Risks of eating processed food
- Risk of nutrient deficiencies. When you’re eating fresh food obviously obtaining natural vitamins and minerals from the food sources. When you’re eating processed foods a lot of those foods would not have nutrients in them. So they won’t have the vitamins and minerals that you need. Even if they do have the vitamins and minerals in them through fortification, a manual way where scientists put synthetic vitamins and minerals into that food process, those nutrients are not bio-usable. So they’re not readily available for the body.
- Increase the risk of having high cholesterol. Processed food contains what’s called trans fats. Trans fats are not usable by the body these are warped fat molecules and so the body can’t actually utilize those. Therefore they float around your body and either get embedded into your arteries and cause arterial sclerosis, which increases the risk of high blood pressure and heart disease, or they will embed in other areas of the body. Eventually, you’ll find them through the bloodstream until they eventually get to the liver and through to the kidneys where then they cause further damage to your detoxification organs.
- Elevates triglycerides. These are three little molecules of fat joined together, that enter through the bloodstream, caused by high levels of sugar and fat. If not used as energy expenditure, triglycerides are then converted to visceral fat, dangerous fat stored in your abdomen, around your organs. This increases your risk of cancer, heart disease, and other obesity-related illnesses.
- Risks of having a stroke. Trans fat that you get from the processed food gets embedded into the arteries. Thus, thickening the walls of the arteries and slowing down blood flow to your heart and brain. Your heart is going to have to work harder in order to push that blood through those arteries because of the narrowing of the canal. This elevates your blood pressure since it thickens the blood which can lead to blood clots and stroke.
- Decreases the longevity of your life. Because of the illnesses and diseases that you may experience if you are not conscious of what you are eating.
Impact of eating processed food while losing weight
- Increased doses of trans fat, sugar, and sodium impacts your ability to burn fat.
- Increased sugar and trans fat may result in overeating.
- Processed food doesn’t contain a lot of good fats and natural fibers to keep you full.
- It suppresses your leptin hormone and triggers your ghrelin hormone or hungry hormone, increasing your appetite.
How to change your lifestyle by eating more Fresh food and less processed food:
- Start with changing your breakfast. Forget about breakfast cereals; change it to a fresh cooked meal. People in the past would always have home-cooked meals until cereal companies appeared and brainwashed people into thinking that cereal is what they should eat for breakfast. The power of marketing.
- Focus on eating meals rather than snacks. Humans have a six-hour digestive process from consumption to excretion. Six hours in order for you to digest and absorb and so on and so forth and then excrete. That means we need to be having good four to six-hour breaks in between our food in order to give our body that time to go through that correct process before starting again. If you’re constantly eating, you’re interrupting that process thus interrupting hormone synthesis.
- If you can’t avoid eating processed food, make sure to put a cap or limit on it. The best advice we can give is to write down all processed food you eat in a week, and half it every week, eating less processed and eating more fresh food overall.
- Make your own food. You are in control of the ingredients you put in your food. You get to substitute processed ingredients for healthier ones.
- Meal prep. Plan and make your food so whenever you crave or get hungry you already have food prepared on the go. You don’t need to look for other options because you already made one for yourself.
- Cooking simple food. Create simple food like salad, or just steak and some veggies and some rice on the side. Use herbs and spices to create that zing in your mouth to make that meal delicious.
- Shop outside your supermarket. Spend more time buying things on the outside of your supermarket rather than the middle part then you’ll have less of the processed stuff.
- Coach Terri