Friday, July 07, 2006

Kicking the habit – putting an end to fast food and snacks in your diet

It’s always easy to gain weight and damned hard to lose it. Eating is one of the true pleasures in life and refraining from food has huge physical and psychological implications that cannot be easily discarded. Nobody likes to have to give up a pleasure, which is why many people drift farther and farther into fat without doing anything to stop the process. Moreover, recent data showed that the body does not respond to diets as doctors thought it should. The body has to adapt to changes and diets are seen as lean periods that should be offset by making fat harder to burn. While the body is certainly the most complex instrument we posses in our lives, it cannot discern between actual lean times and diets.

Another problem for the body is the widespread use of fast food, snacks and soft drinks. Fast food is highly powered food that fools the stomach into calling for more, despite the fact that one giant burger is the caloric equivalent of an entire meal. The giant burger is not usually enough to fill the stomach of an adult person, so most people eat more than one and wash it down with soft drinks that are little more than sugared water. This is an unfortunate way of eating, since the body gets far more than it needs from burgers and soft drinks. The largely sedentary lifestyles led by most urban residents mean that the excess calories will certainly be stored as fat.

Snacks are another threat to a healthy life by bringing in too much calories and by being too readily available when hunger strikes. The correct option for between meals snacks is to buy fruit. Sure, it may not taste as good, especially if one is used to chips or other types of snacks, but one or two bananas or some apples are far better for one’s health. A very important point is to remember that habits can be kicked just as easily as they take root. By ignoring the temptation of chips you will gradually lose interest in them and get used to fruit. Once chips are no longer a staple of your diet, you will find yourself wondering what was so good about them anyway.

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