Tricks of healthy eating: how to eat and lose weight?

Author: Marina Grineva - dietitian, Master of Sports in athletics, author of the website bestdiets.
2018-10-03

Sometimes, you really want to start eating healthy food, find a healthy meal plan, and achieve an ideal figure in a short time. Such dreams exist for everyone, even the thinnest person, but the habit of eating unhealthy yet delicious food doesn’t go away in a day.

So how do people transition to a healthy lifestyle and stick to it for years? It’s quite simple. There are several straightforward yet effective ways to gradually train yourself to a healthy diet, to the point where you won’t even think about breaking it.

Why Do We Gain Weight?

Before you try to go on a proper nutrition plan again, you need to understand why we gain weight. If you use a calorie calculator and check how much food a person should consume in a day, you might notice that many don’t even reach their norm. So where does the extra weight come from?

Besides calories, it's important to understand the composition of foods. For example, you can eat a small serving of French fries (approx. 250 kcal) or 200 grams of Caesar salad with low-fat dressing (approx. 250 kcal). In the first case, you are only getting fats and carbohydrates, along with a ton of salt and spices. In the second case, it’s a complete meal that will keep you full for 4 or more hours.

Thus, simply counting calories is not enough; you need to consider the ratio of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates in the food. This principle underlies fractional nutrition and many other diets.

Trick 1: Routine

This may seem too simple. Many people eat in the morning, afternoon, and evening, yet they don’t lose weight for some reason. It’s not just about the time frame; it's about the specific time on the clock. Train your body to have breakfast at 7:00 AM, lunch at 1:00 PM, and dinner at 6:00 PM. Only strict adherence to these times, as in the 8-hour diet, will help you get in shape and start burning fat.

You need to select a reasonable range of products, calculate their caloric content and nutritional value. It is often said that breakfast should be the most filling because it starts your day, and you must stay energized until lunch, which lasts at least 5 hours. Remember, filling does not mean heavy or fatty!

If you eat on a schedule with the right portions, you won't feel hungry at all, and the extra pounds will melt away before your eyes.

Trick 2: Lemon Water

A simple truth is that 15 minutes before eating, you should drink water. This method of filling the stomach can help reduce appetite and has been known since the idea of weight loss on mineral water. But did you know that just a few drops of lemon juice can significantly cut your food intake and make you feel refreshed?

Lemon juice stimulates the production of gastric juice through the abundant secretion of saliva. There’s a simple rule: if there’s too much saliva in your mouth, food will soon follow, which is why you should chew gum after a meal.

Lemon causes you to want to drink more water, significantly increasing the volume of liquid consumed before a meal. You might drink not one but two glasses in one go. At the same time, food in the intestines will be processed faster due to the abundance of gastric and pancreatic juices.

How is this beneficial? You consume significantly less food, don’t feel hungry, and initially use the energy from the food you just consumed, followed by the body fat.

Trick 3: Go Shopping After Eating

This small trick will help you avoid unwanted purchases in the store. When we shop on an empty stomach, we hardly notice what we toss into our cart. Thus, driven only by hunger, someone trying to lose weight may end up buying so many unhealthy and high-calorie products that they can't possibly consume them in a week.

A full stomach does not cloud the mind; you will be able to walk calmly through the supermarket, choosing what you consider necessary. You will have time to look at the label and think about how it will affect your weight and wallet.

Trick 4: Use Many Plates – Eat Less

If you conduct a small experiment, taking two people and setting an equal amount of food on the table but arranging the first person's meal on different plates and dumping everything onto one plate for the second, what will the result be?

This experiment has been conducted, and the results are quite interesting. The person who ate from one plate was able to easily eat all the dishes and even didn’t mind going back for seconds. On the other hand, the one who ate from several plates couldn’t finish even half. How is that?

It’s quite simple; first and foremost, the brain assesses food, and seeing an abundance of plates makes the volume of food seem greater than if it was all on one plate. The same principle applies to the size of plates. You can serve a portion in a small dish and a large one of the same type. A person will continue to eat until the plate is empty.

Trick 5: Chew Slowly and Thoroughly

The more a person chews, the quicker they will feel full. The principle is the same as when adding lemon juice to water. The body, particularly the brain, thinks you've eaten too much once you’ve thoroughly chewed a piece of meat. Moreover, such food will digest much faster.

Remember, the feeling of fullness comes much later, so by chewing more than 20 times, you will wait for your body to truly say "Enough!" and thus avoid overeating.

Also, do not rush. The French have created a whole culture around food; they can take 20 minutes to enjoy a croissant with coffee, while an ordinary person would swallow it in one gulp. Don’t rush; try to savor the food rather than gulp it down.

Conclusions

Finding a healthy meal plan is not difficult, but sticking to it can be a challenge for some people. First, you need to understand the reasons for your rapid weight gain, formulate solutions for all problems, and then start losing weight. At the same time, small tricks will make the transition from unhealthy food to healthy dishes more comfortable.

Remember that excess weight leads not only to aesthetic dissatisfaction but also to the development of numerous severe diseases. Diets are not a panacea! During the initial stage of weight loss, you can use short-term diets, such as Polina Gagarina's diet, who lost 40 kg in six months or the trendy Pegan diet, but proper nutrition should be your foundation for life!