Foods to Avoid

When trying to lose weight, everyone knows to avoid eating foods such as cheesecake, fried appetizers, and ice cream. But there are several “gray area” type of foods that some dieters consume completely unaware of how fattening they actually are. This often results in frustration since the amount of effort that is seemingly being put into the diet isn’t yielding results. It’s a mistake to assume that foods are healthy enough for your diet standards. Here a few of those “gray area” foods that should indeed be nixed from your diet when trying to lose weight:

Most Salads

Perhaps the biggest dieting mistake that people make is ordering salads under the presumption that they are healthy. By and large, salads tend to be horribly unhealthy. They are often covered in a high-fat salad dressing along with cheese, bacon bits, croutons, and other delicious but fattening toppings. Another “salad myth” is that they’re really healthy since they contain vegetables. However, lettuce actually contains very little nutritional value and oftentimes lettuce is about the only vegetable in a salad. This is especially the case for lighter colored lettuces which are basically just crunchy water. Any dieter eating a lettuce salad with cheese and ranch dressing and thinks they’re making weight loss progress is living in disillusion. You might as well cut the charade and order yourself a hamburger!

Fruit Juices

Fruit juices offer a reasonable degree of vitamin supplementation at the expense of lots and lots of sugar calories. A single 8 oz. glass of most fruit juices contain well over 100 calories. The key to weight loss is decreasing calorie consumption. One of the most sure-fire ways to prevent this from happening is when not only do you eat calories, but you drink calories too! This means all non-diet sodas also need to be cut out. Some people could lose weight by keeping every facet of their diet exactly the same except replacing juice and sodas with water.

Most Alcoholic Drinks

For most people wanting to lose weight, it’d be asking a lot to have them stop drinking alcohol altogether. If you can’t do that, then at least don’t drink high-caloric alcoholic beverages. Things like margaritas and other fancy cocktails are often very fattening due to the tasty mixers used. Wine and beer (even the supposed “ultra-light” ones) still contain a lot of calories. Your best bet if you must drink is mixing liquor with a diet soda. Something like a rum-and-diet contains about half the amount of calories as the average beer and about a fourth of the amount of calories as something like a margarita.

Soups

Understandably, most people tend to believe that soups are a little healthier than they actually are. After all, they are mostly liquid so it seems fairly logical that they wouldn’t contain a ton of calories. This isn’t always true, though. Some soups can be very, very fattening. As a rule of thumb, avoid any cream-based soup and any dark-broth soup (like gumbos which are made with a lot of oil). Soups made with chicken broth are usually fine and should actually be sought out as an alternative to whatever unhealthy choices are currently responsible for your expanding waistline!