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I have a friend who doesn’t get my sense of humor. He was telling me about his health club in Chicago. It’s a huge facility that has its own dining room. “They serve this wonderful Spa Pizza there,” my friend told me.

“Well,” I quipped. “Spa Pizza sounds like an oxymoron to me.”

He didn’t laugh and even seemed a little hurt.  So I asked him why they call it a Spa Pizza.

“Because they put healthy ingredients on top of it.”Of course, all of those “healthy ingredients” are sitting on a crust made of white flour and containing 44 grams of carbohydrates. But what my friend sees when he orders a Spa Pizza is a healthy lunch.

What he really gets is spinach, tomato, mushrooms, red onion, and low-fat mozzarella on a crust. He is also of the belief that he can eat the pizza because he has burned off enough calories on the treadmill to balance things out.

It makes perfect sense that eating a Spa Pizza at a reputable “health club” must be a good way to maintain a healthy weight or even lose a pound or two. That’s one big leap of faith and logic, however. And it’s an example of how easy it is to make the wrong food choices based on the way food is marketed to you. Nobody who has just run five miles on a treadmill is going to buy a deep dish Chicago-style pizza. But they might justify sitting down and polishing off a Spa Pizza at their health club.

It’s so much healthier (sounding).

I’m to the point in my weight loss journey that I will no longer purchase any product containing the following words on the label or packaging:

• Healthy
• Heart-healthy
• Heartwise
• Lean
• Low fat
• Diet
• Lite
• Light
• High Fiber
• Low sodium
• Low Salt
• Sugar-free
• Fit
• Low calorie
• Spa

You can bet that any product with those words on the label is already highly processed. Look for sugar, high fructose corn syrup, enriched (refined) flour, and a host of chemicals and preservatives in the ingredients list.

When you read the nutrition information on boxed food, start with the grams of carbohydrates per serving, not the calories.

It’s the carbohydrates that raise your insulin levels and causes you to store fat.

Another name I have placed on my Never Buy Again List is

• Go Lean

I have written about Kashi products before, but the other day when Zola and I were in the grocery store I walked down the cereal aisle. There at eye level was this box of Kashi Go Lean High Protein & High Fiber Cereal.

It’s got “healthy” written all over it.

I saw RED when I noticed that Kashi put the grams of protein, fiber, and fat on the front of the box. You have to read the nutrition label on the side of the box to discover that each 1 cup serving delivers 30 grams of carbohydrates. Why don’t they put that information in a gold balloon right on the front of the box? Could it be because Kashi executives know that you know carbohydrates make you fat? Or maybe they really still believe that all you have to do is expend fewer calories than you take in to lose weight.

It really doesn’t matter. Do you see how you have bought into the low fat, low-calorie marketing madness? Until you get mad enough to stop it, you will have a hard time getting off the diet merry-go-round.

South Beach Diet products are made by Kraft. Weight Watchers packaged foods are made by Heinz. These are food processors who are banking on the fact that you still think that calorie reduction is the way to lose weight. They brag on their packaging about the low-fat content while they add salt and sweeteners to make these products somewhat palatable. People who desperately want to lose weight buy them and put more carbohydrates into their insulin-overloaded systems.

Maybe you are one of them.

Finally, I am placing one more label on my Never Buy Again list:

• Lean Cuisine

Phase 1 of Plan Z is ZBinge. Zola was doing ZBinge today. For lunch, she had Lean Cuisine Macaroni and Cheese. Only 290 calories but 41 grams of carbohydrate. That makes it the perfect binge food, but horrible diet food.

But thankfully it contains NO PRESERVATIVES, lol.

Action Item: Think about how many foods you have purchased because of the low-calorie or low-fat promise. If you have any in your home right now, go read the labels. Check out the serving size and the grams of carbohydrates in the products.

Now go look in the mirror and ask yourself how well these so-called “diet” foods have worked for you.

Then decide if you are mad enough to get rid of the healthy, diet, low-fat, low sodium, light foods that have kept your insulin up and shut down your ability to lose weight.