Ways to remove extra calories from your food & drink....

Today's Post:  Friday, 3-29-2013

Intro: 

You CAN lose fat by adding muscle and doing other things that boost your metabolism.

But calories DO count and removing some kinds and a bit of others will speed your fat loss and help you to keep it off.

First:

Because they are the building block of your body and health you want to keep or even eat a bit more of health OK proteins and foods that are high in fiber such as nonstarchy vegetables.

In fact, many people losing fat need to eat MORE health OK proteins. 

And, almost everyone losing fat needs to gradually eat MORE and more kinds of nonstarchy vegetables. 

Beans and lentils have both protein and LOTS of fiber.  Unless you are allergic to them, eat those but don’t overdose since they are slightly glycemic; and overdoses can be uncomfortable!

Eating these few kinds of foods also helps prevent the famine response with its increase in hunger and reduced metabolism.

Protein and foods high in fiber fill you and make you less hungry and make it take longer until you are hungry next.

Second:

Here’s a list of ideas to cut calories from everything else.

1.  Fruit with its higher glycemic index and sugar, health OK oils such as extra virgin olive oil, and raw and unsalted nuts, if you aren’t allergic, be sure to eat in moderation.

Only drink one glass of real fruit juice a day with breakfast.  And, drinking organic 100 % cranberry juice has about half the sugars and calories of other juices.

Only eat fruit at breakfast if it’s higher glycemic such as bananas and only eat one serving of one kind each day.

Eat mostly low glycemic fruit such as organic wild blueberries, raspberries, cherries, peaches, and plums.

Extra virgin olive oil is wonderfully good for you.  But a low moderate amount has a lot fewer calories than twice that much.

Guacamole is so good for you and avocados are so good for you and their fat is actually good for your heart.  It’s OK to eat extra once a week or so.  But be very careful to limit how much you eat on the days you are cutting calories extra.  And eat a low moderate amount most days.

Milk is a good food for drinking just after a hard workout since it’s anabolic and will help you build or keep muscle.

But take in less calories and avoid milk’s fattening effect at all other times by eating nonfat Greek Yogurt, nonfat Cottage cheese, and small amounts of cheese from cows fed only grass and hay – and drink ice water the rest of the time.

Cutting calories with that switch works! I just lost 5 pounds mostly from doing just that.

Third,

Stop drinking all soft drinks—both regular and diet! 

The people who do are hungrier and eat more extra foods than people who don’t!  They are routinely MUCH fatter and heavier too!

a) For people who have been drinking regular soft drinks, they get 10 % of their calories from this source!

They tend to have ALL that 10% stored as extra fat! 

You know what you weigh.  Subtract 10% of that from your current weight.  Unless you are very young and have very little fat now, you can lose all that fat by losing soft drinks completely!

b)  Whether rebound hunger, other bad food choices, and causing your liver to make you fat, drinking diet soft drinks and using the artificial sweeteners in them have been found to make you fatter than drinking regular soft drinks!  They also cause more diseases than even regular soft drinks do such as type 2 diabetes.

As fattening as regular soft drinks are, even more fattening is NOT a desirable neighborhood!

Do NOT stay there.  Stop diet soft drinks!

c) Ice water promotes fat loss. 

Tea and green tea are good for you and best for you with no milk or sugar added. 

Coffee is actually very good for you and a good fat loss choice if you have it with no  sweetener.  Small amounts of half and half or coconut milk are OK. 

Double servings of half and half or coconut milk or milk is too fattening.  That’s doubly true if you have it with tons of sugar. 

Some people who have fancy coffees each day with both too much fat AND sugar can cut up to several hundred calories a day by switching to no sweetener and far less fat in their coffee!

(Green coffee bean extract is a way to get the health supporting part of coffee with virtually no calories.)

Never use nondairy creamer!  Because it’s made out of hydrogenated oils which are a direct cause of heart disease, heart attack starter, and the stuff builds up in your body from even small amounts, never ever use that stuff!

Four, in fact there are a whole list of things that tend to be quite harmful to your health to eat or very fattening or both.

Guess what? The best fat loss solution is to never ingest that stuff!

You need to cut calories from somewhere to lose fat and keep it off.

Why not delete almost all fattening foods and ALL foods and food components that harm your health!

You may be consuming enough of that stuff now to cut 10% of your body weight or more as fat!

Because you may need to eat more real food, it may not be quite that much.  But because these food and drink components are so fattening it may actually turn out to be even more effective even after adding some real foods to compensate!

Most people are eating several things every day that are on that list!

a)  We just covered that foods made out of hydrogenated oils which are a direct cause of heart disease, heart attack starter, and the stuff builds up in your body from even small amounts, never ever use that stuff!

