Optimize Weight Loss & Weight Management; Foods to Avoid

In a previous hub, I wrote about beneficial snack foods such as nuts, apples, dark chocolate, and tomato juice. It's also worth mentioning foods to stay away from in order to optimize your weight loss and weight management.

Keep carbohydrate intake to a minimum. Consuming too many cards has a negative impact on blood sugar an your body's overall metabolic rate. In order to maintain a low carbohydrate intake, sharply reduce your consumption of desserts, bread, potatoes, and other sweet and starchy foods. Limit the consumption of processed sugar by using organic unrefined or or unprocessed sugar such as "sugar in the raw". Avoid eating heavily processed grains (such as white bread). Eat as much 100 percent whole wheat bread as possible.

Avoid consuming processed foods containing high amounts of fructose. Consuming a large amount of fructose at once overwhelms the body's capacity to process it into sugar. Instead, the body's metabolism starts producing fats. Fructose also has the effect of blocking your body's appetite-regulating hormones. As a result, you're left feeling hungry and unsatisfied. Unsurprisingly, excess fructose consumption has been linked to weight gain.

Avoid drinking diet soda. In fact, give up drinking any kind of soda altogether. Diet soda harms the body's metabolism and increases the chances of weight gain. Furthermore, giving up artificial sweeteners will diminish your cravings for sweets over time. Drink plenty of water or iced green tea as healthy alternatives

Limit alcohol intake. Alcohol interferes with the fat-burning process, something that is critical for weight loss. Usually, the liver metabolizes fat. However, upon drinking an alcoholic beverage, alcohol outranks fat. The liver breaks down alcohol for energy first, causing fatty acids to accumulate. The body thus uses the calories derived from alcohol first before metabolizing the calories from fat. Alcohol also invigorates appetite in many people, and can thereby be very counterproductive to weight-loss efforts.

Occasionally, you'll notice that you've stopped losing weight in spite of all your efforts. To get off this plateau, vary your routine and introduce new elements. I hit two or three plateaus during the course of my weight loss. Each time, I had two choices, either I could exercise more ( which would be difficult due to time constraints such as work and everyday life), or, I could eat less. However, eating less might very well turn out to be counterproductive by sending the body's metabolism into "starvation mode." The result could be a decrease in muscle mass in stead of burning additional fat. Therefore, I decided to change up my exercise routine. Instead of walking all the time, I decided to incorporate some jogging into my routine as a type of "interval training" involving walking about 1/4 mile followed by jogging 1/4 mile in rotation. I gradually increased my pace. Each time I varied my routine, I noticed an initial weight loss of 3-4 pounds over the first two weeks of my stepped-up routine!

Weight management is a continuous balancing act between exercise and food intake. By sticking to the routines described in my previous blogs and continuing to monitor and adjust my weight management plan, I'm carefully controlling my weight. It no longer controls me!