How to Say No to Unhealthy Food

You know you want to lose weight. You know you want to get healthy. You worry about illnesses like diabetes, heart disease or high blood pressure. The one thing that is stopping you from getting healthy is it is so hard to say no to unhealthy food. And it is hard because unhealthy food is all around us, but learning these tips can help you reach your health goals.

You already know you are overweight, you already know what your BMI number is, and you already know that being overweight leads to certain diseases. You don’t need to be told what you already know.

Today, some might think it is normal to be overweight, and medications will take care of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol.

Doing something you want to do is much easier than doing something because you need to. Need is like needing to do the laundry, want to is because you know it is what will make you feel good and happy in the long term.

It is not easy at first but gets easier with practice. It took years to become unhealthy, but thankfully, you can regain your health in much less time than it took to become unhealthy.

Unhealthy Food is Almost Everywhere

Unhealthy food is all around us. We see it and smell it every day. Unhealthy food is at work, at home, on television, and in the air. When the wind blows out of the west, you smell McDonald’s, from the east might be Burger King and the south might be that new place with fried everything.

Work might be the hardest place to say no to unhealthy food. There are birthday parties, retirement parties, and employee appreciation days. And then there are the donuts or the well-meaning coworker that brings in fast food breakfast burritos.

At first, you might feel funny or out of place saying no. But as time goes on and the better your health becomes, the less unhealthy foods will appeal to you. Unhealthy food is almost everywhere, but it doesn’t have to be a part of your life if you don’t want it to be.

The Unhealthy Foods

We are so confused today that many of us aren’t even sure what foods are healthy or unhealthy. This is partly because of questionable scientific studies that are bought and paid for by the food industry.

And the media doesn’t help, picking out parts of a study and taking it out of context to make a certain unhealthy food look good when in reality, that was not the result of the study. No wonder so many of us want to just say the heck with healthy eating.

The hardest foods to say no to are of course some of the unhealthiest foods including:

• Refined white flour products which include donuts, cakes, cookies, etc.
• Vegetable oils. The consumption of vegetable oils has increased right along with the increase in obesity. Oil is pure fat and has more than twice the calories per gram than either protein or carbohydrates do.
• Fried foods increased the risk of heart disease and weight gain.
• High fructose corn syrup and refined sugar leads to weight gain, fatty liver disease and can worsen type 2 diabetes.
• Saturated fat causes insulin resistance which can lead to type 2 diabetes [2]. Saturated fat also leads to hardening of the arteries and heart disease.
• Red meat and processed meats can lead to cancer and are high in saturated fat.
• Dairy products. Studies have found that casein in dairy foods can cause an increased risk of cancer [3, 4]. Cheese is actually addicting, which certainly makes it harder to say no.

Processed foods are equally unhealthy. The problem with many processed foods is that they contain synthetic chemical food additives that can damage our gut bacteria. While other food additives, known as obesogens, interferes with certain hormones that can cause us to eat even more junk food.

It might appear there is not much left to eat, which is one reason why it is so hard to get motivated to say no to unhealthy foods. But the truth is there are plenty of healthy foods to eat.

The Healthy Foods

One food group that has remained healthy since the start of time is plant foods, like vegetables, beans, legumes, tubers like potatoes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and fruit. You can’t get fat eating plant foods because they are just too low in calories, yet starches and carbohydrates are healthy and filling.

Plant foods contain so many healing phytochemicals, fiber, and nutrients, that you can’t help but get healthier when eating plant foods as the main source of your calories. I have never read a study that says vegetables are unhealthy in any way.

How to Say No to Unhealthy Foods

The best motivator in saying no to unhealthy foods is a health scare. Your doctor says you are pre-diabetic, or your arteries are clogged or some other scary health issue is a pretty big motivator. But we all hope to get healthier before it comes to this.

It could also be that you decide one day you are tired of taking prescription medications, the cost and side effects are taking their toll. Saying no to unhealthy foods is very powerful and it puts you in total control of your body and your health goals.

These tips can help you say no to unhealthy food:

• Excuses: Don’t make excuses like “only this one time”, or “only a little bit.” Because those just one times add up, and before you know it, you’re back to eating unhealthy foods all day.


• You Want To: Make healthy eating something you want to do, not something you feel you need to do that you dread.


• Goals: Keep your goals and your reasons for eating healthy in your mind. When you are offered a piece of pizza and you stumble for a moment, remember your reasons for saying no to unhealthy food. Your reasons might be weight loss, reversing heart disease, reversing type 2 diabetes, or just to eat a clean diet and get healthy.


• Don’t Worry: Worrying about offending someone if you turn down a cupcake is very common. Remember, you are doing this for yourself and your health goals. You can always give the cupcake to a coworker or friend.

Health Knowledge is Power

Knowledge is power. Just learning about the foods that can heal us, prevent disease, and in some cases even reverse disease can give us powerful motivation to say no to unhealthy foods.

Once you have the knowledge of just how food really does affect our health, you will be far more motivated not to buy or eat unhealthy foods. If you look at unhealthy food with a little knowledge of what it is doing to your body, it becomes easy to say no.

When you learn why a bacon cheeseburger damages your arteries and why fat causes type 2 diabetes, you will then be able to say no to unhealthy foods with knowledge and confidence. Knowing the why gives you the power to say no to unhealthy food.

Reading one or two of the following books will give you powerful knowledge to understand what certain foods are doing to your health. After reading any one of these books, you will have the confidence to say no to unhealthy foods and regain your health.

The Starch Solution by Dr. John McDougall
How Not To Die by Dr. Michael Greger
How to Reverse Diabetes by Dr. Neal Barnard
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn 

Conclusion

Learning the reasons you should say no to unhealthy foods will make it that much easier to say no and give you a sense of power over your own health. After a while, it will become second nature as you watch your health improve every day.

About the Author

Sam Montana is a certified Food Over Medicine instructor from the Wellness Forum Health Center and certified in optimal nutrition from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

© 2019 Sam Montana/Healthy Food and Life

Resources:

[1] Mayo Clinic – Statin side effects
[2] UC Davis Integrative Medicine - Diet and Diabetes: Why Saturated Fats Are the Real Enemy
[3] PubMed - Aune D, Navarro Rosenblatt DA, Chan DS, Vieira AR, Vieira R, Greenwood DC, Vatten LJ, Norat T. Dairy products, calcium, and prostate cancer risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies. Am J Clin Nutr. 2015 Jan;101(1):87-117. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.113.067157. Epub 2014 Nov 19. PMID: 25527754. 

[4] The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 85, Issue 6, June 2007, Page 1667, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/85.6.1667 Published: 01 June 2007