I decided to cut out certain foods in 2024 — namely, any that were ultra-processed or high in added sugar. Research has shown that eating ultra-processed food (UPF) can increase your risk of dying, with four foods in particular shown to have the highest risk . But UPF makes up a huge percentage of many people's diet in countries like the UK and USA.
So having decided to cut them out of mine, the question became "What do I replace them with?" This is not a simple question to answer for people who are used to a very similar looking shopping list week after week which relies on pre-packaged supermarket foods. To show you the extent of change needed to do this, here are just some examples of UPFs that I, like many of us, was eating regularly: supermarket packaged bread breakfast cereals and granola flavoured yoghurt chocolate, biscuits and crisps energy and granola bars shop-bought pizzas and ready meals supermarket sausages It's a lot isn't it? But it took very little time to replace all these foods comfortably and (for the most part) inexpensively. Ten months later, my diet is permanently changed, I've lost at least a stone in weight (going from 11.
5 stone to 10 stone) and I don't really crave any of the UPFs I used to eat a lot of. But how do you cut such "staple" foods from a diet while still being able to eat simple and cheap meals. Well, it was easy and relied on these three foods: legumes (that's chickpeas, lentils and beans) nuts Greek yoghurt Of course, I've added more.