Welcome to the GitFit Guys' quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm the Get Fit Guy. And in today's episode, you're going to discover

four fitness foods that you should probably avoid. So the Journal of Marketing Research

recently released the article,

The Effects of Fitness Branding on Restrained Eaters' Food Consumption and Post-Consumption

Physical Activity. That's a mouthful, pun intended.

Anyways, in the article, what the authors looked into were the effects of food branded as

fitness food, specifically investigating

whether people who were trying to lose weight and who were given trail mix-style snacks

marked either fitness mix or trail mix would approach both the snack and their exercise differently,

depending on whether they perceive the snack to be fitness food. The trail mix marked

as the official fitness mix, which was no different than the regular trail mix in terms of

ingredients, but just labeled differently, even had a picture of running shoes on the front of it.

Well, the results were kind of humorous. People given the fitness labeled snack mix, not only

ate many more calories of that fitness snack mix, but they exercise less after eating the fitness snack mix.

Apparently convinced that the act of eating something associated with increased health or fitness somehow justified them exercising less.

And here's the deal.

Even if you do have self-control and you actually eat less or the same

amount of food that you perceive to be health food or fitness food, the fact is that many of

these foods still contain ingredients that aren't doing you any favors in the fitness, fat loss,

or health department. So I'm going to give you four popular fitness foods and so-called health foods that you should probably consider limiting or avoiding.

Let's start with the first one, which is fruit juice.

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