There are many tips for weight loss and looking at the nutrition label is one of them. Decoding the nutrition label provides your diet with an extensive amount of information that can be beneficial to your weight loss journey and there are three ways to do it.
Analyze the Listed Ingredients
On every single nutrition label, the FDA requires that it be listed in “descending order of predominance by weight.” That means that the ingredient of the highest amount within that item is listed first and the ingredient with the lowest amount is listed last. Therefore, a thumb of rule that I recommend is not purchasing any food or beverage item with sugar or high fructose corn syrup within the first three labeled ingredients. Sugar and high fructose corn syrup are the bodies number one enemy to weight loss. Sugar is a carbohydrate which eventually turns into fat inside the body and high fructose corn syrup does the same thing.
Match the Sodium and Calories
An excess of salt can leave you bloated and cause extra pounds to make its way onto the scale. A quick way to fix this problem is to match the sodium on the nutrition label to calories. You can decode the sodium in one of two ways. The first way is to not purchase any item that has more milligrams of sodium than it has calories. So, if an item has 70 calories in one serving but 120 milligrams of sodium, then leave it on the shelf where it was. The second way is to just match your entire day of calories to the daily intake of sodium. This requires you to keep track of the amount of sodium and calories that you intake throughout the day so at the end both should match up. So, if your calorie intake is 2,000 calories, then your sodium intake should be 2,000 milligrams.
Eat More Fats
On most nutrition labels you’ll see total fat, unsaturated fats, saturated fats, and trans fats. When most people see the word “fat”, it automatically translates as something negative. On the contrary, in the world of nutrition labels, unsaturated fats are something you should strive to get into your weight loss plan. The two unsaturated fats are monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. On some nutrition labels, they won’t list the unsaturated fats, but you can subtract saturated fats and trans fats from the total grams of fat to get that amount. They help your liver filter out things that cause an increase in body fat, which causes the scale to tip left in the right direction.
