The hidden calories lie dormant in many places in everyday life and make it difficult to lose weight. How to avoid the secret calorie traps and lose weight permanently.
Bremen – First of all, it should be said: You can and should enjoy the summer wonderfully with a few extra kilos on your hips. Because all bodies are beautiful. However, if you would like to lose some weight and live healthier at the same time, you should know them: the dangerous calorie traps in everyday life. They lie dormant in many products and have it all. Since they are usually ingested unconsciously, many consumers are faced with the mystery of why they simply do not lose weight.
We are talking about – you guessed it – ready-made products and industrially prefabricated foods. Sure, they save a lot of time in everyday life due to their convenient preparation. Open it, warm it up, and you're done. But, like almost everything good in life, this also has a dark side. Because the price that you pay into your calorie account with each finished product is correspondingly high. In addition, ready-to-eat meals increase the risk of disease, including colorectal cancer.
Modern ready-to-eat foods in the refrigerated section look healthy at first glance
Modern industrial foods, so-called "convenience" products, are particularly high-quality and healthy. They are often placed in the refrigerated counter and thus give the impression of freshness. That must be healthy, many people think - and fall for the marketing trick of the manufacturers, who ultimately only want to differentiate themselves from classic "canned food". Basically, they differ only in their presentation, less in their content. In both cases, they are largely real salt and calorie bombs.
Convenience foods contain a lot of sugar and fat – and lots of calories
As a rule, ready meals contain a lot of sugar and fat as flavor carriers, compared to the home-cooked meal even significantly more. In addition, there are numerous preservatives. This is necessary because the food loses its flavor due to the preparation process, boiling down and long storage. Sugar and fat compensate for this taste deficit, as nutritionists Constanze and Martin Storr explain to Focus. They do the math: A portion of homemade chili con carne has 193 kilocalories, while a comparable finished product contains 418 kilocalories per serving, more than twice as much.
The ingredients of ready-made products ensure that you eat faster and more
Overall, the combination of ingredients in the ready-to-eat foods also ensures that people tend to eat faster and thus more. And this from a product that is high in calories. In other words, a true "fattening cycle". This is the conclusion of a study led by Kevin D. Hall of the National Institute of Diabetes in the US state of Maryland: Ready-made products not only increase weight gain, but also increase appetite.
Highly processed foods are unhealthier than fresh foods and have more calories. © Oleksandr Latkun/IMAGO
Self-prepared food, on the other hand, reduces the production of the appetite-stimulating hormone PYY, as the researchers found. To do this, they measured the values of two test groups that consumed only ready-made food or home-prepared food for a certain period of time. The scientists' recommendation is therefore also that highly processed foods should be removed from the diet as far as possible for health reasons, as they significantly increase calorie intake compared to freshly prepared foods and cause weight gain.
Home-cooked food performs better than ready-made food on all levels
The bottom line is that if you invest the time and effort to cook something fresh, you are investing in yourself and your health in the best way at the same time. Sure, only very few people manage to do that every day. But if you leave the ready-made products on the shelf more often and instead help yourself at the fruit and vegetable counter, you not only save a lot of calories and ultimately lose weight, but also pay into your health account in many other ways.
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The significantly increased salt content in ready-to-eat foods also leads to high blood pressure, which increases the risk of strokes and heart attacks. In addition, the type of fats in ultra-processed foods increases the overall risk of cancer and dementia.
Leave out ready-made food as often as possible – anyone can learn to cook with fresh ingredients
The best way to lose weight permanently is and still remains the combination of the right diet and regular exercise. Maybe one or the other will enjoy cooking in the long run, because that can also be a form of relaxation. If you don't have the ideas, you can simply get a cookbook with simple recipes as a gift. Those who like to exercise outdoors, even in the cold, have an advantage in several respects: On the one hand, they can often achieve better weight loss success and may even strengthen their immune system.