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I wish I had a dollar for every time somebody said to me, "You know what, Kristin? I couldn't
do what you do because I just love food too much. I'd be rich." When somebody says to
me, "Kristin, I love food too much. I just couldn't do that," you know, the implied message
is that I hate food, that I don't enjoy eating or taste. You know, if I didn't enjoy eating
I think I'd have much, much bigger problems that we need to talk about and that's a topic
for another FABulously Fit Friday. And oftentimes it comes when I'm in the grocery store and
I run into people that I know. My cart's full of all these colorful vegetables, and mounds
of eggs, and flats of chicken, and stacks of ground turkey. And then they often say,
"Gosh, don't you get sick of eating the same thing day in and day out? I like variety with
what I eat." And when I their cart it's full of processed foods, all these colorful packages
and boxes. I mean, it sure does look like they have a bunch of variety in their food,
and I got to tell you that has really intrigued me because I've never felt that way. I've
never felt like I have a lack of variety in the foods that I eat. As a matter of fact,
I feel like I have tons more variety than I ever did when I was eating junk food. So
chose to do a little bit of research about this whole perception that people that a clean
and people that get into into sexy, amazing, awesome shape don't have variety in their
food. So for this FABulously Fit Friday, we are going to dive right into this top we are
going to dive right into this topic and see what we find. Did you know that there are
17,000 new food products introduced to the food industry every year. 17,000. Holy crap,
that's a lot of food. When I looked at my diet and what I eat on a regular basis, it's
about 125 foods, plus or minus a few. Jeez. So you take that 17,000 minus that 125, that's
16,875 that I'm missing out on every year. Something is really odd here. I'm eating chicken,
turkey, broccoli, vegetables. Let's see, fruits. I'm eating all sorts of nuts. I don't think
there's any new animals running around the planet. The last time I checked, I don't think
they're making too many new varieties of fruits and vegetables unless God's been awfully busy
and I wasn't paying attention, so what does that really mean when we talk about 17,000
new food products on the market each year? Well, those numbers really perplexed me and
this whole idea, this whole notion of not having variety in my diet has perplexed me
as well, so I did a ton of research. Hours, and hours, and hours, which is going to break
down into about three minutes of video here, which just amazes me every time I do this.
What I found was that the typical American diet, now get this, the typical American diet
is 60% made up of four grains. 60%. It comes down to corn, soy, wheat, and rice. 60% of
the calories that most Americans eat are those four grains, and they're not even whole grains.
Most of the time they're ground down into flour. Now, even I, when I read that statistic,
I thought, "Gosh, that can't be right. 60% of the American diet's made up of four grains?
How is that even possible?" I mean, even when I was eating junk food, I knew I had more
variety than that. At least I thought I did. The fact is that is absolutely true. You take
any combination of those, you add salt, you add sugar, and you add some fats, and then
some chemically induced flavors that come out of a lab, and you've got a new food. Bam.
Slap a colorful label on it, stick it out in the market, and it sells. Why is that?
Because Americans love taste. We love our sugars, we love our salts, and we love our
fats, and we buy processed foods thinking that we're getting variety, thinking that
we're getting new foods and a whole bunch of new stuff everyday, we're really not. Don't
believe me? Let's break down a typical American diet for one day and check out what's in it.
For breakfast, we have a bagel and cream cheese, a staple for many of you. In the bagel, we
have flour, water, salt, yeast, and sugar. Note flour is the biggest ingredient. In cream
cheese we have milk, salt, stabilizers, which is actually made out of soy and cheese culture.
Some you will have a latte for breakfast. So what is that? Milk, and if add flavor to
it, you've just added a bunch of sugar. Now, I know a lot of you are trying to eat healthy,
so for a snack we might have a low-fat yogurt. Reduced fat milk, sugar, non-fat milk, and
corn starch. And then for lunch we head to Subway because Subway's good for us, right?
We get ourselves a six-inch roast beef sub. The bread is made up of wheat flour, water,
yeast, and sugar. The roast beef is primarily roast beef--actually a real ingredient. Water,
salt, dextrose (which is sugar), and corn syrup. There's that corn again. Now, for a
snack we try to be healthy so we have an apple and a bag of Sun Chips. Sun Chips are whole
corn. Last time I checked I don't think I was crunching on whole corn kernels when I
ate Sun Chips in the past. I think they're ground down just a little bit. Vegetable oil,
whole-wheat, rice flour, sugar, and salt. And now we get to dinner where we really try
to eat healthy, so we grab Healthy Choice frozen dinner. Today's is chicken with angel
hair pasta. Primary ingredients: a little bit of chicken (that's good), semolina (what
the heck is that?). Semolina is a really fancy name for saying flour. The seasoning contains
salt, sugar, and corn starch. Let's break down our day. Put all those ingredients together.
