How reading food labels can help keep you healthy.

I often get asked “what should I not eat”? the answer is that there is no foods off limits but there are definitely better food choices that you can make, especially to keep the excess pounds from going on and for overall health in general.

Karen's Weigh to Go promotes healthy eating through using as much whole foods as possible and limiting processed foods. I encourage anyone to get in to the kitchen and cook. It does not have to be complicated dishes using loads of different ingredients just basic ingredients to start if you are not confident in the kitchen and progress from there.

If you are not using whole foods you need to be familiar with reading food labels to help you chose the healthier options. Have you ever bought, for example, gluten free pasta or GF bread even though you aren’t gluten intolerant because you think is the healthier option? How about cereal bars have you bought these thinking it’s a healthier option? The reason for this is probably because stated at the front in bold writing is the words “healthy”, “low fat” or “low sugar” etc.

Don’t be fooled by this especially cereal bars as these labels are marketing strategies by manufacturers to get you to buy their overpriced high sugar, most of the time, products. You do not need to buy gluten free products if you do not have intolerance to gluten. These products are completely overpriced and don’t even taste that good and some are very high in sugar.

A very easy quick way to check foods is by looking at the traffic light system printed on almost all packaged supermarket foods. It will indicate calories, fat , saturated fat , salt and sugar. Red means high, amber means medium and green means low content per portion stated on the pack.

My best advice is to use and eat as much whole foods as possible but if choosing to use packaged food items read the label and to opt for foods that have mostly green and amber indicators on the colour code, and to cut down on the foods with red indicators on the colour code.