is really made from whole-wheat. Many times the main ingredient is still white flour which is not as healthy as wheat flour. Additionally, these breads can still be full of fat, sugar and calories. Even one fairly small ‘bran’ muffin is going to set you back over 300 calories.

These examples demonstrate that relying on bold words on packages is not a good idea and can be costly weight loss efforts. Please, check those labels carefully to make sure that what you are buying is truly something diet-friendly! I’ll plan to follow this up with a 7 best foods to eat, stay tuned!

(Picture by Br3nda on flicker)

The Most Important Thing: Education

I feel like in order to run this blog the way I want, I need to get my philosophy about losing weight written here early. The first one, the one about mindset, and this post are what I'm going to call 'editorials' about weight loss. The last post about the smoothie represents the tone that I see this blog moving towards after I finish with these.

When I say education I don't mean taking a formal class or joining a group like weight watchers (although those can help). What I mean is learning about food, what it does, and how it interacts with your body. As I said in my first post, I am not a nutritionist and I don't know the subject very deeply, but I have learned the basics.

Diets that claim that you can lose weight by not eating carbs, only eating one kind of food, or anything else crazy DO work - but are not healthy or sustainable. If you don't eat enough of the one of the basic types of food (carbs, protein, and fat) your body will not be able to function properly and you will find yourself feeling tired, hungry and miserable. This is why people quit, and even if they keep going they are harming their bodies in the process and gain it all back later.

Of course you can lose weight by cutting carbs or fat, but that weight loss is not from the lack of those substances but from the lack of calories. Technically, you can lose weight by eating chocolate all day long as long as you eat fewer calories then you burn. The problem with doing that is twofold: 1. You will be extremely hungry and 2. Your body will not be getting the nutrients it needs to run well and you will probably lose more muscle than fat.

The secret to weight loss is calories in, calories out. The secret to healthy sustainable weight loss is the right calories in, calories out. Nutritionists differ on what the right proportion of carbs, protein, and fat is, but most agree your calories should be made of about 50% carbs and 25% of both protein and fat. Going too low on those percentages can be dangerous, as I personally found out and will post about later along with a more detailed explanation about how each works with your body.

Now to the education part. Losing weight in a healthy way involves a lot of reading. Looking up the calories in food, reading about nutrients and visiting forums in order find answers to questions are all just part of the research that goes with learning about food and exercise. In my opinion the most important thing to learn is the amount of calories in the foods you eat. At first, it is very difficult to remember the calorie counts, but after a while you can easily recall the stats of the foods you eat the most. Additionally, you also become good at guessing how many calories are in the foods that you don't know, enabling you to make the right choices when you can't look it up.

Websites like calorie-count.com (which is what I used and will write a separate post about later) offer nutritional information on thousands of different foods. These sites make it much easier to keep track of what you are eating and remember the stats for you to easily look up.

In short, healthy weight loss means learning what is in your food and how it interacts with your body. The best part, unlike systems that send you food and do the math for you, once you finish losing weight that knowledge stays with you and makes it easy to maintain your new lifestyle. Doing it the 'easy' way and buying some program that says it's best point is that you don't have to think just hurts you in the end since you didn't learn anything about real food.

I think that education is so important that when people ask me what I did to lose weight and how I've managed to keep it off I always simply say I that I learned.

Recipie: Super Easy Smoothie!

As I'm sure you don't know, in addition to being a student I also coach high school rowing. Besides being an extremely rewarding experience, coaching novice girls on the water turns me into a walking weather report since I am required to pay close attention to the forecast for safely reasons. Let me tell you, I couldn't be happier to finally have the warmer weather! Being stuck in the middle of the river in a small metal boat in 35 degree temperatures in just no fun - no fun at all. 70 is a much better number, right between the points of numb fingers and massive painful sunburns.

Why am I writing about this? I swear it relates!


With the weather (finally) getting warmer I thought that today would be a great day to share my easy, low-calorie, smoothie recipe!

• 1 Dannon Peach 'Light & Fit' Yogurt ---- 60 Calories

• 1 Cup Frozen Strawberries ---------------- 52 Calories

• 2 Cups Ice ------------------------------------ 0 Calories

• 1-2 Packets of Splenda to Taste ---------- 4-8 Calories

-------------------------------------------------- Total Calories: ~120

Mix it all up in the blender and ta-da! A huge yummy smoothie for no more than 120 calories!



Of course, you can replace the peach yogurt for any other flavor or the Strawberries for a different type of frozen fruit. I've tried Strawberry/Strawberry and while it still tasted great, I find that the peach works better. The vanilla yogurt also works very well and matches with just about everything. Feel free to also change the amount of ice since some people like thicker/thinner smoothies.

The only problem with this recipe, and home made smoothies in general, is the horrors that could befall you while trying to crush the ice. Depending on the quality of your blender, you might have to try different ways of combining the ingredients in order to get it done. If the ice won't crush when you put it all in at the same time you may want to try dividing the ice and adding it slowly.

