Nutrition label tricks

If you’re serious about your diet then I’m sure you know that every calorie counts. Quality should be the main word here and a good place to start looking for quality is the nutrition label. What are the key points to watch for when buying something? First of all you should realize that manufacturers are interested in making a profit and not your health. That’s why world wide the food industry spends over 12 billion euros on chemicals that are added to food. A statistic shows that on average, a normal person consumes somewhere between 7 and 8 kg of chemical additives per year. To my surprise I know people that said: “Hey, if I eat it and I’m not feeling anything bad it must be OK!”. I don’t know where to begin explaining how dumb this kind of thinking is. Most of the processes inside us DON’T have immediate results. Just because you’re young and your body is struggling to filter the junk you eat doesn’t mean it can keep on doing that indefinitely. Sooner or later everything will collapse and you’ll be puzzled how this happened because you didn’t do anything different.

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Expectations

If you haven’t worked out in a consistent way then you probably have false expectations.  I’m sure many of you heard stories about a friend who gained 20-30 pounds of muscles in just a few months.

Can that even be possible? Not even close. The only way to come close to that is by using steroids which is wrong on so many levels for a normal person.

If it is that unrealistic then why do people believe it to be possible? It is because the majority of people measure their results on a weight scale. Unfortunately the weight scale doesn’t tell you the whole story. It cannot tell you how much muscle you have compared to fat.  In other words the person saying that he gained 20 pounds probably added 15 pounds of fat and only 5 pounds of muscle.

            Or maybe you know someone that lost 40 pounds in just 2 months to get in shape for the summer season. Wait a few more months and see if that certain someone didn’t put back on more than the initial 40 pounds. This is because when you’re engaging a diet with a high caloric deficit your body adapts to the situation in order to keep itself alive.
As a consequence your energy demand significantly drops. When you’ll get back to eating normal, the excess calories will be stored as fat. Another important aspect is that our bodies aren’t built to support drastic changes, so even if you can keep your weight, you’ll have health problems in the future.

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