You should always watch what you eat if you want to maintain a flat tummy and lose weight.
You are always told to burn more calories than you consume to get rid of belly fat, but weight loss is not just about that.
You really don’t have to concentrate on calories too much; after all, they make eating fun.
There are some ways you can ensure you aren’t hungry and still burn body fat while losing pounds.
Below are tips on how to satisfy your hunger pangs while you drop weight and live a more healthy life.
1. Cook Your Own Meals
Preparing your own meals allows you to control the number of calories from home, unlike at the restaurant where everyone cares about the bills and not your weight loss journey.
There are a variety of meals you can prepare to save over 600 calories compared to having the same meals at restaurants.
Some good examples are yogurt parfait with berries for breakfast, avocado toast with fried egg and tomato for lunch, hummus with cucumbers and carrots as snacks, veggies, and roasted chicken and quinoa for dinner.
On average, you can consume 137 fewer calories and 16 fewer grams of sugar at home than you regularly consume at restaurants.
2. Start the Day with 2 Glasses of Water
You already know the importance of H2O to your body.
Every activity in your body involves water including flushing out wastes and metabolism.
Moreover, the lack of enough water in your system may lead to dehydration, and it impacts your energy levels.
Jumpstart your day with two glasses of this natural fluid to boost your energy levels. A hydrated body is always active and burns more calories.
3. Snack Whenever You Feel Like
Contrary to what has been said before, eating the right snacks at day time is one of the eating habits to help shrink your waistline.
According to a study, people who eat low-sugar, high protein snacks shed more body weight.
How do snacks help? It depends on the kind of snacks you are consuming.
The appropriate ones are the high protein snacks, and they help to maintain blood sugar levels.
Perfect blood sugar levels prevent your brain from receiving hunger signals that lead to consuming high-energy foods after you feel like you’re starving.
4. Fill Your Recipes with Fiber
For the love you have for your body, foods with fiber are as essential to your body as jet fuel to a Roll’s Royce engine.
Fiber keeps you full for longer so that you can concentrate on your job, cleans out your bowels, and feeds the helpful bacteria living in your gut.
When that bacteria feed on soluble fiber, they turn them into inflammatory fatty acids which trigger your fat genes to shut and allow your body to lose some pounds or kilos without even bothering about calories.
Besides, if your gut had been damaged by high-sugar diet and high saturated fat, fiber will help mend it off.
5. Also, Add Proteins
Rather than incorporating calories in your meals, eat more proteins including possibly one of your favorites, pasta.
Protein is a slow-digesting micronutrient that boosts your metabolism while it decreases appetite and squashes cravings.
If you love smoothies, there are many protein powders in stores and supermarkets that you can mix with your fruit pulps whenever you are making those healthy beverages.
Smoothies packed with protein can nourish your calorie-burning muscles.
6. Apply the 80-20 Rule on Your Diet
Creating healthy habits can take time, and you will make some errors while watching your weight.
An unhealthy snack at one time is not bad.
The idea is to eat 80 percent healthy food and leave the 20 percent for those unnecessary but delicious treats.
For every five meals, four should be healthy and one should be food treats.
That way, you won’t feel like you messed your body by eating some McDonald’s fries or slices of pizza.
Just don’t consume too much and you can alternatively make those fries or pizza at home.
Remember that restaurant food is filled with calories.
7. Don’t Award Yourself with Certain Foods
It’s good to be proud of your small wins and achievements, including achieving weight-loss milestones and getting that perfect body that you always dreamed off.
You can also reward yourself, but don’t do that with fatty and sugary treats or else you will triggering your body to gain weight again.
You can alternatively reward yourself by catching a movie at the theater, going to the beauty spur to get a manicure, or checking into a fitness class.
The moment you start fighting food urges, your lifestyle will change, and you will be able to eat healthily.
8. Get Enough Rest
Feeling full doesn’t depend on how much food you consumed alone.
It also depends on how much sleep you get every day.
Failing to get enough sleep leads to increased levels of hunger causing a hormone known as ghrelin and lowers the level of hormone leptin resulting in hunger pangs.
Your sleep-deprived body will continue craving for more food, and you end up munching calories even when you aren’t hungry at all.
Catch some good rest in the evening after taking your main meal to stay full for longer.
9. Maintain an Exercise Regimen
Sticking to one weight maintenance plan is as important as sticking to a balanced diet.
According to a study performed by the University of Alabama, clinging to a single exercising program might be the key to maintaining the weight you have.
The research indicated that people who stopped working out after achieving their weight goals would experience a dip in their metabolism while their counterparts who continued to work out for only forty minutes and thrice a week would fry their calories and still maintain their weight.
