4 Compelling Reasons to Ditch Junk Food for a Healthier, Leaner You
Imagine for a moment a world where you love the taste of healthy food, never crave junk food, effortlessly lose fat and add significant time to your life expectancy. It isn’t crazy. It’s the world I live in. But it wasn’t always like that.
For most of my life, I indulged in a completely standard American diet. My typical day began with a bowl of breakfast cereal. For lunch, I often opted for fast food and washed it down with loads of soda. Pizza, pasta, cheeseburgers, and french fries were my go-to staples.
As I entered my 30s, the toll of all that junk food became evident. I started gaining weight and feeling terrible. Like many others, I experimented with various diets in my 20s and 30s, with mixed results. I counted calories and switched to diet soda. I made efforts to incorporate more salads and boost my protein intake.
Me in 2011
Although these different diets showed varying degrees of success, the real transformation in my life came when I decided to ditch junk food entirely.
I ditched all of it.
I completely stopped eating junk. No more pizza, candy, soda, cereal, cheeseburgers, or fries. It's a hardcore solution, but as you'll see below, it's worth it. In this article, I'm going to build the case for quitting junk food, and I'll offer four big reasons.
Don't worry; you don't necessarily need to go completely junk food-free. My current diet is maybe 5% junk food. As you'll see below, you can get absurd results from simply cutting back. If you can reduce your consumption of junk food by 50%, you'll see a HUGE difference, and everything you read below will still apply to you. But having said that, there's something magical about going junk food-free, if only for a while.
1) Cutting out junk food will get you leaner
Me in 2023
Americans are consuming more and more junk food with each passing year. In fact, researchers have estimated that almost 60% of the average American’s diet is Ultra Processed Food (UPF) or junk food. It is also estimated that 73% of the US food supply is comprised of Ultra Processed Food.
We’re basically swimming in junk food. It’s cheap, easy, fast and tastes good. However, it is also contributing to the rise in obesity. It's no coincidence that as our intake of UPF has increased, so has our obesity rate.
For instance, let's compare our diet to the Japanese. Our diet is 58.5% junk food, and our obesity rate is 36%. Meanwhile, the Japanese diet is 38% junk food, and their obesity rate is only 4%.
Now, you might be wondering if the diet is really making the difference. Perhaps the Japanese are just great at counting calories or love to exercise.
Well, in 2019, some amazing researchers decided to find out, and to eliminate all other factors, they used a Randomized Controlled Trial, the highest quality study available to nutrition researchers. These studies are costly to conduct, but they can provide a ton of insight.
The scientists took 20 adults and locked them in a lab to monitor everything they did and ate. For two weeks, 10 of the adults were fed a diet high in Ultra Processed Food, while the other 10 were fed a diet of minimally processed foods. The researchers told both groups to eat as much or as little as they wanted.
After two weeks, they switched the diets. The group eating the highly processed diet switched to a minimally processed diet, and vice versa.
The results were impressive!
When a group was eating a highly processed diet, they consumed 500 more calories per day and gained a little over half a pound in two weeks. Conversely, when a group ate a minimally processed diet, they consumed 500 fewer calories and lost a little over half a pound.
Now, that may not sound like much, but you have to remember that the Japanese eat a less processed diet their entire life. So even if you only lost 1 pound per month, that's 12 pounds per year and 60 pounds in 5 years. That goes a long way in explaining the obesity epidemic.
So why does this work this way? Why do people lose weight on a diet of minimally processed food? Why do cultures that eat less processed food have fewer obese individuals?
Basically, you're just less hungry. When you process food, you remove the fiber and water. This causes three significant downstream effects.
First, it increases the caloric density of the food. A stomach full of unprocessed food has fewer calories than a stomach full of processed food. Therefore, if you eat until you're full, you're going to consume fewer calories if the meal was less processed.
Second, fiber takes a long time to leave your stomach, so a diet high in fiber leaves you feeling fuller for longer. Thus, a stomach full of less processed food (high in fiber) will leave you feeling full for longer than a stomach full of highly processed food (lower in fiber).
Third, some foods are harder to digest, requiring more energy from our bodies. Essentially, industrial food processing does part of the digestive work for us. So, a stomach full of less processed food is harder to digest than a stomach full of highly processed food. As a result, you burn more calories digesting unprocessed food and fewer calories digesting processed food.
Add all this up, and you naturally consume fewer calories eating a minimally processed diet.
Ok, so a diet of unprocessed food can help you get leaner, and of course, that's great; but there's more. It can help you live longer too!
Would you like to know more ways you can reduce your hunger? Check out my article 10 ways to manage your hunger for year-round visible abs.
2) Quitting junk food will extend your life expectancy
The Japanese aren't just leaner; they live longer too. In fact, on average, they live 7 years longer than an American. Imagine that – 7 more years with your kids and grandkids, and possibly a chance to spend time with your great-grandkids.
Now, again, you might be thinking that diet alone probably isn't making the difference. And you'd be right. In fact, in 2018, researchers at Harvard found that there are 5 factors that make the difference. The 5 factors are daily exercise, a healthy body weight, a healthy diet, not smoking, and drinking only moderately.
Furthermore, the researchers found that Americans who had those 5 factors in place lived an average of 10-14 years longer than the average American. They even lived longer than the average Japanese.
