No more nibbling while you cook. Making your meals at home is a great way to save money, cut down on calories and generally eat things that are better for you. But if you spend the entire time grazing through the food you're preparing, you can easily put away a couple hundred calories without even realizing it.
Make snacks a formal affair. Stop eating when you're standing in front of the refrigerator, digging through the cupboards or while watching television. Pour a measured portion of the snack into a bowl or onto a plate. Then go to your dinner table, sit down and eat it. Munching mindlessly is a sure-fire way to pack on the pounds.
Use plates that help you. Replace any large dinner plates with small plates no more than 9 inches across. Having a smaller plate means you won't be able to fill it with as much food. When people had their larger dinner plates replaced with small portion control plates, they lost an average of 1.8% of their body weight compared to 0.1% for the control group.
While you're replacing your plates, do the same for your bowls. Try using ramekins, or bowls that hold only 1/2 a cup of food each. Use them to serve sweet desserts in. It may look small but 1/2 a cup equals a single serving on the nutrition label of most ice creams.
To make sure you're getting a more nutritious diet, look for plates that have painted lines marking off sections for vegetables, protein and carbs.
Eat at least three meals and two snacks every day. People who eat five meals a day cut their risk for obesity by 50%. All day long you body is a machine constantly working to keep you alive. The food that's in your stomach is the first source your body turns to for energy.
A typical meal takes two to four hours to digest. If it's been LONGER than 4 hours, you still need energy but there's no food left in your stomach to draw from, so your body turns to muscle. Eating something every two to four hours helps you prevent muscle loss and reduces binge cravings between meals.
Eat more filling, high fiber foods. Lean people eat significantly more fiber daily than overweight or obese people. In one study, doing nothing more than increasing the daily average from 14 grams a day to 24 grams a day resulted in a 4-pound weight loss over 3.8 months. Here's why.
It takes longer to eat high-fiber foods. That gives your body more time to register the food that goes into your stomach and signal your brain you're full. High-fiber meals also tend to be less "energy dense", meaning they have fewer calories compared to a similar volume of low-fiber food.
