Top 10 Worst Supermarket Foods

Want to know the quickest way to lose 20, 50, even 100 pounds? No, not dieting. No, not surgery. You can do it by thinking.

Don’t believe me? Then meet Tim Wadsworth. He stripped 92 pounds of flab off his body in just 12 months by walking a little more and flipping through Eat This, Not That! on his weekly trips to the local supermarket.

What Tim learned is that the supermarket is like a county fair. Roll your cart down the aisles and you're assaulted by bright lights, enticing smells, and shameless hucksterism ("Nine vitamins and minerals! Everyone's a winner!"). The typical supermarket boasts roughly 45,000 unique food items, and nearly every one presents itself as healthier than it truly is, with fancy fonts, earthtone colors, and misleading front-of-package images to convince you that they're better than flab-forming junk foods. Tim learned not to fall for it—to listen to his brain instead of his stomach. You can, too.

Consider the 10 popular grocery items below. By choosing slightly different versions of them, you can save more than 3,800 calories. That’s more than a pound of weight loss in one day’s shopping trip. If you go to the market twice a week, like most Americans, you’d save enough calories to lose—I’m not kidding—more than 100 pounds in the coming year. And that’s just from these 10 swaps, excerpted from the all-new Eat This, Not That! Supermarket Survival Guide. When you know the smartest choices to make when it comes to eating all your favorite foods, it's easy to melt belly fat without dieting.

#10: Worst “Healthy” Frozen Entrée

Healthy Choice Roasted Sesame Chicken
440 calories
9 g fat (1.5 g saturated)
470 mg sodium
23 g sugars

Reality check: The name says roasted chicken, but read the fine print and you see the meat is coated in flour and then cooked in vegetable oil. Sounds an awful lot like fried chicken, doesn’t it? Then Healthy Choice soaks the pasta in pineapple juice and coats the fruit side dish in a sweetened syrup to deliver a candy bar’s worth of sugar. Healthy? Hardly.

SUGAR EQUIVALENT: 3 Krispy Kreme Traditional Cake Donuts

Eat This Instead!
Kashi Southwest Style Chicken
310 calories
5 g fat (1 g saturated)
680 mg sodium
3 g sugars

DISASTROUS DRINKS: The beverage aisle is just as likely as any to sabotage your waistline. Click through the Worst Drinks in America to see which are safe to sip—and which you should skip.

NEXT: Worst Packaged Side >>

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