8 Reasons Why it is Your Fault That You are Fat

(CC BY-SA 2.0) by Aranami/Flickr

1) You do not eat healthy, nutrient rich, foods

You may have to work harder to get access to these types of foods, but it’s your life and health that are on the line. Eat foods that will help you not be fat such as brown rice, buckwheat, barley, quinoa, sweet potato, mushrooms, cruciferous vegetables, potatoes, mushrooms, green vegetables, red cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, onions, lean meats and fish, especially those high in omega-3s like sardines, salmon, tuna and mackerel.

If you eat a lot of processed, high-calorie, low-nutrient foods that are not on this list, you will continue to be fat no matter how many foods on this list you do eat.

2) You consume too much sugar

If you are typical, you average more than 126 grams of sugar a day. That’s 10 tablespoons. You also drink more than 170 liters of soda a year. That’s more than 42 gallons.

If you don’t drink soda and drink orange juice, for example, or any other sugar-sweetened liquid, you are still consuming that much sugar regardless. The reason is sugar is in most of our foods. Reading food labels will show you that sugar is in abundance in our foods, unless you are buying whole foods that are not sugar cane.

In addition, many of our prepared restaurant foods are way over-sweetened and you are addicted to that. You used to drink coffee, perhaps with a little cream and sugar. Now you have a coffee shake at soda fountain establishments in coffee shop clothing.

It takes effort to avoid sugar but it can be done. First, never add sugar to anything, never. Not even to make the medicine go down. Read food labels. Drink water or unsweetened tea. Green tea if possible.

3) You never were educated in nutrition and you are not interested in that

It would have been nice if you had learned all this nutritional Information in school, but you didn’t. You did learn a lot of useless information to keep you busy and off the streets. How’s that working for your waistline? We need to eat a wide variety of foods every day in order to have the macro and micro-nutrients to be performing our best. You will have to make an effort to learn what you should and shouldn’t be eating. The information is there, but it’s like a scavenger hunt now.

Blogs, such as one you are reading, CalorieLab, have all the information. Book stores have sections devoted to the subject. YouTube has many channels on it and there are apps that can help you. There are some TV shows, but not too many as the vast majority revel in the most unhealthy foods out there like a pig in slop. The answer is you have to want to educate yourself.

4) Your meal portion sizes are way too large

Plates, bowls, glasses and cups are all much larger than necessary, they are filled to overflowing and you have habituated yourself to cleaning and emptying them. This is not just in restaurants, but in convenience stores, food dispensers and yes, you do it at home now, too. You must relearn to focus on quality over quantity.

5) You eat the wrong types of starches and add all kinds of fattening ingredients or cook them in unhealthy ways

Rice and pasta, for example, are easily cooked with no added ingredients in water. Not so with bread. Bread is made with wheat plus many added ingredients like fat, sugar and salt as well as preservatives that you do not need. Then you cover it with butter, jam, jelly. etc.

Your potatoes, which are fine by themselves, are deep fried in who knows what? Then covered with additional fat, sugar and salt, and a variety of condiments. Then you buy processed meals filled with the standard salt, sugar and fat plus a long list of chemical additives with names most PhDs can’t pronounce.

6) You don’t walk anywhere if you can help it

You rarely take pubic transportation that you would have to walk to, but take the car and park as close to your destination as possible unless you can get what you want at a drive-thru. Now you may walk a little in the mall, but of course, that includes walking to and using the food court.

7) You have handed over your health to eating establishments that do not care at all about your health

This includes many types of restaurants besides the obvious fast food ones. When you were growing up, your meals were probably prepared by someone who really cared about you and even if they were not perfect in their food preparation, they surely were trying to be. Now you must be your own mother, though I hear a lot of fathers are cooking healthy meals at home now also.

8) You do not want to exercise

You feel exercise is punishment. You didn’t always feel that way. You were born wanting to suck and move. Now you suck at moving. Humans evolved to move, as without that nature, we would not exist. Somewhere in your DNA is the desire to move and be active. You had that as a infant. It’s still there. You may have to do it little by little, however, to regain that buried intrinsic ability.

Go find it!

And don’t stop at the food court while you are looking.