10 Foods & Drinks to Avoid for Weight Loss

The best way to achieve continuous success on your weight loss journey is to combine effective exercises with a healthy, nutritious diet. Hours spent slaving away at the gym will be completely useless if you’re not mindful of what you eat. This is because certain foods can cause bloating or add fat to your belly, making it difficult to lose those pounds. Let’s take a look at some foods and drinks to avoid when losing weight!

1 – Alcohol

Having an occasional beer with friends is okay. However, when you overdo it, you’ll end up with a “beer belly”. Since alcohol has many empty calories and can be addictive, a single night of drinking can translate into taking in thousands of liquid calories. Instead of being burnt by your body, these calories will be stored as fat and accumulate on your stomach. Alcohol also increases your appetite and causes you to crave junk food which will often result in you consuming even more calories and sabotaging your weight loss goals.

2 – Artificial Sweeteners

Artificial sweeteners may contain zero calories but this doesn’t make them a good choice when it comes to losing weight. These artificial sweeteners are loaded with chemicals that increase your appetite and cause overeating. They also cause bloating as they contain chemical compounds known as sucralose, cyclamate, and aspartame which do not break down easily in the body. On rare occasions, you can get aspartame poisoning which can result in many health issues or even be life-threatening. Opt for honey as a natural and healthy sweetener!

3 – Candy

Candy is high in calories and provides very little nutritional value. The excess calories in candy cause fat to accumulate in your body. The high sugar content also causes your blood glucose levels to suddenly crash and surge. This reduces your energy levels and has a negative impact on your performance throughout the day and during workouts while also increasing your appetite and making you more likely to overeat.

4 – Dried fruits

Many people believe that since dried fruits are healthy and natural, they’re a great choice for weight loss. However, unlike fresh fruits which are mainly water and low in calories, dried fruits contain large amounts of sugar and are very rich in calories. While they make a great healthy treat, they have a similar effect on your body to candy, and eating too many can sabotage your fitness efforts. Either eat dried fruit in moderation or opt for fresh fruits instead.

5 – Fast Food

Apart from being low in nutritional value and high in dangerous trans fats, a single fast-food meal usually contains 1,000 calories or more. Not only does this large amount of calories cause excess fat to be stored around your stomach but it also results in you being sluggish during your workouts.

6 – Fruit Juice

Like with dried fruits, many people assume that fruit juice carries similar benefits to fresh fruits. While fruit juice does provide your body with some vitamins and minerals, it contains zero fiber and high levels of sugar. Therefore, it doesn’t suppress your appetite in the same way as fresh fruits and also leads to you consuming excess calories which often get stored as body fat.

7 – Processes foods

In order to improve their flavor and boost their shelf life, processed foods are packed with chemicals, sugar, and salt. The chemicals and salt in processed foods increase your appetite and cause bloating while the sugar adds extra calories that increase your body fat levels.

8 – Refined grains

Refined grains are stripped of vitamins, minerals, and most importantly most of their fiber during processing. This reduced fiber content makes you more likely to get hungry when consuming refined grains and also slows down your metabolism.

9 – Sodium Rich Foods

Sodium makes your body retain water and can cause bloating around your stomach. It’s added to many different foods, so make sure you always check the amount of sodium in foods before you eat them and keep your overall sodium consumption below 1,500mg per day.

10 – Soda

Soda is something that many people surprisingly continue to drink while attempting to lose weight. However, both regular and diet soda are detrimental when trying to burn fat. Regular soda is packed with sugar and causes you to consume more calories than you need. These liquid calories then become body fat and prevent you from getting lean-toned abs. Diet soda contains zero calories but is full of chemicals that increase your appetite and cause stomach bloating.

By cutting back on these 10 foods and eating them sparingly, you’ll find that your weight loss efforts will rapidly improve. So run through your existing diet today and make sure that the foods listed in this article account for no more than 20% of your overall diet.