Healthy Food Groups

Fruits

Sometimes fruit gets some heat from low carb fanatics because it contains fructose, which is a simple sugar.  What people don’t realize is that fruit doesn’t store as fat easily because fructose gets stored in the liver first.  The liver can actually store quite a bit of fructose and it would take several pieces of quite large fruit to spill over into fat storage.  Most fruit are not high on the GI index even though they contain simple sugars.  If you are wondering what the GI index is go to www.gi.com.  All this information means to eat your fruit.  They are jam pack with nutrients and are not that calorie dense.  They are a great way to snack.

Vegetables

The green and leafy vegetables have more fiber and fewer calories than the starchy ones such as potatoes.  All vegetables are great for you and packed with nutrients so eat your vegetables.

Meat

The trick here is to eat lean sources of meat.  Most beef is very fatty and packed with calories.  One of the biggest culprits of being fatty is those frozen pre-made burgers.  The type of fat that is in fatty sources of meat is saturated fat.  This type of fat is easily stored as fat and one fatty burger will easily throw off your calorie ratios for the entire day.

Grains

With grains you need to avoid white grains.  They are processed the most.  Also watch out for the whole wheat breads that have enriched or high fructose in their ingredients list because they are more processed than you are led to believe.  Breads are also an incomplete source of protein.  This means that breads have part of the essential amino acids but not all.  If you stack a grain with nuts or beans then you will have a complete protein.

Nuts and Beans

These are a good source of fats.  They contain mostly poly-unsaturated or mono-unsaturated fats.  Like mentioned above if stacked with a grain a complete protein will be made.  This is why peanut butter sandwiches are made so often.

Diary

This group has more cons than pros.  The diary industry leads you to believe that 24 oz. of dairy will help you lose weight.  They tell you this because the calcium in the milk will help you burn fat.  While true in some cases it isn’t that true in most cases.  The reason being is that most people are allergic to milk and most of them don’t know.  Your body can have a reaction to milk and release antibodies into your blood stream without you knowing it.  When you are having an allergic reaction to anything losing weight becomes extremely difficult and drastic caloric deficits are needed to lose weight.  If you can handle diary without any problems then I say go for it.  If you are having trouble losing weight and everything else in your diet seems to look good, the first place you should look is at your diary intake.  You absorb more calcium from green vegetables, so just be sure to eat your vegetables.