The majority of people look to their fridges for their most healthful foods. It’s easy to think that they are the places that contain the foods incapable of sabotaging your weight loss. They’re the whole foods and those that are least likely to be processed.
After all, when you think of your fridge, you’re likely thinking about vegetables, fruit, milk, yogurt and other similar items. That said, if you really look around, a lot of the foods you’ve jammed into that nice cool fridge are not nearly as healthful as you might think.
In fact, some recently published research has shown that when foods are labeled “healthy” or if we mentally label them that way, we’re more likely to overeat when we have them, this sabotaging your weight loss. This was published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. Apparently, we tend to think of those foods as being less filling and as having fewer fats and calories, so we feel we have room to eat more of them.
To help to protect yourself from that habit, it’s a good idea to truly get to know the foods you’re storing in your fridge, right down to the sauces and condiments you likely keep in the door. This will help you to make better decisions when you’re shopping for food, which is an important step. When you think about it, if you don’t have it in the house, you’re quite unlikely to eat it. Therefore, keeping it off your grocery list will help you to avoid many problems when mealtime comes around.
Some of the most problematic items include the following. These are foods that pretend they’re good for you when they might actually be causing more harm than help:
• Fat-free milk and yogurt
• Flavored yogurt
• Frozen veggies with seasonings or sauce
• Mayonnaise
• White bread
• Processed/deli meats and sausages
• Soda
• Ice cream
• Frozen French fries
All these foods look pretty harmless but the fact is that they are jammed full of sugar, sodium, bad fats or combinations of those unwanted substances that could be sabotaging your weight loss right now. Moreover, they’re also low in fiber and other nutrients. Any nutrition they do happen to contain is negated by the number of unhealthful components. After all, a little bit of dairy in ice cream doesn’t make up for the mountain of sugar that it also happens to contain. Just like the protein in deli meats doesn’t compensate for the fact that they contain several days’ worth of sodium.
