Is What You Drink Ruining Your Nutrition?

Have you found yourself stuck in a weight loss plateau with very little options? Getting frustrated with the work you have put into your weight loss goals thus far with little or no results? It happens to everyone, usually at the very start of any weight loss plan you lose a few pounds, feel fantastic about what you have already achieved and then it hits you. You are stuck with the weight you are at and having trouble getting that scale to go down any further. One simple way to begin to break that cycle is to look at what you are drinking.

Believe it or not what you are drinking on a daily basis can be one of the culprits freezing your scale. Many do not realize the huge amount of calories they are allotting themselves each day through beverages. Does this mean you must drink water everyday for the rest of your life to stay fit and trim? Absolutely not, it simply equates to monitoring it much closer.

For example, many people have a drink schedule that looks something like this: they awake to a fresh cup of coffee, they then continue to another when they arrive at work or perhaps even get one of those frothy coffee drinks at a nearby shop. Next, they have a soda with their lunch, with maybe even another to follow suit during the rest of their workday. When they arrive home at dinner time, they have yet another soda or iced tea with their meal. Certainly they will become hungry once more before they settle in for bed for the evening and this could be another soda, glass of wine or maybe even a beer. Once you begin to look at all of those from a distance and add up those calories, the results can be shocking.

One soda for instance is over 100 calories, some are even over the 200 mark per serving. If you get yours from a fast food place you can instantly double that calorie total as the sodas they pass out are larger in size than what one would receive by drinking it in a can from home. Those calories add up all day long and some even result in drinking over one thousand calories per day which is unnecessary for a healthy diet. If you find that you are one of these people, start by cutting back on the drinks that are high in calories and substitute them for water as much as possible. Your body needs water to function properly and if you do not care for the taste of it, then invest in one of the fruit flavored varieties or place a slice of lemon in your water. For soda lovers, replace yours with a diet version immediately. At least those do not contain calories or they contain very few and that will greatly decrease the amount of content you are taking in each day. Track your progress with your new drinking plan and in a just a few days you will notice the difference when you lose additional weight and get out of your weight loss plateau.

How To Understand Fat

“Fat Free!” “Low cal!” “Sugar-Free!” Lately, these tend to be the popular phrases that catch your eye as you walk the aisles of your local grocery store. They were designed to reel you in and make you think that you are eating healthier by choosing products with similar labels. However, buyer beware! There are far more factors to take into consideration then buying foods that are genetically altered to be low in fat.

A common misunderstanding is that fat is bad for you. Sure, too much fat isn’t healthy for anyone, but fat is actually a necessary nutrient for everybody. Dietitians and nutritionists both agree that the daily recommendation for your fat intake should be about 30%. This means 30% of your calories should come from products with fat! So as you mosey along through the grocery store and try your hardest to avoid fat at all costs, you may end up compensating for the missing fat in your shopping cart by over-indulging in something else. This causes a falter in balance.

Of course, there are good fats and bad fats, but regardless of the type you choose, its a proven fact that your body needs the nutrient overall. Good fats include fats from oils, like olive oil, fats from nuts, seeds, and fruit like avocados. Even peanut butter is considered a healthy fat. The oil and fat content that comes from these products are not hydrogenated or saturated so they are much less likely to work negatively with your body. With this said, it is very important that you stand strong in the supermarket so you don’t fall victim to these marketing ploys.

A big mistake that people make when purchasing “fat free” items is by justifying their intake by the fact that the food is “fat free.” Instead of eating one handful of potato chips, equaling approximately 11 chips that come out to be composed of 190 calories, 11 grams of fat, and 17 grams of carbohydrates, they are eating half the bag. Yes, the bag says one serving of these “fat free” chips has 110 calories, 20 grams of carbohydrates, and 0 grams of fat, but when you eat 5 servings in one sitting, you’re looking at well over at a “snack” that is well over 500 calories, rounding at about 100 grams of carbohydrates, and minimal amounts of protein. This downfall overview isn’t even including the extensive amount of sodium that you’d be ingesting by this eating behavior. You would be over the maxed out of sodium that you should have in one day! Looking at just the calorie content you can eat an entire meal for 500 calories or less! A well-balanced meal at 500 calories would be much more beneficial to your nutritional needs because you would be supplied with your carbohydrates, your proteins, and your fats at a proportional balance.

So instead of buying into all of the hype of low-cal, fat-free products, focus on getting what your body needs instead of putting all of your effort into avoiding the “Total Fat:” portion of the nutrition label.

Eating Out? Nutritional Information Sites For Your Favorite Restaurant Foods

Ever wonder what your favorite restaurant foods have in them? I'm not thinking ingredients (although that's a good question too) so much as fat, calories, etc? I know I have, as do most of us who would like to lose some weight. Many states require fast food restaurants to have a poster on the wall or a pamphlet you can take home with the information on it, but how many people actually *read* them? Considering that most people I've seen in fast food restaurants are in a hurry or dealing with errant kids, not many. It's not much different for 'sit-down' restaurants; I'm usually there with friends and not thinking about the food so much as the team trivia game we are playing. If you are in the same boat, you're in luck. I've found a few websites that give us the skinny (pun intended) on the caloric content of various restaurant dishes.

Rather than simply listing restaurants and foods, Chubbygrub.com gives information from the viewpoint of a person who is trying to eat better. It's not that other sites don't do this too, but I appreciate that the webmaster is of the same mind I usually am when I'm on a site like this. You can search by restaurant or by food category; it even has information on sauces and cream cheese spreads! I appreciate that because it doesn't do much good to eat salads to lose weight if the dressing is fatty. The only problem I see is that it doesn't include information on coffee-house drinks, but you can request restaurants or items to be added to the list.

Caloriecount, a service associated with About.com, also gives detailed information on the nutritional content of restaurant foods. Even if it doesn't actually give the restaurant's name (as is often the case for smaller, non-chain restaurants), you can still search by the food category. You can also search for alcoholic beverages, which is something I haven't seen on many 'diet' websites! There are also options to create a profile complete with a food and exercise journal. I have used it in the past and found it very helpful. I believe there is also an app for iPod/iPhone users, and I know that you can obtain food information via text message.

DietFacts.com has a very thorough database that gives nutritional information for nearly every restaurant you can think of...and many you can't. Not only can you find information on restaurant-specific dishes, the site features 'mainstream' foods such as sodas and steak sauces. As I said before, this is good because it's pretty easy to 'ruin' an otherwise-healthy meal by slathering on fatty condiments or chugging empty-calorie drinks. For extra help, DietFacts.com also links to various diet and weight-loss websites.

There are many more websites that let you research the nutritional information for your favorite restaurants, but these are the ones I found most useful. Sites like this take a lot of the 'guesswork' out of making healthy choices when eating out.