What do you consider too much processed food?

Daisy_May

I love to cook and bake and given the choice I'd rather make something myself then buy it prepared but I work from 7am to 7pm most days so this isn’t always possible.
I would still say that most of my diet isn't processed but I’m beginning to wonder since some people on here "eat clean" maybe I'm not doing as well as I thought?
Most mornings I have Mini Wheat’s for breakfast or a hard boiled egg, for lunch I almost always have low sodium soup. For dinner I make baked chicken with a side dish and veggies at times the side dish may be Fast and Fancy Rice or Lipton’s side kick scalloped potatoes(maybe twice a week something like that that comes from a package). Other nights it's whole wheat pasta with ground turkey and tomato sauce but my sauce is form a can.
The only night of the week I tend to go over my sodium is when I do Turkey Tacos and even then it's only slightly over, every other day I'm WAY under my sodium. It seems to me the sodium is the reason people are so very against prepared food so if I’m staying under is the occasional Fast and fancy rice really going to hinder my weight loss?
I also have one snack a day that's processed like a 100 cal pack of somethign or a nutri grain bar.
I gues my question is how good to you have to be to be good? If you are staying in your calories and making an effort to eat fairly well and still losing weight, should you worry about the rest?

remembertheharddrive

Once I started to keep an eye on my sodium intake, I realized that it pretty much all came from processed foods. The only things I really eat now is a cereal on some mornings and faux meat products. Even then, it came push me over my 1600mg limit. Once I started to track it that way, I realized that the only way for me to keep my sodium in a reasonable range was by having next to nothing ready to eat. My shopping cart is all fresh produce, frozen produce and plain dairy. Unless I'm going for herbs/spices or toilet paper, I pretty much never set foot in the "aisles" of the grocery store.

To get around it, I take Sunday afternoons to prep and portion all of my snacks and lunches for the week, so that I'm forced to grab something prepared or snack-like.

When you start eating whole, unprocessed foods, you retain far more nutritional value as well. The preservation, heating and additives, basically zap a lot of the nutrition -- or the foods are simply made with cheap fillers in the first place, with flavor-enhancers making up for the taste.

Whether or not you go to the extent of making everything from scratch is really up to you. Most people are losing weight without eating clean - its sort of a new wave of eating and way of thinking about what we're putting in our bodies.

But when it comes to eating clean, anything off-the-shelf like the mini wheats, liptons and canned sauce, isn't really sticking with the program. The difference will most likely be more noticeable once you get closer to your goal weight. It could be the difference between you and those last 5-10 lbs. But I think the real question ends up being, is a 100% clean eating lifestyle something you can stick with? If it isn't, then you're better off just eating as clean as possible so that you stick with it. Small steps and changes.