Get Healthy By Cutting These Things from Your Diet
By Sara Butler
Restrictive diets are a major drag; they’re also not a great long term strategy for your health. It’s important to enjoy the food you eat and understand that most foods are just fine in moderation. Still, there are some foods that have so little nutritional value they should be severely limited or avoided altogether. Here are a few things you should be phasing out of your diet in order to stay healthy.
A Few Phasing Out Tips
Before you begin to cut these unhealthy foods from your diet, here’s how to do it in the least painful way possible:
- Eat the foods less often
- Cut down the size of the portion when you do eat it
- Substitute something healthier for it when you do cut it out
Sugary Drinks
Drinks don’t have fiber or other nutrients, they simply have calories. Drinking calories is one of the easiest things to cut out of your diet. The American Heart Association endorses that women have no more than 24 grams of sugar per day, or about six teaspoons. Men should have no more than nine teaspoons. To give you some idea of what you should be limiting your sugar intake to, the sugar in an average sugary drink is about 77 grams. That’s almost three times what you should be consuming in a day, all in one 20-ounce drink!
Sugary Cereal
Are you sensing a theme? You should, because excess sugar is one of the most important things to cut from your diet. You can easily get cut down your sugar intake by saying goodbye to sugary, sweetened cereals. Anything with a cartoon animal on the front should probably get the ax. Try whole grain cereal or oats with fresh fruit instead.
Processed Meats
Move over bacon. This may be hard to hear, but processed meats such as bacon, hot dogs, and ham increase your risk of heart disease by as much as 42 percent. Plus, a preservative found in most of these foods, sodium nitrate, has been linked to cancer. Just say no.
Trans Fat
You should know by now that trans fat is the big bad wolf of the food world. It wreaks havoc on your cholesterol levels and increases your risk of heart disease and early death. So, leave foods containing shortening, frozen meals, and anything else with hydrogenated oils out of your dietary lineup.
To learn more about your health and wellness, see your local chiropractor at The Joint Chiropractic.
