7 Tips to Lose Weight without Depriving Yourself

If you’re trying to lose weight, you may know that dieting may not be the best way to keep it off over time. Indeed, restrictions that are too abrupt can have a yo-yo effect on your weight.

The best thing is to make a long-term change by eliminating bad habits: snacking, meal composition, etc. Yes, but how do you do this in practice?

Here is a list of habits you can adopt to say goodbye to your excess weight. There’s no need to start abruptly: choose a few to start with, and add others as you go along.

1. Avoid stockpiling sweets

Reserve cakes, ice cream, chips and other calorie traps for special occasions. If you don’t want to succumb to temptation and if you can’t accommodate the whole household in one place, hide sweets, chips, snacks, so that your eyes can’t fall on them as you walk by. Make it less easy to access them!

Good to know: if greed assails you, breath, don’t rush, try mindfulness meditation, or find a palliative gesture, make yourself a tea, a coffee?

2. Eat at one place

If historians don’t know exactly when the whole house became a snack shop, it clearly didn’t help control our weight.

Choose a place in your kitchen, and make a habit of eating only when you’re sitting there. This will allow you to drastically reduce snacking (in front of the TV, while reading in the living room, in your bedroom…), which is often one of the causes of failure of many good food resolutions.

3. Reverse your relationship to high-calorie foods

Try to treat them more like the icing on the cake than the whole cake. Instead of eating a steak with a small pile of vegetables, eat a mountain of vegetables with steak strips on top!

The idea is to avoid frustration by making these foods more exceptional to enjoy.

On the other hand, rediscover the pleasure of cooking, take the time to prepare your food and start good cooking habits.

4. Turn your home into a restaurant

In a restaurant, the dishes stay in the kitchen, and it’s the plates that go on the table. Adopt this principle at home to avoid being tempted to get a refill!

Even better, once you’ve finished cooking, fill your plate and put the leftovers straight away. Once you’ve finished your plate, the temptation to refill it is less and little by little, your brain will understand that your meal is finished.

Good to know: Tryptophan is a substance that helps to curb your food cravings. It is found in bananas, seeds, brown rice and brewer’s yeast, among others.

5. Eat 5 or 6 light meals instead of 3 large meals a day

Indeed, one study suggests that people who eat breakfast several times in the morning consume about 30% fewer calories at breakfast than if they had eaten the same amount all at once. Other studies explain that this redistribution of calories causes the body to release less insulin, which helps reduce the feeling of hunger.

This is more difficult for those who tend to snack. So try to:

– Reduce the size of your plates: use smaller plates and glasses, which will look fuller for the same amount of food.

– Slow down the pace of your meals.

Good to know: Eating too fast can cause weight problems as well as digestive problems.

6. After breakfast, drink water!

Juice for breakfast, okay. But for the rest of the day, avoid sodas and juice. Apart from the fact that they contain more calories, sweetened drinks don’t trigger a feeling of satiety according to several studies.

In addition, drinking one soda a day, diet or not, increases the risk of diabetes by more than 20%, regardless of other factors.

7. Add vegetables on the table!

Want to eat twice as much pasta salad? Add tomatoes, carrots or broccoli, and you’ll have half the calories of a pasta salad with mayonnaise. You can also use the process for a larger omelette without having to add eggs.

One study group suggests that eating water-rich foods (cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, salad, soups, etc.) during meals reduces total calorie consumption.

Shredded carrots, celery, radishes, cabbage, oranges, apples or fruit salad no matter what, put a large plate of fresh fruit and vegetables on the table at each meal, and don’t hesitate to help yourself. In addition to their health benefits, some vegetables are even able to trap fat or burn it more quickly.

The bottom line

Start with the above tips first as they are the easiest to try. Even if you cheat at times, it’s OK. You can restart all the time! Just make it a habit, and your body and mind will follow.

Then, you can slowly add physical exercises to your routine. Following that, you can then try a few food supplements that can help you reduce weight. You might also wish to read more on: Alpha Lipoic Acid (ALA) combats free radicals & helps you build muscle or lose weight!