To lose weight, you have to lower your caloric intake, below your expenditure. Think of it as like your wallet. Take in more than you spend, your wallet gets fatter. Spend more than you earn, your wallet gets thinner. Only in this case, it’s all about food, and your waistline.
A Dieter's Worst Nightmare: Hunger
The simplest way to lose weight, is just to eat less. Eating less never really sounds good, your stomach growls, you can’t touch those cookies, you can’t drink that soda and you are ravenous all the time. The reason why most people end up binging, is probably due to insatiable hunger on a diet.
Tip 1: More Lean Protein
The research is clear. Protein is the most satiating macronutrient, far more than carbohydrates or fat. Studies reveal that higher protein intake reduces hunger both in the short and long term.
However, don’t use this as an excuse to eat roast beef and steak all day. The point is to keep calories low! So choose lean sources of protein like low-fat fish (Tilapia, Sutchi), skinless chicken breast, or even low-fat red meat from lean sources of beef like the filet mignon,
Eating more protein on a diet is also beneficial for stabilising blood glucose and maintain lean body mass so you don’t lose skeletal muscle in an attempt to lose fat!
Tip 2: Choose Vegetables!
Vegetables are low in calories and extremely filling. Why? Because of fibre.
Fiber can help hunger by filling up your stomach, It physically ‘stretches the stomach and signals how much food has been eaten. The more stretched your stomach is, the more full your brain thinks you are.
Secondly, fiber slows down gastric emptying, food leaves your stomach slower. By keeping foods in the stomach longer, you stay full longer too.
What’s best? Vegetables have so little calories, you can eat steamed or boiled veggies with light salting and pepper in almost unlimited amounts and still lose weight!
Tip 3: Don't Cut Out All Fat
Completing cutting out fat and going low-fat or no-fat tend to leave a lot of people hungry in both the short- and long-term. Normally, dietary fat doesn’t really blunt hunger in the short-term, but keeping some in your diet keeps you fuller longer between meals because fat slows gastric emptying like fiber.
In addition, low-fat diets often get compared to eating cardboard. Psychologicalyl speaking, people don’t follow a diet that doesn’t taste good for long. Fats gives food a certain texture and very low-fat diets remove it, leaving people dissatisfied, and binging after their willpower crumbles.
Research shows that moderate fat diets helps you stick to your diet longer and more efficiently, without wanting to go crazy.
Keep it healthy though, it’s no excuse for fries. Add some salmon or almonds in for a healthy dose of omega-3!
Tip 4: Exercise
Exercise can have the potential to decrease hunger. Forgive the science talk but let’s see how it works.
Exercising increases leptin transport into the brain which should help some of the other hunger signals work better.
Psychologically, research suggests that people ‘couple’ exercise and their diet as a package. The underlying psychlogy seems to be along the lines of “I exercised today, I am not going to undo it by screwing up my diet.”
However, beware of the pitfall “I must have burned 1000 calories in exercise, I deserve that pizza slice and milkshake.” We always over-estimate how many calories we burned with exercise, ending up eating more than we burned
Tip 4: Drink Black Coffee or Tea
Researchers at Griffith University found that the coffee drinkers get hungry less often and feel more satiated throughout the day, This is because caffeine is a great appetite suppresant!
What’s actually surprising is the fact that even decaf coffee seems to work great! The exact mechanism is not yet known, but blood serum PYY hormones show that it does indeed reduce the sensation of hunger! So you aren’t one for the caffeine, try decaf coffee, black, of course to get rid of that growling tummy!
Leave a comment