HOW TO EAT LESS WITHOUT COUNTING CALORIES

In the world of fat loss and diet advices, the most common one is that you should definitely start tracking your calories if you want to lose excess body weight. And you must be thinking: On a top of all things that i have to do during the day, now i have to actually measure every morssel of food coming into my mouth.

 

First of all, its boring, time consuming and i don’t even know how to do it in a first place.

And you know what – you are completely right!

The fat loss game is already difficult enough – with so many conflicting information out there the last thing anyone wants to do is to track, measure and count every single calorie for the rest of their life. Although calorie tracking can be useful in certain situations for limited amount of time, it is definitely not a long term solution for building healthy relationship with food and with your own body.

But don’t fall in despair – in this article i am going to show you 6 ways how to eat less, be more full after your meals, and all of that without any measuring and calorie tracking:

1. Eat slowly

One of the most important habits that you can implement if you want to lose weight and feel more satisfied after your meals is the habit of slow eating.

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Most of the people simply rush through their meals and that can often lead to poor digestion, less satisfaction after the meals and overall higher food intake.

What the research show is that people who eat more slow tend to eat less food and feel more satiated after their meals when compared to people who eat fast. You might be thinking: What the heck speed of eating have to do with how much i am eating during the meal.

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The reason behind this lays in the fact that it needs approximately 20 min from beginning of the meal for our satiety mechanisms to kick in. This is the time needed for your brain to receive the information from the gut that you had enough food and to send the satiety signals. So if you eat really fast, you will be able get much more food during that 20 min. time frame than the person who eats more slowly. On a top of that, people who eat more slowly are experiencing greater satisfaction after their meals so they tend to control their appetite better during the whole day. So if your goal is to lose excess weight and you simply hate counting
calories, slow eating is one of the first habit that you should try to implement into your daily life.

 

And while that’s easier to say than to do here are some tips on how to implement this habit during your meals:

- Don’t watch tv, put your phone on the side and engage with your food.
- Chew slowly, put the fork down every few bites and engage in the conversation with your dining partner.
- Don’t need to try to get full 20 minutes right of the bat.
- At the start just try to add extra few minutes on your current eating time and slowly, once you feel comfortable with this new eating time you can add extra few minutes again . Repeat the cycle until you reach 20 minutes mark. Try it out and let me know how it went...slow eating is definitely one of the best habit that you can implement in your daily life if your goal is to eat lesS and lose extra body weight without need for calorie counting.

2. Eat protein dense foods with each meal.

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This one is very simple, protein is the most satiating macro-nutrient and research consistently show that higher protein diets are more satiating when compared to lower protein diets. You basically end up being more full after your meals and eating less food during the course of the entire day. Try to add a at least one serving of protein dense food with each meal.

 

Great options from animal sources are lean meats, fish, chicken, eggs and diary products. If you prefer more plant based protein sources great options are beans, lentils, soy products and nuts.

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3. Eat fiber dense food with each meal

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There are 2 ways how high fiber foods can help us eat less. First, fiber has the ability to increase the physical stretching of our stomach and second, it can decrease the speed at which food leaves the stomach so the food stays in the stomach longer period of time. Both of these effects, physical stretching of the stomach and slow gastric emptying are strong signals to the brain that can signal the fullness.

On a top of that, most fiber rich foods like vegetables for examples are very low in energy density – they have very low level of calories compared to the volume of the food they provide. So by eating more veggies you end up eating big meals that fill you up while providing very little calories. That sounds like a winning situation for eating less without being hungry after the meals

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4. Eat without distractions

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Like the slow eating , this one doesn’t have too much to do with what are you eating but rather with the way you eat. When paired with slow eating it represents very power full tool in your dieting arsenal. Research is clear the we tend to eat more food when we are focused on other things during the meal. Watching tv or playing with your phone while having a meal at the same time are all distractions that can prevent you to tune in with your internal hunger signals.

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So by removing all the other activities and focus on the meal itself, you can get in better touch with your internal hunger and satiety cues and terminate your meal much earlier when compared to eating while
being distracted by watching your favourite tv show.

5. Don’t keep any snacks on visible places in your home or office

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The research and real world experience both agree that seeing the food, especially if it is high calorie, high palatable snack food in your home or office place pushes us to eat it even when we are not hungry at all One particular study gave secretaries Hershey Kisses in covered bowls that were either clear, so they could see the candy, or solid, so they could not.
 

Those given clear bowls opened them to get candy 71% more often, consuming an extra 77 calories per day, on average.

Try to keep snack food out of the visible places in your house or office or at least replace it with some lower calorie options like fruits. You would be surprised how much total less food you will consume during
the whole year just by implementing this simple habit

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6. Use smaller plates

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Research shows that people finish 92% of the food that is on their plate. We tend to eat more food when more food is served to us. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15827310/ So by reducing the amount of food that is being served we can reduce the amount of total calories eaten during the meal.  Serving a food on a smaller plates is one of the ways to reduce the portions sizes without even noticing that you are actually eating less overall food. One of the downsides of using the big plates for your meals is that any amount of food served look visually smaller and gives you the impression that you didn’t have too much food even when you actually had quite a lot So try to choose smaller plates, thinner glassed and even smaller spoons. It can be a complete game changer for some of you that are used to eat their food from big plates.

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Summary :

 

These are the 6 tips on how to eat less without counting calories. Two are focused on what are you eating, two on how you are eating and two of them are focused on your food environment.

The drivers of huger and satiety have at the same time their biological, psychological and environmental origins and that need to be attacked simultaneously for best possible effect. If you are just at the beginning of the journey of changing your eating habits I recommend that you start with only one habit that you are most certain you can stick with until you feel comfortable in practicing it with great level of success.

After that you can keep adding other habits one by one until all of them are successfully implemented. Having these 6 habits in place can make a huge difference in your fat loss progress without you ever having a need to calculate even a single calorie during your journey