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Make Better Choices At The Drive Thru Window
by Tabitha Stuart
In a perfect world it would be best to avoid fast-food all together, but that's not alway realistic. We all have busy lives and sometime we end up at the drive thru window. Here are a few tips for eating fast-food with out doing a lot of damage to your body or your fat loss efforts.
Avoid the sodas. They will end up as extra belly fat because they are heavily processed high fructose corn syrup. That means NO DIET soda either! It is horrible for your body. The best choices are water or unsweetened iced tea. You get the benefit of the antioxidants in the unsweetened iced tea (but stay away from any sweeteners).
Avoid anything deep fried including french fries, hash browns, and anything breaded like chicken nuggets, chicken patties, or breaded fish sandwiches. These are all full of deadly trans fats from the industrial oils they use to fry everything in.
Note: Although most fast food restaurants have committed to not using hydrogenated oils loaded with trans fats any more, they still use highly refined processed oils. They are still inflammatory and affect both your health and waistline.
Some Studies indicate that as little as 1 gram of artificial trans fat each day can have serious effects on your body such as inflammation, clogging and hardening of the arteries, heart disease, various forms of cancer...not to mention packing on the ab flab. That's just 1 gram!
A typical fast-food meal of a breaded chicken sandwich, along with an order of fries can contain as much as 10 grams of trans fat! Add on a cookie or small piece of pie for dessert, and now you are up to about 13 grams of trans fat with that one meal! If 1 gram a day is slowly killing you, what is 13 grams doing? And that was just ONE
meal!
Anyway, back to the topic of how to avoid this stuff and eat a reasonably healthy meal on the rare occasion that you're forced to eat fast-food. As for drinks, avoid the sodas...they're nothing but heavily processed high fructose corn syrup which will surely end up as extra belly fat. And yes, that mean NO DIET SODA either! This stuff is pure evil to your body. Here's an article I did about why diet soda makes you fat.
At breakfast, the best choice is an egg, ham, and cheese on an english muffin (not a croissant, it's full of trans fats!), or a fruit & nut salad.
At lunch or dinner, the best choices are a grilled chicken sandwich, chili, a grilled chicken salad without croutons (croutons = more trans), or just a plain cheeseburger. These fast-food items aren't truly healthy, but they're the best options you have at most fast food places.
The main point from this fast-food article is that the worst stuff at fast food joints are the sodas and fries, and any other deep fried items. If you stay completely away from those things, you're at least making better choices than most people.
If you that have seen the movie "Super-Size Me", (If not you should) you saw that eating fast food every day for 30 days destroyed that guy's health, but did you notice the guy that was the king of eating big macs? Basically he has eaten these fast food burgers almost every day of his life for the last 30 years.
Notice he said that he almost never eats the fries or soda, even though he eats the burgers every day? And he's not necessarily overweight. Now I'm not saying that fast-food burgers are the healthiest thing, they're not, but the point is that it's the french fries and sodas that are the real health night mare.
The next time you're at a fast food place, remember these tips and choose smart! But, If at all possible, try to find a corner deli with fresh salads or sandwiches instead of fast food.
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much body fat as you want through training and nutrition, check out
The Truth about Six Pack Abs