Now, in terms of diet, the researchers found that eating mostly high-quality minimally processed food was the most important part of a healthy diet. It didn't matter how many carbs or how much fat you ate. What mattered was the food quality.
In 2019, researchers decided to take an even closer look, and they found that a 10% increase in the consumption of ultra-processed food led to a 14% higher risk of all-cause mortality. Basically, as you increase the amount of junk food you eat, you increase your risks of death.
So why would this be? What could be causing it? There are at least three reasons.
First, a diet with tons of junk food is a low-fiber diet. As we already discussed, processed food has less fiber, and fiber is actually insanely healthy.
Second, junk food has far fewer nutrients. As you process and refine food, you make it less and less nutritious. Fruit, veggies, and meat are all loaded with micronutrients and minerals. Donuts, soda, and French fries not so much.
Third, junk food is loaded with preservatives, food dyes, and artificial flavors. The FDA tries to monitor these additives to ensure their safety, but it is nonetheless reasonable to be wary of eating loads of them. For instance, we all ate tons of trans fats for years before it was finally discovered that trans fat is basically poison.
Alright, so cutting out junk food will improve your health, increase your life expectancy, and help you get leaner. But won't you crave your favorite junk foods? Won't it make daily life miserable as you watch your friends and family eat your favorite foods?
Not necessarily.
Would you like to know more about diet and longevity? Check out my article Is there a longevity diet?
3) Quitting junk food means no more food cravings
No one has steak salad cravings. It may sound good, and you may really want it, but you don't crave it like your favorite junk food. Simply put, addictive, craving-inducing food is processed food.
Why is that?
The answer is actually pretty sinister. We all like the same tastes: sweet, salty, and savory. These tastes relate to specific reward circuits in the brain. Whenever we eat something with those tastes, we get a little hit of dopamine. Our brain says, "Mmm, that was good; do more of that." This kept our hunter-gatherer ancestors motivated to gather and hunt. It kept them alive.
Fast forward to today. Food companies have hijacked this reward system. First, they refine food down to increase the amount of dopamine it produces. They make food sweeter, saltier, and more savory while increasing the caloric density. Consequently, industrialized food hits our reward system harder than normal food.
Second, the food companies carefully balance multiple flavors. Everyone has a unique code, and when you find a food that has the right balance of flavors, it's love at first bite. This is why you see things like salted caramel. A spoonful of plain sugar is actually kind of gross.
Okay, so if that's the bad news, here's the good news. Quitting junk food will completely rewire your brain and normalize your relationship with food. When I first stopped eating junk food, I remember walking past pizza restaurants and craving a pizza. The smell was intoxicating. Now, more than a decade later, I can watch my family eat pizza with indifference. I'm far more interested in my meal.
And it isn't just me. Study after study has shown through brain scans that by reducing your consumption of junk food, you reduce your cravings. Your brain heals, and your reward system normalizes. These studies were conducted over a six-month period, and it didn't require eliminating all junk food to get the results.
Other studies have used psychological evaluations to find similar results. One study found that after 6 months of dieting, participants experienced a reduction in cravings, while another study found strong results from 2 years of dieting.
Research has also shown the reverse is true. Our cravings increase when we repeatedly eat our favorite junk food. Did you eat your favorite junk food recently? Have you been eating it often? Then you’ll crave it more intensely.
If you take a break from the food you crave, your cravings will go away. It takes time, but it’s 100% worth it.
Now you might be thinking, “but won’t I miss all the amazing foods? Won’t I miss all the great flavors of junk food?”
Don’t be so sure.
Would you like help with your food cravings? Check out my article Free yourself from junk food: a complete guide for adventure-lovers.
4) Quitting junk food improves your palate
Junk food desensitizes your taste buds. It's the equivalent of cookie-cutter pop music—a relentless pursuit of trivial, meaningless dopamine. It's your TikTok feed.
If you cut out ultra-processed food, you will suddenly appreciate new flavors. You will notice the subtlety of vegetables. Your whole approach to food will change, and your palate will become more nuanced.
My own tastes have changed enormously. Foods I once thought were gross have become favorites, while foods that were once personal favorites have become unappealing. It took years of experimentation, improving my cooking, and discovering new foods.
But you don't have to wait months or years to start seeing the effects. Research has found that your tastes start to change in as little as 6 weeks.
Here's another way to think about it. Countries famous for their culinary prowess don't consume a lot of junk food. For instance, only about 13% of the Italian diet and 28% of the French diet consist of Ultra-Processed Food. In other words, no five-star restaurant is going to serve you a Doritos chip or use cheese from a spray can.
Final Thoughts
So, what does it feel like to eat a diet of minimally processed food? What does it feel like to be lean and healthy? I'll put it this way: If anyone ever figures out how to put the effect into a pill, they'll be an instant trillionaire. It's that good.
I have more energy, feel younger, and can train harder and more often. Do I miss donuts, pizza, or Snickers? Nope, not a bit. I enjoy food now more than ever.
I love the different nuanced flavors of my current diet. And if I really want to, I occasionally indulge, especially now that I have young kids and sometimes want to participate. But I still maintain a diet that's 95% minimally processed food, and I don't feel the least bit deprived.
Thanks for reading!