Add cardio and resistance training to your routine and use them to stimulate muscle growth and burn more calories.
10. Keep Your Heart Beating
Your heart keeps beating all the time and stopping is a matter of life and death.
Sometimes your work, travel, and spending time with kids can make you too busy that you miss your workout routine.
It’s not the end of the world as long as you boost your heart rate and make your blood pump faster by taking the stairs instead of the escalator and elevator.
According to a study, walking for a minute twice in one hour levels your blood sugar and lowers the insulin levels in overweight people.
You don’t have to hit the gym every time but when you have some free time.
11. Create a Plan
Without a plan, you will end up making poor diet decisions.
Also, figuring what you will have for breakfast, lunch, or dinner when you have no plan can make you prefer to eat cookies or a hot dog.
Planning your meals helps you to remove unnecessary calories and control what goes into your mouth.
List a few go-to meals that have fewer calories, and you can eat consistently and switch the plan every month.
12. Eat Slowly Without Distractions
The simplest way to avoid overeating is eating with intention! Whenever we are eating the food’s first stop is in the stomach.
Your stomach has stretch receptors that notify the brain that you are full when it can’t hold any more food.
It takes almost 20 minutes for the brain to get the signal and so you should minimize distractions to prevent you from overeating.
13. Limit Added Sugar
Limiting products with too much-added sugars can be one of the ways to cut calories.
Sugary foods have almost no nutrients, and they leave you hungry most of the time and tempt you to overeat.
Added sugars can also affect your insulin response and lead to obesity, insulin resistance, and even worst, type II diabetes.
Instead of cookies, eat fresh fruit.
Drink your coffee black, and instead of taking juices, blend smoothies.
14. Pay Attention to Your Body
Do you take dairy products and feel congested or eat grains and you feel bloated?
Most people brush off such issues and continue with their routine, but it’s not something you should ignore.
In most cases, such reactions could be signs of food intolerance or allergy which would make your immune system weak, contribute to increased inflammation, and trigger weight gain.
Learn to pay attention to your body and observe if there are any discomforts.
15. Make Healthy Eating a Norm
If you ever cared to check how many calories you eat, you will like you are eating too much and you the food guilt you feel inside disturbs you.
Switch to healthy eating to maintain those pounds or kilos.
Don’t subject yourself to a diet, but organize your diet around a healthy life.
You will start enjoying enough sleep, working out, and also have fun cooking at home.
Once you start maintaining a healthy diet, you will be glad that you made that decision.
16. Take a Deep Breath
When you are stressed out, and you feel like your life is a mess, take a deep breath and relax.
Whenever you are stressed out, your body produces a hormone known as cortisol.
Cortisol is the hormone that alerts your body about impending danger and lowers your blood-glucose levels.
This hormone forces your body to store fat and send hunger signals to your brain.
That means you will start craving for food even when your stomach is full.
17. Go Meatless at Least Once a Week
Or you can as well become a vegan.
It’s recommended.
However, you can still enjoy the benefits of veggies even without taking meat out of your diet.
According to a study, people who eat less meat have lower chances of suffering from obesity, sport lower BMI, and they also have low body fat levels.
We aren’t insinuating that you should completely abandon your meat, but it’s just that they tend to fill you up before you can eat all the veggies in your plate.
Vegetables are known to fight fat.
18. Avoid Drinking Calories
The likes of soda, milkshakes, bottled coffees and teas, those are the kind of drinks to avoid.
The calories in the sugary beverages usually have no other nutrients, and they leave you hungry.
According to research, the energy obtained from beverages has less impact than that of solid foods.
It’s better to go for solid food and reap their health benefits.
19. Make Your Own Salad Dressings
Many salads have many dressings and are filled with more sugar and less chocolate syrup.
While making your own salad dressings, you can use your own ingredients.
Go to your nearest store and grab a bottle of virgin olive oil and combine it with apple cider vinegar, Dijon mustard, and pepper.
Olive oil helps to lower blood pressure while apple cider vinegar is a detoxifying liquid.
20. Hide The Junk
Maybe the reason you are eating that junk food is because you see it.
Get all those kind of foods from your kitchen’s clearest points.
Keeping those vices on kitchen counters will tempt you to forget your goal.
Hide your stash in opaque containers and hind them behind the healthier snacks to always remember your goals whenever you feel like eating some junk food.
Closing Remarks
To achieve that weight and curvaceous look, you have to be patient, eat healthy food, exercise, and avoid impulse eating, especially foods with added sugars.
Cutting on carbs is not a bad decision, but there are a lot more things you have to do to achieve your goal.
Refer to the tips above whenever you feel like you aren’t approaching your goal in the right way.