So, if a food has ANY kind of hydrogenated oil listed as an ingredient or any trans fat amount other then zero, lose ALL the calories in that harmful food and don’t eat it!

b)  Recent discoveries have shown that high fructose corn syrup is so incredibly fattening that it could get approved as a drug to make people fat!  If a food or drink has ANY high fructose corn syrup – sometimes listed as HFCS or corn sugar, do your fat loss efforts a favor and do NOT buy or consume it.  Worse, consuming high fructose corn syrup boosts triglycerides which means that consuming high fructose corn syrup is ALSO giving yourself doses of heart attack starter.

c)  Oddly, artificial sweeteners, despite having no or very few calories, make you fatter than high fructose corn syrup studies show, so take a pass on them too. It counts as if you cut that many calories or more!

d)  Despite the huge availability and seeming normality of foods made with refined wheat flour, stop ALL calories from that source to the very best of your ability!

Refined grains are very high in glycemic index – even more that sugar and are almost as fattening as high fructose corn syrup!

Worse, today’s hybrid and GMO wheat is fattening for many people even when eaten as 100 % whole wheat or wheat germ!

Most bread today fails people who want to lose fat and keep it off. 

The wheat and gluten free versions have high glycemic refined rice flour and added sugar!

But you can cook quinoa yourself as a rice substitute because it is NOT GMO is higher in protein than wheat and low glycemic too!

Barley does have gluten but is so very low glycemic people eating it routinely lose weight!

Whole grain buckwheat flour is far less fattening than wheat and the Bob’s Red Mill version has no gluten.

And for those not allergic there is almond flour.

So you can cook with these components and make a bread that is both low glycemic and not fattening.

A local cook even makes desserts with real sugar and a mix of quinoa and buckwheat flour and said it works great!  (You just want to eat even such desserts far less often!)

e) Real sugar is not as directly harmful if you eat it rarely and after you eat a low glycemic food.

But it is fattening.  So a way to cut calories is to have real sugar far less often!

The average American takes in 7 tablespoons a DAY of sugar or high fructose corn syrup.  After subtracting the 3 or 4 tablespoons from soft drinks and other sources of high fructose corn syrup that's still at least 3 tablespoons a day.  So stop all soft drinks and high fructose corn syrup to cut your sugar and sweetener at least in half.

Then gradually have other sources of real sugar far less often once a week instead of 3 or 4 times a DAY is dramatically better for you and far less fattening!  Once a week or less is MUCH better for you and far less fattening!

Losing those calories counts at least double for fat loss!

f)  Fat from animals fed grains is very high in omega 6 oils.  And, the cheap to make corn and soy and canola oil from GMO crops is very high in omega 6 oils.

People today eating this stuff have 10 to 15 times too much omega 6 oils because of this.  This is now thought to be major cause of both heart disease and cancer!  It also helps cause osteoarthritis and then makes it hurt worse!

So, do whatever you can to eliminate close to all the fat from beef or chicken you get from animals fed grains.  Get lean cuts, cut off any visible fat, in chicken that includes removing the skin, then when you cook, discard the fat that melts and runs off.

(Eating wild caught fish and animals fed ONLY their natural foods makes for a fat that is actually somewhat good for you to eat.  And the wild caught fish and maybe the beef and chicken raised this way have omega 3 oils which is an anti-inflammatory and an antidote to omega 6.

There is even some evidence that this excess omega 6 oils is directly fattening.  So every bit of it you remove from what you eat counts as removing calories!  And it also protects your health.

g)  Excess salt tends to add water weight and the foods that contain it almost always contain these other ingredients.  Eating excess salt also helps cause gout, heart disease, high blood pressure and even autoimmune diseases recent research has found.

You’ll be less fat and far healthier if you avoid these foods.

h)  MSG is thought by many to produce some serious health harms.  This may be a bit on the controversial side.  But it is proven to add to excess chronic inflammation and it has been shown to make people fatter even when they seem to consume the same calories.

So, NOT eating a food that contains MSG counts as removing calories.

The problem is that it’s often listed as autolyzed yeast, natural spices, or just spices on labels.  To be sure to avoid it, if any of those show on a label, I take pass on that food.

This includes many spice blends and condiments!

Surprisingly, for example, almost all mustards on the market list “spices” as an ingredient for example.  The far better news is that the yellow mustard from Annie’s Naturals

 has no such “spices” listed as an ingredient.

Five:

Ways to cut a few calories from recipes.

One is to replace some, perhaps half of the butter or oil in recipes with applesauce.

Half extra virgin olive oil and half applesauce with only a bit of butter from cows fed on grass such as Kerrygold Irish butter added just after cooking is a combination I like.

You get the taste of butter but with only half the calories and dramatically less saturated fat.

Another is to use flavored kinds of sugar and a bit less.

Use half a cup of brown sugar and a quarter cup of dark molasses instead of a full cup of regular sugar would be one example.

You can also add raisins or nuts to add flavor when you cut sugar in this way.

Yet another is to use the natural and relatively side effect free erythritol half and half with real sugar.  I think your body then will process this normally yet you just removed half the sugar and half the calories.

Since erythritol can produce some gas in large amounts though it does this far less than comparable natural low cal sweeteners just minimize how much you use this.

Or you can combine the methods.

Instead of two cups of sugar, use half a cup of brown sugar and a quarter cup of dark molasses instead of a full cup of regular sugar for one cup and half a cup of erythritol and half a cup of real maple syrup for the second cup. 

Then add a few bits of raw walnut if you like.