Kat & Tshepi

Hello there, welcome back to the K&T blog.

We hope you had a good week, we also hope that you are slowly but surely chipping closer to your weight loss and fitness goals, one step at a time. Four months is now gone since the beginning of the year, if you look back at where you were at the beginning of the year we are certain there are positive changes and you are lighter than you used to be. But if things did not pan out as expected, now is a good opportunity to revive your weight loss and fitness goals, it is a chance to have another DAY 1 at trying to become your best version, remember “Continuous effort—not strength or intelligence—is the key to unlocking our potential.” – Liane Cardes. On our side, it has been 2 weeks since we started our winter weight loss journey to lose some weight using our own weight loss guide, to practice what we preach. We are in early days and still trying to find a good rhythm to get going, we hope to reach that momentum soon.

This week we would like to talk about the ingredient list at the back of food packages, this is the side that you should be paying attention to when you are in the process of losing weight. The ingredient list is important because it gives us information about what went into the product we are consuming, it gives us information about what we are putting into our bodies. In most cases we choose products based on what we see in the front, we choose based on the glossy front part and ignore the important back part. Well, it is by design that we should be attracted to the glossy side, lot of effort goes into this purpose by food manufactures but we should try to be sensible and forego the gloss if we want to lose weight and be healthy. So what to look for at the back of the product? Look for the Nutritional Information Panel (NIP) and Ingredients List.

Nutritional Information Panel provides you with information about levels of energy in the product, as well as the amount of macro and micro nutrients such as protein, carbs and fats. Today we are not interested in the NIP though, our focus is on the ingredients list ,but some day we will talk more about it. With regards to Ingredients lists, it is a requirement for manufactures to include ingredients for any food or drink that contains more than two ingredients. Ingredients list are arranged in a descending order by quantity, from the largest to the smallest. This means that if you see an ingredient high on the list, there is more of it in that product than other ingredients. So if you want to know what makes-up a product then look at the first few ingredients on the list to get the answer.

Generally, ingredients list includes :

1.Raw ingredients – These are generally real food like wheat, oats, sugar ,fats and oils

2.Additives – These are ingredients added into food to perform a technical function, like extending product’s shelf life, e.g Emulsifier, stabilizers, anti-caking agents .

3. Food colourings- These are used to enhance the visual appearance of food items, they can be identified by “E numbers between 100 – 199”, e.g E100,E160a, E120.

4.Allergens – Products needs to state allergens in their products, e,g wheat, peanuts, soy. and a warning label must indicating that a product was made where some allergens are used.

If you are on a weight loss journey, it is beneficial to start paying attention to ingredients lists so you can be aware of what goes into your body and which food is working against you. Many products are worth avoiding because of their ingredients, one needs to read the food labels, check the ingredients and make informed decisions. If you would like to use the ingredient list as one of your artillery in supporting weight loss , we recommend you start reading the ingredients list and avoid the following foods:

1.Foods with too many ingredients – This is a sign of high processing , these are highly processed food and not good for you. Whole foods are best for weight loss as they contain a few (1 to 3) ingredients, the fewer the ingredients, the better.PS: All the diets we came across agrees that highly processed foods are a No No, we are proponents of this as well.

2.Foods with additives and colourants – What comes to mind when we talk about additives and colourants is chemicals, we doubt that adding non-food items to foods can be a good thing. But it is hard to eat food without additives and colourants all the time, so realistically one can try to reduce the foods that contain them and prioritise foods that are in their natural state.

3.Foods with sugar as one of the top ingredients – Remember the main ingredients are stated first on the ingredients list, if sugar is one of the first few ingredients then it is best to avoid such food if you are serious about weight loss. It is also worth noting that sugar has roughly 61 different names and these are normally spread across the ingredient list 😦 which means that we are probably consuming way more sugar than we think. PS: Some common names for sugar are  “Sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup, barley malt, dextrose, maltose and rice syrup“, and if the ingredient ends with “OSE” it is probably sugar.

4.Foods with various oils(Fats)- Similar to sugar, fats has many names which can be used in the ingredients list, they are normally filtered throughout the ingredients different oil names, but the reality is that they add-up as Fat. PS: common names for fats are vegetable oils, nuts oils, canola oil, palm oil, coconut oil, hydrogenated oil.

It takes a bit of time to get used to reading the back of products and to understand the real meaning of the provided information but it will make sense with familiarity and repetition. Here is a practical example of being faced with three breakfast options (Oats, Granola and Corn flakes) when you are trying to lose weight and to be healthy. Looking at the picture of the ingredients list for the 3 breakfast options and armed with the knowledge of reading ingredient lists, one can deduce that the first option makes better sense, Simplicity is better for weight loss.

That’s it for this week, we hope this week’s information will help you make better and informed decision when you have to choose products. Forget the gloss in the front and look for the meat and potatoes at the back :).

Until next week, we wish you a great week ahead and stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi