Junk Food: Cravings Too Hard to Resist?
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For many people, junk food represents cravings that are too hard to resist. For your enlightenment and inspiration, we reproduce below – with permission from our friendly author herself, Caroline Shugart, RN, RD, MBA – her article entitled: ‘Junk Food Cravings Too Hard to Resist?” This article was also published in “The BeeWell,” Health, Section “C” of the Herald Journal, Logan, Utah, Tuesday, March 17, 2009.
Junk Food Cravings Too Hard to Resist? - continuation Huge portions and “eat more” messages are everywhere. It’s really hard to resist the super-sized offers. For only pennies more, these ads tell us, you can have twice the fries, or soda, or chips (of course, you also get twice the calories).
Many fast food large combo meals (hamburger, fries, and soda) have between 1,600 to 2,000 calories, yet most women need only about 1,600 to 2,000 calories in an entire day, and most men about 1,800 to 2,500 calories. When you get this many calories in a single meal, it doesn’t leave you much wiggle room to fit in breakfast or dinner. Let’s do the math. Say your active body needs 2,000 calories to maintain a healthy weight and you eat 1,600 calories in one lunch. You now have 200 calories left for breakfast, and 200 calories for dinner. That’s one buttered toast for breakfast, and … one piece of buttered toast for dinner! Yum! Won’t that be satisfying! No? Well, anything in excess of this is stored as body fat.
Oh … but you can just tell your teenager to go for a walk to burn off some of those calories, right? Wrong! For most people, a mile of walking, jogging, or running only burns about 100 calories. We would have to walk 16 miles to burn off those 1,600 combo meal calories, about four hours of very brisk walking. It’s just unrealistic to think we can exercise off our fast food calories, especially if you live a sedentary lifestyle. If you eat more calories than your body needs, you will gain body fat. That goes for children, teenagers, parents, and grandparents. One pound of body fat equals 3,500 calories. It’s just that simple. Burn up 3,500 extra calories or eat 3,500 calories less and you will melt away the body fat! As most of us will agree, that’s easier said than done. But there you have it … calories count! I know it’s frustrating, but we just have to teach our children to choose their calories wisely, a lesson that needs to last a lifetime. And what’s high in calories? Junk food. We can change the environment to protect the health of our children and give them a fighting chance at a long, productive, disease-free life. My Be Well tips include: Watch your portion sizes. Keep junk food out of your homes Mute TV commercials Eat plenty of fruits and veggies Drink local water Many Thanks! We thank dear Carolyn for the above tips on Junk Food cravings. If you want to get in touch with her and learn more about junk food cravings, send us a note and we will forward it to her. More on Junk Food!
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