Why Eating Processed Foods is Bad For Your Weight and Health

Don't Do It!

I must admit, processed foods taste darned good sometimes. Let’s face it, sometimes that box of Cheezits is calling your name, and those grapes or rawveggies with dip just aren’t cutting it as a snack.  We naturally crave processed foods often because they are, by their very nature, very addictive. Their naturally higher levels of certain types of preservatives, salt and sugar make us crave them because they are chemically addictive to our systems.  So, in a way, eating processed foods once makes us somewhat of a junkie, unless we can sort of de-program ourselves and detox against this type of “addiction”.

Breaking your addiction, or even cutting way down on your processed food intake is always good for not only your health, but your waistline as well because they are not only bad for your blood pressure and triglyceride (cholesterol) levels and other readings which determine your likelihood toward certain types of disease and ailments, but they are also bad for your weight because they add pounds on like nothing else.

Think about some examples of raw, natural, less processed types of foods vs. foods that are processed, and how you feel after you eat them. Do you feel satisfied after eating processed foods, or are you often ravenous a few short hours later, or worse, just an hour later?  Are you full of energy and get up and go after eating processed foods, or more likely to tackle heavy focus and heavy lifting tasks after eating a healthy, whole meal with minimally processed foods?

When you compare the two in the ways that they fill you up and satisfy you, prepare you for a lot of mental focus and physical activity, and how they make your body feel physiologically after you eat them – as in, is your heart rate timely or is it beating fast (a symptom of a high sodium meal)?  Is your blood sugar stable, and can you focus, and do you feel full but not painfully so, suppressing your hunger for hours comfortably rather than leading to huge spikes in blood sugar?

These are all reasons to eat more minimally processed foods. This is not even including the massive amounts of chemicals, preservatives, and unidentifiable ingredients in the labels, but the salt and sugars are also a huge detractor to your health and weight maintenance goals.

The general rule of thumb is that you should stay away from foods that have a lot of unidentifiable ingredients in the label.  The more foreign sounding names you read on the ingredients label, the more you should steer clear of these types of foods, and your body will thank you for it.