More tips on how to eat less
Food: one area where “going cold turkey” is an oxymoron
If you find that you’re using tobacco or alcohol or drugs to a degree that is unhealthy, you always have the option of simply avoiding them altogether. Not particularly easy, of course, but it gets right to the heart of the problem.
With food, unfortunately, that option is unavailable: stop all eating, you sicken and die.
The challenge then becomes eating within limits and within reason. A lot of that involves what you eat, and how often you eat. But it also involves how you approach eating, the mechanics and attitude involved with eating.
In that area, here are a few ploys that may help you to simply eat less of whatever you eat, whenever you eat.
Eating: it’s not as simple as chew-chew-chew-swallow
- Evaluate your hunger and respond accordingly. Before snacking or noshing, assign an honest rating to how hungry you actually are: not really; a little; moderately; quite a bit; famished. If your hunger ranking is at the low end, you’re not really hungry hungry, you’re more likely bored or depressed or antsy. Grab a piece of fruit and go for a walk or listen to music or otherwise do something you enjoy. If your hunger measures at the high end, try to eat defensively.
- By eating defensively, we mean eating high-volume (as opposed to high-calorie) food, the kind that fills you up. Soups and salads are ideal, being mostly water. Ditto for vegetables and baked potatoes. For entrees, think salmon and chicken breast.
- Eat slowly. This is not headline news to persons with weight-control issues, but just for the record, researchers in Athens have now pinpointed the reason it works: hasty eating impedes the flow of hormones that make us feel full. It seems simplistic, but given our eat-on-the-run lifestyles, hasty eating may have more to do with our national weight gain than we give it credit for.
- Pay attention. We often eat too much of whatever we’re eating just due to momentum; we’re distracted by TV or conversation or our iPhone or reading and we eat more than we need to or even want to without noticing. Focus on your meal and your consumption thereof; you’ll probably eat less, and most likely enjoy it more.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
Subscribe to our RSS feed | Weekly e-mail updates | Follow us on Twitter
Related posts from the CalorieLab Calorie Counter News archives:
