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When it comes to taking care of yourself, one of the first things you should consider is cutting out junk food. After all, it earned that name honestly. Lacking nearly all nutritional value, junk food just loads you up with fat, sugar, and empty calories that can only hurt you. Here are the best alternatives to common junk foods that you should try today!
Instead of potato chips, try something savory and crunchy like carrots, celery or even veggie chips. That can be a great way to combat between-meal hunger without resorting to greasy, salty potato chips that have nearly no nutritional value. Adding a dip like hummus allows you to get a lot of flavor without adding fat, like with most chip dips.
Energy drinks are downright addictive. Their high sugar and caffeine content makes them very capable of hijacking your brain’s reward pathways, making it incredibly difficult to cut them out of your diet. However, energy drinks are also exceedingly bad for you, putting your heart, liver, kidneys and intestines through the wringer.
A great way to try to combat a hardcore case of energy drink addiction is to kick the cans while maintaining some source of caffeine in your diet. Otherwise, you’ll go into withdrawals and won’t stick with your plan. The best option for this is to drink black coffee or plain Americanos, since these contain no sugar or fat.
If you’re the kind of person who loves to snack on pastries and cakes, you certainly understand how bad for you these sugary, processed treats are. If you’re trying to cut them out of your diet, you could opt to keep sweet fruits like apples, bananas, and oranges on hand as snacks. These will let you get your sweet fix without overloading you with processed sugars and trans fats.
Many of the same things wrong with energy drinks can be found to some degree in sugary sodas. One of the most straightforward ways to combat an addiction to soda pop is to keep seltzer water in the fridge.
Also called soda water, this carbonated beverage is literally just water with bubbles, so you can’t feel too bad about drinking it. The sensation of carbonation often helps fool your brain into thinking you’ve had a soda, when, in reality, you just drank some water!
