Junk Food, Empty Calories and You
Let’s skip over the super obvious. You already know you should give up junk food because it’s bad for you – that much is common knowledge – but do you know the harmful ways that junk food causes damage to your body and mind both directly and indirectly?
First, what is junk food? I define junk food as heavily processed foods such as candy, chips, fast foods such as McDonalds or Arby’s or Pizza Hut and all their cousins. These foods are generally high in fat, processed sugar, salt, and may contain food colorings and other unnatural chemicals. Junk food has ’empty calories’, defined as calories without any or much nutritional benefits such as any proteins or healthy carbs or vitamins or minerals for your body.
If you want to solve a bad habit, you need 2 fundamental things:
- First take stock of just how destructive the habit is to your health and life goals. This way you have a strong reason to stop the bad habit for good.
- Second, have something good at the ready to replace the habit with.
That’s why I want to help you fix junk food cravings with green smoothies because it’s just a bad habit.
6 Things You May Not Know about Junk Food
- Junk foods wreck havoc on your teeth especially processed sugars or hard candy.
- The sugar rush from junk food severely limits your true productivity and throughput.
- Junk food makes you lethargic by zapping your natural energy.
- Junk food weakens your taste buds and your ability to enjoy whole foods in their natural state.
- Junk food makes you fat, unhappy, lazy, tired and even depressed if consumed in high volumes.
- Junk food steals the natural glow and beauty from your skin, hair and nails.
I could go on but this is enough to get us going on why to avoid junk good at all costs.
Now the good news is that you are not predisposed to junk food. It is just a bad habit that you can outgrow. You are in full control.
And the really good news is that you can still nurture your sweet and savory food cravings in a delicious way. In fact, in such a delicious way that you won’t believe this stuff is actually healthy and good for you.
Enter green smoothies.
If you are serious about getting rid of your junk food habit, invest in a blender – I love my Vitamix but you can start with any decent blender – and learn how to make yourself a mean green smoothie like nobody’s business!
Green smoothies will revolutionize your health and change your life as a result.
Case in point: Green smoothies have changed the way I eat, snack, fuel my body and manage my cravings. I used to have so much trouble finding something good to snack on that both satiated my crazy cravings and was good for me. Today, I stay fit and replenish my body from both running and Ashtanga yoga practice with nice portions of delicious smoothies without feeling an ounce of guilt.
But How Do Smoothies Help with Junk Food Cravings?
Picture this: It’s late at night, and it’s been a lousy day. You’ve been working hard all day and things didn’t go your way. You are tired and need to take a break from work but far from done with it for the night. You are not really hungry but you want to eat something. You crave your favorite junk food.
Your emotions have at this point taken over your weakened state and are telling you what to do. The source of junk food craving is emotions such as anxiety, stress, fatigue and boredom.
You start salivating at the thought of this junk food and drop everything else to satiate your craving. Your emotions also tell you that you need way more than a single serving, and you end up over-indulging on some really bad food and you weren’t even all that hungry to begin with.
You need to identify the emotions and take yourself off this auto-pilot mode of responding. This is when you need to put on the brakes and do an experiment with green smoothies.
Green smoothies help reduce and over time eliminate your junk food cravings because they return your body to a natural state of desire – instead of emotional need for food, you become more attuned to your body’s real needs and you start to crave the green smoothie instead of the old junk food.
Why? Because your body gets smarter the healthier you treat it. Neat, ha?
The 7-Day Experiment with Green Smoothies
You don’t have to believe that smoothies will help your junk food cravings at first. You just need to get curious and experiment it for a week and let the facts speak for themselves. If it works for you, which I know it will, great! And if not, you can go back to eating your junk food.
Here’s how this works: Next time you have a craving for anything that falls under junk food category, ignore the craving, then go and make a green smoothie. Do this for a week but do it with a good attitude. Bad attitude can often adversely affect these experiments.
So that means you may have more than one green smoothie per day if you have more than one junk food craving, that is okay. If after a week, you feel no better, and your cravings are not weaker, you can go back to your junk food and nothing lost in this experiment.
Are you willing to try fixing your junk food cravings with green smoothies yet?
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