If you’ve added fruits and vegetables to your diet, increased your exercise and increased your water intake, do you need to do anything else? There are other changes you can make that are minor, but will benefit you.
Whole Grains
Switching to whole grain carbohydrates instead of processed white carbs will not show a big difference in your calorie intake, but it will help you in other areas. For example, in one cup of spaghetti you will only save about twenty calories by switching to whole wheat, but there is more than three times the fiber in the whole wheat version.
What about that bagel you eat for breakfast? The average bagel contains about 200 calories, and that’s before you put anything on it. Change the bagel to a slice of whole grain bread and you will save over 100 calories, and add fiber as well.
A Quaker Simple Harvest granola bar sounds like it would be a healthy choice, but a simple change to a Fiber One Oats and Apple Streusel bar will give you fewer calories, fewer fat grams and almost five times the fiber.
Reading Labels
In order to make these changes effectively, you need to be able to read and understand nutritional labels and ingredients. Just because a product lists wheat flour in the ingredients does not mean it is a whole grain or whole wheat bread. It must list whole wheat or whole grain flour for you to get the nutritional benefit.
The average person doesn’t always know what the nutritional recommendations are for themselves. Regardless of age or gender, the recommendations for daily fiber are twenty-five to thirty-five grams. Most people fall short in this category. In the sodium category, the daily maximum is 2300 mg. This is an area where most people exceed the daily recommendation.
The rest of the categories vary by age, gender, activity level and health considerations, but if you know what to look for on the labels, you can still stay within your daily ranges. If you’re not sure what your range is or how much you’re consuming, use an on-line site like Sparkpeople.com or Calorieking.com to determine your goals.
When checking nutritional content, of course the first thing you normally look at is calories. Just as important would be how many servings per container. When you grab a bag of chips or pretzels, the calorie content doesn’t seem so bad, but if there are three servings per bag the calories may not look so good after all.
When it comes to fat, there are two things to look at and they are equally important. The number of fat grams usually stands out fairly easily on the label but also look at the number of calories from fat. This is listed just to the right of the calories. On average 30% of your calories should come from fat. This makes the number of calories from fat important.
All nutrition labels list the daily percentage of each nutritional component, but bear in mind that these percentages are based on a 2,000 calorie a day diet. If you are working on weight loss it is likely that you will be below these levels so the percentages will not be accurate for you. You will need to focus more on the numbers than the percentages.
One of the hard things when reading labels is when it comes to fat free or sugar free products. Fat free or reduced fat products tend to add more sugar to make up for the loss of the fat and vice versa with sugar free or reduced sugar products. In this case, you will have to evaluate the product as a whole. How does it compare in your other dietary needs?
Being aware of what you are eating will make a big difference in your weight loss efforts.
