5 Foods You Should Never Eat When Losing Weight

If you want to lose weight, it's clear that you should avoid things like cake and ice cream, soda pop or candy. However, other less obvious food choices can be just as harmful to your weight loss efforts. If you want the best possible results on your bathroom scale, you should take these five foods off your "to-do" list.

Fruit Juice

If you're like most Americans, you consider fruit juice to be almost a health food. After all, it's made from fruit. However, fruit juices -- even unsweetened fruit juices that contain only the sugars that naturally occur in the fruit itself -- can have as many calories per serving as soda pop. Even that glass of OJ with breakfast might tip your calorie scales over your limit.

White Bread

White bread is made with refined grains. This means it breaks down into blood glucose much more rapidly than most other foods. This creates a glucose/insulin imbalance in yours system that leads to a "sugar crash" within an hour of eating. When that happens, you'll experience intense food cravings -- cravings that can lead you to cheat on your diet.

Baked Potato

Baked potatoes are made almost entirely of starch, a simple carbohydrate that breaks down almost as fast as white bread. Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health writes that eating a baked potato has the same effect on your blood glucose as spooning up a serving of table sugar straight from the bowl. And that's just for a plain baked potato. It doesn't even take into effect the butter, sour cream, bacon and other toppings that accompany a dinner potato.

Fast Food

A fast food hamburger can have more than 1,000 calories, according to an expose article at ABC News. That's half the daily calorie allowance for a regular diet in just one part of one meal. Add to that a side of french fries, which take all the problems of a baked potato and then soak them in oil to weigh in at 100 to 300 more calories per meal . Don't kid yourself that a diet soda on the side will make this a weight-loss friendly meal. Stay away.

Salty Foods

The sodium in salt stimulates your body to retain more water. That's why salt tablets are a standard part of desert survival gear. However, than water retention adds weight to your frame and can leave you looking and feeling bloated. Although water weight isn't the same as adding fat, this can slow your progress and leave you feeling frustrated. So frustrated, in fact, that you might be tempted to give up.