Are Burgers Bad For Weight Loss?
Are burgers bad for weight loss?
On one hand, burgers are delicious and a good source of protein, iron, and vitamin B12.
But on the other hand, there’s the shitload of fat, cholesterol, sodium, sugar, and calories when you count the beef, bun, cheese, bacon, barbecue sauce, ketchup, mayo, and other toppings and condiments food scientists have played God with.
Considering that all of the things going against burgers contribute to weight gain, what you should do is pretty obvious when it comes to trying to lose weight.
And that pretty obvious something you should do is…
…to keep eating burgers!
Yup, if a nice, thick juicy burger is something that you enjoy putting your mouth to work on, then there’s nothing wrong with continuing to do so while on a diet, just so long as it’s occasionally and/or adjustments are made to make your burger a little less of a nutritional nightmare.1EXAMPLE: If ordering a burger at a restaurant, ditch the white bread buns and eat the burger by itself or ask to have it wrapped in lettuce. If making your own, whole-grain buns and sandwich thins are another option, as is sandwiching the burger between tomatoes, eggplant, portobello mushrooms, sweet potatoes, cauliflower, or zucchini. Other healthful choices include using 90-95 percent lean ground beef or swapping it out for ground chicken, turkey, or bison, as well as opting for mustard or calorie-free flavorings like hot sauce, chili powder, garlic powder, etc.
By incorporating your favorite food into your diet, you won’t feel like you’re depriving yourself, which is a common reason why people adhere to their plan for a while before eventually going on a binge, if not giving up altogether.
When it comes to losing weight, people think they have to limit themselves to salads and quinoa. That’s because people are still trapped under the mistaken belief that weight loss is about food quality.
If the use of “mistaken belief” didn’t give it away, weight loss isn’t so much about how healthy you eat but about how much you eat.
It’s about quantity, not quality.
As an illustration, eat more than you should of anything and you’ll gain weight no matter how “good” or healthy that anything is. Conversely, eat less than you should and you’ll lose weight, no matter how “bad” or unhealthy what you eat is.
Because food quality doesn’t have as much importance as quantity, the most important thing for weight loss is doing things that help with the continuous achievement of taking in less calories than are needed, which can be easily accomplished by including seemingly questionable foods in a diet because you’ll be that much more likely to stick to it long enough to produce results instead of forcing yourself to eat foods that you don’t like, which can increase the odds of you overeating the foods that you aren’t eating and find all the more tempting.
So that’s why you should eat burgers on a diet, or anything else that you desire!
Glossary: calories, diet, dietary fat
