10 foods to avoid if you're trying to lose weight

10 July 2019

Eating a little bit of what you fancy from time to time can help prevent you binge eating and, therefore, gaining weight. Still, if weight loss is your goal, you should try to do what you can to cut the following foods from your diet.

White bread

There are plentiful varieties of bread you can beneficially eat, but - for a weight loss regime - white bread isn't one of them. White bread contains much added sugar; one study cited by Healthline linked daily consumption of white bread with a 40% higher risk of putting on weight.

Ice cream

Amazingly succulent though ice cream might be, it's also highly unhealthy. It is calorie-rich - and, in many instances, sugar-loaded. Furthermore, you can too easily eat a lot of it in a single sitting. Stick to eating just a small portion on occasion.

Pizza

Commercially made pizzas are a no-no due to their extremely high calorie content and such unhealthy ingredients as processed meat and highly refined flour. You could, however, make healthier pizzas at home, where you could omit nasty ingredients.

Foods with lots of added sugar

Certain foods to which manufacturers can add an inconveniently high degree of sugar include granola bars and sugary breakfast cereals. Tread carefully when you see foods marketed as "fat-free" or "low-fat", as the manufacturers may have added a lot of sugar to create flavour which fat would have provided.

High-fibre snack bars

Fibre is good for keeping you feeling full, but not when you have your entire daily intake in just one go. Therefore, it's not a good sign if that intake comes from only one snack bar which you gobble up quickly. Keep this intake "consistent throughout the day", as advised on Cosmopolitan's site.

Cereal in boxes of "family size" or "value size"

Those cereal packages may initially look like good value - but, according to one Cornell University study, people eat as much as 22% more from such packages. Knowing how much food there is in one box could lead you to subconsciously eat more of the food.

Soy sauce

It might be low-calorie, but it also has an extremely high sodium content, warns MSN. Therefore, eating a lot of this sauce could give you a rather bloated feeling.

Tropical fruits

Snacking on fruit is a good idea when you're trying to lose weight. However, you should probably omit mangoes, ripe pineapples and other tropical fruits due to their abundance of natural sugars.

Grapes

These are another form of fruit in which the amount of sugar is problematically hefty. However, rather than entirely avoid them, you could use them to complement salads - on the subject of which...

Salads

These aren't actually a bad meal choice on the whole; in fact, they are excellent. However, the dressings - such as high-fat mayonnaise - can be much worse for your waistline.

On weight loss boot camps that we run, you can learn other crucial don'ts if you are eager to eat your way to a slimmer body.