Part of the reason people are able to save money at the grocery store is because they fill their carts with unhealthy foods. It may seem counterintuitive that unhealthy food would cost less than the healthy alternative, but through inexpensive and inorganic ingredients, food companies are able to make processed food at a fraction of the cost of all natural and healthy food for customers to consume. If you’re looking to turn your diet around and not spend a lot more at the register next time you’re shopping for groceries, the following tips should help you out immensely.
Remember, not every food item is for everyone, and depending on your dietary needs, some recipes may not be appropriate. The key is to try different things out and decide on what you like and don’t like and what best fits into your diet and lifestyle.
What Makes Food Unhealthy?
While it’s easy to toss the term “unhealthy food” around, what exactly makes food unhealthy? Foods that are classified as unhealthy are foods that don’t supply the body with the nutrition it needs to function properly. Highly processed foods are generally low in nutrients because in the processing portion of the food preparation, the nutrients are lost in cooking or mixing with other ingredients. The more chemicals and additives that are added to foods to preserve them on the store shelf the unhealthier they generally are.
Processed foods are also typically very high in sugars and saturated fats. The body has a difficult time processing sugars because they are often complex carbohydrates that the body can’t do much with. Expending all of its energy on digesting the sugars and finding no nutritional value from them once they’re deconstructed, the body becomes weak. Eating things like fast food and prepackaged meals can introduce processed sugars and unhealthy fats that the body can’t use for nutrition and ultimately leads to things like heart disease and obesity.
What to Look For
If you think that you’re taking in too many unhealthy foods every day, it may be time to step back and figure out what you can change about your diet. It may not be a steadfast rule, but if you’re purchasing foods in the grocery store that have been prepackaged and the ingredients list looks more like a novel length than a list of simple ingredients, you may want to opt to put that food back on the shelf.
Another easy way to gauge whether or not something is unhealthy for you is to look at the fat and saturated fat content of the food. In the United States, the FDA recommends you eat no more than 20 grams of saturated fats in a day. By looking at how much fat certain premade dinners and meats have in them before consuming them, you can drastically cut down on your weight gain and cholesterol intake.
Knowing how to treat your body and what to put in it is vital to your life’s longevity. You can get more insight through a number of ways including taking courses in an online msn program.
Things to Eat Instead of McDonalds
Unfortunately, McDonalds is easy to grab and go. What makes unhealthy foods so popular is that they’re often the easiest to make and they’re the most accessible. If you’re looking to introduce healthier foods into your diet but aren’t sure where to start, a fantastic book that we recommend reading is called “The World’s Healthiest Foods, Essential Guide for the Healthiest Way of Eating.”
The ultimate goal of the book is to introduce much healthier foods into your diet and make them tasty to boot. But although there are huge benefits by following the advice in terms of what foods you should and shouldn’t eat within the book, what has us recommending the book not only to you, but also to our friends, are the cooking times of most of the meals. The book keeps busy people in mind and understands that unhealthy foods are easy to prepare. To rival unhealthy meal choices, the book focuses on making most of the meals within itself ready to eat in just a few minutes.
You can obviously get more complicated and extravagant than the meals outlined in the book, but for anyone getting started in the world of healthy eating, this book is definitely the way to go.
Start Small
The problem with most people who try to change their diet is that they try to do it all at once. It would be nice if you could go from an unhealthy lifestyle to completely healthy overnight, but by trying to do so, you’re ultimately setting yourself up for failure. Starting slow and making healthier decisions when you can is a good way to build morale until you can build yourself up to full meals based around vegetables and lean meats and grains.
A good example of what you can do differently is that instead of having cream cheese on your bagel in the morning, you can instead substitute it for low fat butter or low fat cream cheese spread. You probably won’t be able to taste the difference and you’ll save yourself a large amount of calories by making the switch. Another thing to try to ease yourself into a healthy lifestyle is to use whole grain bread for your sandwiches instead of white bread. White bread is simply wheat bread that has been bleached and artificially flavored to taste better. By using wheat bread you’re giving your body healthy whole grains and fewer calories than a slice of white bread and after a few days of eating it, you won’t be able to tell the difference anymore.