Food Packaging Causes Weight Gain and promotes Obesity

What your food is packaged in turns out to be just as important as what is in the food itsef. This might be the best reason yet to follow our BodyRock Meal Plan for weight loss. 

If you are someone that is mindful about how many calories that you are consuming, and the nutritional value of your food intake, you are probably accustomed to reading food labels. What you likely didn’t consider while reading the nutritional information printed on the packaging is that the packaging itself might lead to weight gain and other serious health conditions. 

If food packaging has been definitively linked to weight gain, what other impacts might it be having on our health?

Scientists and researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have determined that 2 chemicals present in plastic based packaging, specifically, bisphenols and phthalates, disrupt metabolic function in a way that causes obesity. 

Having discovered that these 2 plastic chemical were link directly to obesity and weight gain, the researchers extended the focus of their investigations and looked at an additional 34 other common grocery store products containing plastics, items like dish cleaning sponges, yogurt and other food containers, and multiple beverage bottles. These commonly purchased items had a total of 629 chemical compounds present, of which another 11 disrupted the metabolism. 

These plastic chemicals don’t always stay in the packaging, but can and do leach out into the food or drink that they are meant to hold. Once the chemicals transfer into the food or drink, they are consumed and enter into our bodies to wreak havoc on our metabolism. It’s unclear what other harm these plastic chemicals might be causing, but it seems highly improbable that the damage they inflict is limited to weight gain. 

Avoiding food packaging plastics is not as easy as avoiding single use, disposable water bottles. Additional studies have shown that harmful, obesity causing plastics chemicals have been discovered in the food packaging and wrappers present in popular fast food chains, with the highest concentrations in hamburgers and meat based menu items. 

Here at BodyRock, we tend to break food down into 2 main categories: ‘whole foods’ and ‘food products’. 

Whole foods (not to be mistaken with the grocery chain ‘Whole Foods’), typically don’t come in boxes, cans, or wrappers. Their ‘packaging’ is natural - the skin on a piece of fruit, the peel of the banana, the rough outer leaves of a head of lettuce for example. These foods are also all single ingredient items - there has been no processing - no added sugars, no preservatives, no stripping out fiber or other important nutrients. These foods are grown or raised. 

Food products are designed in a food lab and are manufactured in a factory. They come in packaging (often plastics). They contain multiple ingredients, and often contain added sugars, fillers and preservatives. These food products are engineered to taste great (often with added sugars) and typically contain very little in the way of nutritional value. 

We get that life is busy, which is why we don’t take the approach of banning ‘food products’, but we strongly recommend that you source your foods from whole foods as often as possible, not just because following a balanced diet based on whole foods will make fat loss significantly more efficient (and faster), but also because let's face it - having plastics in your body not only promotes obesity, but may have the potential to cause other harmful health conditions.

Our Meal Plan Bundle ($24.99) is optimized to support fat loss, and is based on a whole foods approach. Our Meal Plan Bundle includes a Nutrition Guide, a Cookbook and recipe guide, and the Meal Plan Book, which includes grocery lists, easy to prep meals, snacks and deserts. We take an easy to follow, common sense approach to having a balanced relationship with food. We also love eating great tasting meals, snacks and deserts, which is an important part of what makes our plan so sustainable.  It’s an accessible, proven lifestyle plan, not a short term diet, and the amount the other benefits - including supporting weight loss and powering your fitness goals, will help you steer clear of harmful plastics, preservatives and a lot of other chemicals that you might not even realize you are eating and feeding to your families. 

I hope that the information in this article will help you make better choices for you and your family. 

Best,

Freddy.

P.S. While I have you here, I wanted to take just a minute to touch base on how your movement and exercise is going. 

Did you know that just 10 minutes of exercise per day is enough to improve your health, cheer you up and help you achieve your fat loss and fitness goals? Pairing up our Meal Plan with our streaming workout programs is the fastest way to see these results even faster. 

Researchers at the Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana studied 464 women who were non-exercisers. After 6 months, a group of these women that exercised for just 10 minutes per day on a consistent workout program, had improved their heart strength and general fitness conditioning. The body responds very positively and very quickly to 10 minutes of exercise per day. 

If you are reading this, and it's been years or even decades since you’ve purposefully exercised and followed a workout program, we have a great article here on how to get started.

We have also created a workout program designed specifically for beginners that includes daily workouts that are between 10-15 minutes long. Our 30 day Beginner Bootcamp workout series features fat burning, body toning workouts designed to get you moving again. The workouts will challenge you, but they are achievable - meaning that you will be able to successfully smash them out - even if it has been years or decades since you last followed an exercise program. Our Beginner Bootcamp will get you into the habit of training again, building your confidence every step of the way.

Over 250K women (and men) have taken Season 1 and 2 of our Beginner Bootcamp, and have used the program as an entrance ramp to their fitness journey. Right now we are offering a full year of unlimited access to our fitness streaming service BodyRockPlus.com (think NetFlix, but for workouts) where you can find The Beginner Bootcamp, Intro to HIIT, Intro to Strength, and many other beginner level exercise programs for just $69 for a full year with code: NY22. That’s a full year of having us help to support your fitness and weight loss goals. If you like our vibe and how we approach fitness and nutrition, we’d love to have you train with us and join our fitfam. 

Freddy.