These 5 Foods And Drinks Are Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Efforts

Feeling like you're trying everything to lose weight but nothing's working can be soul destroying. Make sure you're not making these mistakes and sabotaging your efforts to lose weight. 

Fruit Smoothies

You've seen it in all the films and TV shows. As soon as a character goes on a diet, they start drinking fruit smoothies. They're marketed to us as being healthy but in reality, drinking fruit smoothies could be causing you to gain weight.

There is a huge debate surrounding fruit and sugar and whether the sugar from fruit is as bad as the sugar from, say, a chocolate bar. While fruit sugar may be natural, it is still sugar, and will still have the same effects on your body such as raising your blood sugar and causing mood swings.

Fruit smoothies can contain a high amount of calories and may not even contain all the goodness of the fruit.

Fizzy Drinks

High fructose corn syrup in the form on soft drinks like Coca Cola is the number one source of calories in the United States. Even zero sugar and diet versions of our favourite soft drinks could be harming our health. Diet coke still contains artificial sweeteners and is also very bad for our teeth! Drinks like diet coke also dull your taste buds which means that in order to satisfy your sweet cravings in future, you'll need to eat foods which are absolutely loaded with sugar, which will sabotage your weight loss efforts.

Soup

Soup is another food that is often thought of as being very healthy and is considered the ultimate 'diet' food. The logic does come from truth as soup is very low in calories, with a tin of Heinz Tomato Soup coming in at under 300 calories. However, manufactured soup is often full of added sugar and does not contain any important nutrients like protein. Soup is also often eaten with large amounts of bread which can be very calorific and contains a lot of carbohydrates.

Read more about sugar in soup here.

Granola

As is the case with most of the foods on this list, the underlying reasons why they are not healthy is added sugar. Granola is often considered a healthy breakfast food, however manufactured and branded versions often contain a lot of added sugar. Most granola is classified as being 'high sugar' which means it has 12.5g of sugar per 100g, however some brands can have as much as 29g of sugar which is more than an average chocolate bar!

Flavoured Yogurt

According to research, yogurt actually doesn't have any association with being healthy. While it does contain calcium, Vitamin D and other nutrients, it can also contain very high amounts of sugar which is of course bad for our health. Additionally, if you are eating yogurt for the 'good bacteria', think again. The sugar and sweeteners that are loaded into most flavoured yogurts actually feed the bad bacteria in the gut, which completely reverses any healthy effects the yogurt might have had.