7 Eating Habits For Weight Loss

As your nutrition is the most important factor in weight loss, you need to develop the best eating habits you can. You want healthy nutrition to become a part of your day-to-day life. I want to help you do just that.

If your nutrition is healthy, weight loss becomes easy. If it’s bad, it is nearly impossible to achieve. So, I urge you to take the following tips to heart and to apply them in your life. These are habits that I adopted myself in my struggle to lose weight and they have served me well ever since.

Start With a Salad

There is a right and wrong way to begin a meal. The wrong way is to start it off with high calorie foods. The reason is that you’re naturally at your hungriest level at the beginning of a meal so the likelihood of you overeating is greater. If you overeat on calorie rich foods you can kiss your calorie deficit goodbye. Get ready to gain weight instead of lose it.

What I do is begin my meals with a salad. This way I get a good dose of nutrients, not too many calories, and I fill myself up. Once the other food is served, I am not as hungry as I was at the beginning of the meal. I can better control myself.

Keep It Plain

The more elaborate your dish is, the higher it must be in calories. If you want to lose weight, you need to keep your food relatively plain. Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to eat bland food. You can enjoy great, low calorie food. Often, the more plain a food is, the better it really tastes.

Un-plain food includes salads with heavy sauces (the sauces may contain hundreds of calories), designer coffees, cream covered pasta or potatoes, etc. Often, the basic food of the dish is suitable for weight loss. The sauce or topping is what ruins it.

Sample Everything

This tip is especially useful for big holiday feasts or buffet meals. Whenever you have too many food options, especially if they’re appealing ones, you’re in the danger zone of overeating. You will simply want to try everything.

This is exactly what you need to do: try everything. But trying a dish doesn’t mean taking a plate-full of it. It means sampling it. Your body doesn’t need a big portion of everything, you just want to enjoy the taste of everything that’s offered you.

So, sample everything that seems tasty and then stop. By the time you’re done sampling you will have probably eaten enough for that meal and maybe the one after that as well.

Drinks Have Calories Too

Did I shock you? Is this a surprise?

I know that you may not feel like you’ve eaten anything when you drink your cafe mocha or your cocktail, but your body doesn’t forget. Calories are calories, whether they come from food or beverages, it doesn’t matter. Your body remembers everything.

You may not know it, but drinks may contain a huge amount of calories. I’m talking about hundreds of calories in various beverages. Drinking these high calorie beverages can quickly push you into a calorie surplus which makes weight loss impossible and weight gain assured. The worst part is that you don’t even feel full when you drink so you end up eating more calories on top of that (some drinks actually make you feel hungry).

I drink simple beverages such as green tea or water. I hardly drink juices, sodas, or alcohol (when I do it’s beer or a little wine). Just by watching what I drink, it’s easy for me to maintain my weight. It will be easier for you to lose weight if you follow my example.

Seek Alternatives

In a previous post I talked about various healthy food alternatives that promote weight loss. This is something that you need to turn into a habit. Whenever you have a craving for something, try to find a healthier alternative. For instance, if you want something sweet, don’t rush for the chocolate, try some fruit instead. If you want something crunchy, almonds are a better option than salty potato chips. There are plenty of options to satisfy any craving. Choose the healthiest one.

Stop While You’re Still Hungry

If you eat until you stop feeling hungry it means that you’ve eaten too much. This is how you end up feeling stuffed and lethargic.

Your body will only signal your brain that it’s full 15 – 20 minutes after it has become satiated. This is why I usually stop eating when I’m still slightly hungry. It keeps me from going overboard.

Keep It Close To Nature

My diet today consists of plenty of fruit, vegetables, and fish. I do eat meat but I like fish better. My general philosophy is to choose food which is as close to nature as possible. I like fresh produce and organic foods. I don’t like ready-made dishes and highly processed foods. I realize that avoiding all processed foods is a challenge, but you can certainly move toward more home cooked meals and fresh food and reduce buying frozen or pre-cooked products. A great source for easy recipes is the Metabolic Cooking plan so you can use it to cook simple and tasty meals for yourself and your family.

In Conclusion

I’m sure that there are plenty of more tips and healthy eating habits that you know of. I’d love to read about them in the comments below. I hope that the 7 tips that I’ve shared will help you lose weight faster and to do so in a healthy way.