Enjoy the weather and happy smoothie making!

-- Pictures from flicker used under CC. Frozen Strawberry by blmurch, smoothie by Poldavo (Alex) --
(Once I get a working camera I'll take my own)

Where to Start – Getting into the Right Mindset

The first step to losing weight is to decide to lose weight. Sounds easy doesn’t it? For many people this is probably the hardest part of weight loss.

Something like 40% of American adults say that they are on a diet, but no where near that number actually lose weight. To many that may attest to the fact that weight loss is hard, which it is, but I wonder how many of those people are really trying to lose weight. I known people who have ‘been on a diet’ forever and have never lost any real weight, I’m sure you know them too. A large portion of people who go on diets don’t put their hearts into it. Many people go on fad diets because they are feeling the pressure to lose weight from the people around them and want to do it easily and quickly. They buy into the false and/or dangerous claims of the advertisements because they, themselves, didn’t really make the decision to lose weight – others did it for them.

If there is one thing I’ve learned over the past few years it’s that you can’t make people do what they don’t want to do. You can’t help people who don’t want help and will not help themselves. The same goes for yourself; you can’t make yourself lose weight if you don’t really want to. If you do not feel ready to lose weight then don’t worry about what other people are saying, if you do not put your heart into it you won’t accomplish anything. But, if you feel ready to really begin to lose weight it’s time to stop saying ‘I want to lose weight’ and start saying ‘I WILL lose weight’. There is a lot of power in words and that, along with education, will be a re-occurring theme of this blog.

Similarly, if you’ve decided to start losing weight go ahead and tell those closest to you. I know that keeping it a secret is by far emotionally safer. That way if you fail no one knows besides you. I hate looking like I failed at something, probably way more than I should, and it’s a problem I’m working on. As harmful as the fear of failure can be, it was a vice that turned into a blessing during my weight loss. After I had decided for myself that I was going to lose weight I made sure to tell my parents, my sister, and my friends. It made it much easier for me to keep to my goals knowing that other people were going to be asking me how I was doing. The fact that I did not get the feeling that most of those people really believed I was going to do it pushed me even harder to prove them wrong.

I know it is repeated by everyone, but to lose weight ‘diets’ are not the answer. The key is not following some cut out plan of what to eat and when – life rarely works like that – but rather to undergo a life-style change that you can live with forever. If you are doing something that you know you can’t keep up forever then it is time to change your approach. This leads into what I think is the second most important key to weight loss and the topic of my next post – Education.

Mission Statement

Welcome to my new blog!

I started this blog with the hopes of offering tips and support to people who are trying to get healthy and lose weight. Embarking upon such a difficult task can be extremely challenging, especially since magazines, television, the internet and hundreds of other sources are offering tons of conflicting advise about what what should and what should not be done, what works and what doesn't work, and how one should go about slimming down. Sorting through all of the information out there is tiring and causes plenty of people to give up their goal before they even start.

I am just a normal person, not a nutritionist or doctor, so anything I write here is only a reflection of my own personal experience losing weight. Until two summers ago I had been overweight for my entire life despite the fact that I had always been involved in some kind of sport. I did not understand food or what a healthy relationship with it was. I honestly didn't understand why I weighed so much when I didn't think I ate very much in comparison to the other people around me. Halfway through college I decided that I wanted to learn what it would take to lose the weight. Unlike a lot of other people nothing triggered this desire; one day I woke up and decided that I wanted to change.

When people ask me how I managed to lose over 65 pounds in 8 months I tell them that the most important thing is to want it. To really truly want it. The power of willpower is amazing and everyone, EVERYONE, has it. If you really want to lose weight you have to commit to it, set goals, and hold yourself accountable for your actions. Don't say 'I want to lose weight' or 'I'm trying to lose weight' say 'I WILL lose weight' and 'I AM losing weight'. Just speaking those words offers a boost to your willpower and can steal yourself against slipping back or giving up.

On this blog I am going to cover topics that include:

• Where to start and the importance of planning and education
  
• Why 'diets' don't work
• Emotional complications and the danger of going too far
• How exercise fits in
  
• Why I eat ice cream every night (besides the fact that it's yummy)

I also plan on posting about food products and recipes, links to relevant articles and stories, reviews of helpful websites and information about any other random things I used when I was still losing weight or have come across since.

I believe that anyone can lose weight while still eating the foods they love the most. You can still go out to restaurants, enjoy holidays, and go through your day without feeling overly hungry or deprived.



Before and After pictures of me. I think I had even gained a little more weight after that first picture was taken before I started to lose. The second picture is me going through a very very small hole in a Buddhist temple in Japan while I was studying abroad. It was one of those times I was extremely happy to have lost all the weight because other wise I would have not been able to fit.

I look forward to writing this blog, and I hope that it helps other people achieve their goals!