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Don't be a Fruit All your life you've heard that fruits are good for you. Yes, for the most part they are. However, if you're trying to lose weight you want to minimize your fruit intake. Why? As we've talked about earlier, most fruits contain high amounts of simple sugars (fructose) that your body will easily convert to glucose and open the simple carbohydrate flood gates. Now, fruits also contain a ton of beneficial chemicals, nutrients, and minerals that you need for good health. So, I say have one "serving" of fruit a day. Whether it's a banana before your daily jog, blueberries on your cereal, or an apple with your lunch, that's fine. Just don't go overboard on the fruits. An orange, for example, has 70 calories. Not bad... but you don't want to sit down and eat four of them at once. A good friend of mine went on some wacky fad diet and told me he was cutting out the fats and the carbs, and just eating veggies, fruits, and lean meats. So for lunch the one day he had 8 oz of grilled chicken (good) over a salad of mostly lettuce (good) followed by a banana, an apple, and two oranges. I asked him if he knew how many calories he had just eaten. He didn't have a clue. He wasn't worried about it because he wasn't eating fats and carbs, so he should be losing weight. I told him his "lite" lunch contained about 600 calories (240 calories from the chicken, about 30 for the salad, 110 for the banana, 80 for the apple, and 140 for the oranges). That's a lot or calories for lunch when you're trying to lose weight. Bottom line: fruit is good for you, but watch the calories. Have one serving of fruit a day. I'll break down the servings in the next section. Good v. Bad Fruit I really can't find any bad fruit. Like I said in the last section, you can eat any kind of fruit you want, just limit yourself to one serving a day. A serving of fruit would be, for example, one banana, one apple, one orange, a half-cup of blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, or whatever other "berries" you like. Mix it up a bit... eat a wide variety of fruits, but just keep the calories in check. The exceptions to the fruit calories rule are lemons and limes. They have very few calories in them. While you might not like to eat lemon or lime, they make great drink enhancers. I love unsweetened iced tea with a squirt of lemon. Or, make your own lemon/lime drink out of some filtered water.
Rick's Fruit Tips Dried fruits. Dried fruits make excellent snacks. A prune, fig, dried apricot... all are excellent choices. You can even get dried raspberries, strawberries, or cherries to put in your yogurt or cereal, but beware the calories! Remember - dried fruits are excellent for you, but a quarter cup of dried raspberries, for example, has 140 calories! That's quite a powerful punch of calories in a very small container. Eat them early in the day if possible because if you eat them as a night-time snack, your body is likely to store that excess sugar energy (from the fruit fructose) as fat if you don't exercise afterwards.
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