Avoid Fast Food to Improve Your Body and Mind
It’s almost funny how pervasive fast food has become as a part of our accepted culture. Except for small towns in the middle of nowhere and long stretches of highway, you’d be hard-pressed to travel more than a few miles before coming across at least one fast food restaurant.
This pervasiveness isn’t a good thing because eating fast food has been proven to be bad for you in both the short and long-term. There are several reasons you should avoid fast food and make healthier choices for you and your family at dinner time.
Reasons You Should Avoid Fast Food
Understanding your dinner time choices is important. Though fast food is quick and easy, the nutritional benefits are slim to none.
Let’s take a look at some of the primary reasons why you should avoid fast food:
Fast Weight Gain
To say that fast food is bad for your waistline is a huge understatement. With tons of calories, fat, sugar, and sodium, unhealthy weight gain is inevitable and may even lead to serious medical conditions like diabetes and high bad cholesterol. If weight loss or maintaining a healthy weight is an important goal, then fast food restaurants should be avoided as much as possible.
Addictive Qualities
Fast food meals are practically designed to keep people coming back over and over. Due to the high content of fat, salt, and sugar, your body can quickly develop not just a desire for the food but a full-on addiction to it. Very often, you’ll be up against a cavalcade of foods and drinks with added sugar intended to give us a feeling of euphoria – and it works!
Lack of Nutrition
No one’s under the impression that any type of junk food has a high level of nutrition, but you may be unaware of exactly what you’re missing when you eat fast food on a regular basis. Fast food provides a lot of calories with very few vitamins or essential items such as fiber, minerals, and healthy fats. Even the menu items touted as healthy barely have any of these things.
Digestive Problems
Your digestive system is quite resilient, so just imagine how bad fast food is if it’s making you sick to your stomach. Many people often complain about acid reflux, heartburn, diarrhea, and other issues soon after eating at a fast food restaurant. It also doesn’t take long for a healthy person to develop chronic problems such as these due to repeated visits.
Fast Food Can be Bad for Your Heart
If there’s one internal organ that fast food is especially dangerous for, it’s your heart. Eating foods with a high level of saturated fats and sodium will quickly raise your blood pressure and bad cholesterol. This, in turn, increases your risk of heart disease and other severe coronary issues that may eventually become life-threatening.
Mental Health Problems
So much focus is put on the physical issues caused by fast food that many people don’t even consider the mental problems that can develop as well. Neglecting essential ingredients while filling up with carbs and other unhealthy elements can severely interrupt proper brain function. This can lead to depression, anxiety, and other harmful mental issues.
How You Can Avoid Fast Food
Once you’ve gained knowledge, it’s time to implement the proper techniques to avoid fast food.
Here are a few helpful steps you can take:
Plan Meals Ahead of Time
As the name implies, fast food is often the result of an impromptu decision. If you haven’t planned your meals ahead of time, then you may have a tendency to make a quick run to the closest burger or taco hotspot. Planning your meals in advance will reduce the chances of this happening.
Shop a Store’s Perimeter
If you’ve never heard of this concept before, definitely take the time to jot it down or commit it to memory. Although there are obvious exceptions, the perimeter of a typical grocery store is where you’ll find the healthier items such as proteins, fruits, vegetables, and dairy. Sticking with these items will keep you healthy and make it easier to avoid a quick fast food trip.
Don’t Avoid Healthy Fats
The old thinking was that if you wanted to lose weight and stay healthy, you needed to avoid all fats. In recent years, we’ve learned that this isn’t true. Just as there’s good and bad cholesterol, good and bad fats also exist. You want to avoid eating foods that are high in saturated fats and trans fats commonly found at fast food restaurants while searching out foods that contain monounsaturated fats.
Eat Fruit for a Sugar Fix
If you have a severe sweet tooth, just know that you’re not in this battle alone. This is one reason stopping by a fast-food restaurant can be so enticing. The sugar found in fruits isn’t the same as those found in milkshakes and fountain sodas – meaning they’re much better for you – so always try to keep a few fruits handy for a more nutritious snack.
Take a 30-Day Challenge
Challenges that you find online might be silly or trendy at times, but there are plenty can help you improve your health. Given the proliferation of fast-food restaurants and an increase in obesity, one helpful 30-day challenge consists of avoiding these places all together. If you’re a fast-food junkie or even a casual visitor, a full month could break you from an unhealthy eating cycle.
Sign Up for Local Meal Kit Delivery
Signing up for the delivery of meal kits is a great way to get the convenience of fast food without the terrible ingredients. These services provide the precise ingredients you need and can be prepared in a short time. The best of these meal kits are ones that use local ingredients because they’re always the freshest and healthiest available.
Contact Chef Ami to Avoid Fast Food and Eat Healthy
Chef Ami offers the only local healthy meal kits in Tampa Bay and can help you avoid fast food and break this dangerous eating cycle. If you have any questions about our service or would like to discuss which meal plan would be best for you, call our staff at (813) 773-4719 today.
