Avoid Eating Refined White Flour Products

This is a great weight loss tip because it covers a lot of ground by identifying several well known food items that you can easily cut out of your diet or replace them with a more healthy alternative that will help you to reduce the amount of sugars and starch that gets fed into your bloodstream. Here's how this works:

Refined white flour is wheat with all the goodness stripped out of it and pounded into a powder that is used by the food industry to make a variety of products. What you have is a pile of empty calories that contains almost no goodness or nutrients apart from starch and high GI carbohydrates. When these are eaten and the digestive system goes to work on them, a rush of sugars hit the bloodstream creating a rush of energy.

Usually, you are not in an active state soon after eating, so the energy is not used. The body compensates by releasing insulin to try and regulate the elevated blood sugar level and the result, without going too deeply into the physiological processes is that redundant mass of sugars are sent to the body's storage system to be stored in fat cells.

How to Avoid this Situation:

There are several staple foods that you need to avoid, or at least switch to the whole wheat alternatives to slow down the process of sugars being released into the bloodstream so fast. These foods are:

That list can be subdivided into products made from white bread or mixtures with a white flour base. This includes such products as pizza, breadsticks, pretzels, bagels, buns (for burgers, hot dogs etc), pastries, flans, pies etc.

You can substitute some of these with wholemeal or whole wheat bread, brown (wholemeal) pasta, and home baked cakes, biscuits and cookies using wholemeal flour in place of white, or self raising flour. While the levels of high GI carbohydrates will be reduces, that doesn't mean you can go eating a ton of these products and lose weight. You won't! You still have to cut these down considerably, but the alternative of wholemeal flour based products does allow you to make a few cheats on your diet without causing the damage that the equivalent amount of white flour products would do.

Are There More Health Risks?

There are other health risks that go with eating a diet high in refined white flour products. One of these is increased risk of type II diabetes from the almost constant demand made on the body for compensating for the relentless bombardment of sugars in your bloodstream that have to be dealt with by the release of high levels of insulin.

Generally, these food products also come with a payload of bad LDL cholesterol forming ingredients. This can make the impact on your arteries and cardio vascular system in general more problematic.

But from a purely weight oriented point of view, by cutting out these products from your diet, you will do your progress untold amounts of good as their absence will not only free your body of the harmful properties they contain, but you will also gain more energy and feel more motivated as the sluggishness they cause by the retarding of your metabolism is lifted.