Posts Tagged ‘Diet’
Why Soda Is So Bad For You
Everyone knows that soda (Pepsi, Coke etc.) is bad for you. Doesn’t really take a genius to figure that one out, I mean just looking at the label you can see that it contains sodium, carbohydrates and lots of sugar, while not containing anything good. You might as well pour sugar into water and drink that (which is what soda really is anyway. Unfortunately the reality is that soda is even worse than it looks, when it comes to weight loss.
As I had pointed out in the diet basics post, the food and the way it is prepared has progressed a lot, while human’s digestive system is mostly the same as it was thousands of years ago. And soda is one of the most obvious examples of how this affects people in their every day lives.
Did you know that human body does not recognize calories contained in liquids? That means that you could drink 2000 calories worth of soda and not feel any less hungry than you did before? Just think how much you would likely eat if doing so did not satisfy your appetite? Probably lots more than you currently do. So, why in the world does human body not recognize calories contained in liquids? As pointed above, because we still have the same digestive system that humans had thousands of years ago, yet the food preparation has changed a lot.
The reason our bodies do not recognize calories in liquids is because the only naturally produces liquid that contains calories is milk. Milk that is designed to be consumed by a baby (that needs all the calories it can get) and has an obvious natural limit since a mother only has so much milk in her breasts. As such our bodies simply didn’t need a mechanism to recognize calories in liquids, and unfortunately food preparation has progressed at a much faster rate than our bodies are able to adapt.
There is of course nothing that you can do about this, but it is something to be aware of. When you drink your coffee, energy drink or soda, no matter how many calories they contain your body will not recognize them and you will feel just as hungry as you did before. As such you should try to eliminate most of the calorie containing liquids from your diet. Drink your tea or coffee without sugar, cut back on energy drinks and obviously completely eliminate all soda (diet or normal doesn’t matter.) It’s not easy (I love soda) but it is a necessary step to achieve fast weight loss results.
PS: What do you know, I make this post and 2 days later I read this article on yahoo’s front page Soda is bad for you where it is explained in more scientific details why sodas are very, very bad for one’s health.
Diet Basics – What Should You Eat And Why
Diet – many people have a love/hate relationship with this word. But why do you even need to diet in the first place? Shouldn’t our body (which is pretty smart about other things) self regulate and stay healthy on its own? Yea, that would be nice, but there are two problems here because of which that will never happen.
First and rather obvious is the ability of our bodies to store extra calories as fat, which can be burned in the future for energy. Of course, this worked a lot better a few thousand years ago where food was scare and people might’ve gone a few days between eating. In today’s world with plenty of easily available food (for the most part) such built-in mechanism isn’t of as much use as it used to be.
The other problem, and it is the reason why one must diet is that human body simply hasn’t adapted to the way food and food processing changed. Think about it, the way food is being processed changed drastically in the last hundred years, yet our bodies are the same as they were back then. The food contains elements today that our bodies simply can’t deal with – from high fat foods to foods with lots of cholesterol etc etc.
For example a watermelon contains lots of sugar – but since it’s a natural food, made by nature, you would be hard pressed to eat enough of them to get any illnesses. On the other hand candy contains lots of sugar but is a processed food, the kind of food that didn’t exist even a few hundred years ago, as such our bodies aren’t able to deal with its contents. eating candy you can easily get diabetes. In fact I herd a story of a guy who ate 10 pounds of candies over a week (don’t ask me why in the world he did that) and got a diabetes. Something like that would be nearly impossible with a natural food.
As such the basics of a diet would dictate that one should try to stick to natural food (foods found in nature) and try to avoid anything processed. Of course a diet like that is too extreme for most people (I certainly know I am not going to be able to stick to a diet like that) but it’s still a great guideline for a diet.
As such you should try to include as much fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds as you can in it, of course lean meat and none bottom feeder fish is great too.