We have flour, milk, sugar, a little bit of chicken, a little bit of roast beef, a teeny
tiny bit of vegetables in our Subway sub sandwich, an apple, corn starch, and sodium. That breaks
down into about nine items. Now, is that all the ingredients in these items that I talked
about? No, of course not. There's a whole bunch of other cool things like chemicals
and added flavorings, but that pretty much is the list right there. Now, if we knock
it down to the things that are actually good for us... Now, if you've watched other FABulously
Fit Friday videos you know, number one, milk adds a whole lot of fat to our body and we're
the only species on the planet that continues to drink milk into adulthood, so we're going
to cross milk right off that list. That's not particularly good for us. And flour, we
all know that flour acts like sugar in the body. It turns into fat instantly if you're
not running a marathon when you're eating it, so we're going to cross flower off that
list too. That's not particularly good for us, and we all know that sugars and salts:
bad answers. Those aren't good for us either, so we're crossing those off the list. Those
aren't real foods. And, lastly, corn starch. I don't think you could call that a food either
because, again, that's made from corn. We're going to nix it right off the list. So we're
down to four food items that actually could be considered kind of good for you. We got
chicken, roast beef, a little teeny tiny bit of vegetables, and an apple. Not much variety
there if you ask me. Now, let's take a look at my diet on a typical day. I start off my
morning with a whole big bowl of old-fashioned oats. I add some Stevia for flavoring and
I have a bunch, six as a matter of fact, of scrabbled egg whites. My next two meals consist
of a ton of chicken and almonds. The meal after that is ground turkey breast and sweet
potatoes, followed by chicken and a whole bunch of vegetables, including red, orange,
and yellow bell peppers, cucumbers, celery, and tomatoes. Tons of vegetables. My post-workout
meal is grapes, a whey shake, and then I top off my night with another six egg whites.
We break down that day and we have 13 food items. 13. That, to me, is variety. Now, sometimes
I do like to mix things up and add flavors. I can add salsa, or tabasco sauce. So isn't
that interesting? It's actually not surprising to me now after doing all the research that
I did that 60% of the calories that Americans consume consist of those four grains. When
you look at that list of the typical American diet day, you see those grains popping out
all over the place. Those grains are ground down into very fine particles. They're processed
foods, so what happens is, when they're really fine particles, that gets absorbed into your
body very, very quickly, and if you don't use it right away, burn it like if you're
running a marathon, then your body's going to store that as fat. So it's no wonder to
me why we're getting fatter, and check out this chart that I found. This is fascinating
to me. It's a fact that we started getting fatter and fatter in direct proportion to
the number of new products that were released by the food industry each year. What this
chart shows is that our fat percentage keeps going up and so do the new products that are
released on the market. What are we doing? We think we're getting variety, we think we're
getting all sorts of great nutrition, and we're not. We're getting a bunch of processed
grains that are just going to make us fatter. More processed foods equals more weight gain.
Simple and true. The other thing that I found fascinating when I did my research for this
FABulously Fit Friday is this whole industry that has to do with food scientists. There
are food scientists that their entire job is literally to get you hooked on foods through
salts, sugars, fats, and chemically induced flavors. There are thousands of food scientists
all over the country that work for the big food companies. That's all they do. They figure
out how to get us hooked. They spend thousands and thousands of hours figuring out that perfect
formulation of salts, and sugars, and fats, and crunchiness, and melting in your mouth
and this. It's a complete science to get us hooked on foods that are bad for us. We all
know salts and sugars, in particular, are very highly addictive. So once we get them
into our bodies, we want more. You add a bunch of science to that, tack on some great marketing,
and we're hooked. Now, one thing that I want to make perfectly clear, because this is really
important to me, I don't fault the food companies for giving us what we desire. The simple fact
is, if we stop buying them, those food companies either would, one, have to change the products
that they're sending out into the marketplace or, two, they're going to go out of business.
The food companies are simply just responding to what we want. We want bold taste, and we
want convenience, and we want it cheap. Bam. Processed foods full of crap. And so, please,
don't take this as I fault food companies for giving us what we want and we'll pay for.
What I want you to do when you're looking at losing weight, I want you to really look
at those processed foods that you're putting into your body. If it's not picked, plucked,
or harvested then it's probably not good for you. Whole grains, vegetables, lean meats,
fruits, and nuts--now, that's variety. And if you like different tastes like I do because
I absolutely love food. I love to eat and I love to eat volumes of food, and there's
all sorts of ways to add great combinations of foods that are healthy and good for you,
as well as adding different tastes with spices. Out of my 125 foods that I eat on a regular
basis (My mom would be proud of this because she was a high school math teacher), I literally
have over 317,000 varieties and combinations of foods and tastes that I can put together.
317,000. Now, I call that variety. I hoped you liked this episode of FABulously Fit Friday,
and if you did go ahead and hit that "Like" button below because that tells other people
that this episode is really valuable. And if you want a deeper dive into how to get
into amazing, crazy, sexy, awesome shape, then go ahead and check out FAB University
on FigureAndBikini.org. And if you want to see other episodes of FABulously Fit Friday
then make sure you hit that "Subscribe" button somewhere around on YouTube because YouTube
changed things up again. I don't even know where it is anymore. Hit that "Subscribe"
button and you will be notified of each episode as it's released. I'm Kristin Shaffer, founder
of FAB University and FigureAndBikini.org, and thank you for watching this episode of
FABulously Fit Friday and I hope to see you again soon. Hey, gals. FAB University is open.
Head to FigureAndBikini.org to check it out.