5 Eating Hacks for Weight Loss
I’ll be the first to admit it. I’m inherently lazy in nature when it comes to certain things. One of those things happens to be nutrition sometimes. Can anyone else relate? Yeah I thought so…Unfortunately when it comes to our fitness goals we can’t really afford to be lazy. There is, however, a way to work smarter and make the goal you have seem less daunting.
I also can’t be the only one wishing that there were easier ways to coordinate your eating habits without having to track every little detail of your food intake. Don’t get me wrong, tracking is an amazing tool, however it can frequently feel like too much effort for the results achieved. Below, I am going to provide you with my top 5 nutrition hacks for weight loss! I’ve accumulated these over the last 5 years of personal training and seeing what worked best for the clients that I worked with, in no specific order.
1. Time Restricted Eating – if you’ve never heard of this idea, it boils down to restricting the time you’re allowed to eat during the day to a set number of hours. If you have ever heard of intermittent fasting, this is the concept used by that diet trend. Commonly people will do 16 hour fasts with a 8 hour feeding window. This means if you were to stop eating at 8pm, you would not eat your next meal until 16 hours later, being 12pm the following day. The reason this works so well for most people is that it’s hard to significantly over eat in that 8 hour window. You can even prioritize where you intake most of your calories for earlier in the day if you know that you’re more likely to over-indulge at night.
2. Eat 2 servings of vegetables at EVERY meal. When you eat more vegetables with your meal, you are actually filling up on food that is has a low calorie density. This means you have more food with less calories. When you eat more vegetables, and they are not deep fried or prepared with excessive calories, you are limiting the amount of food that you will continue eating the rest of the meal. This helps create a much lower total calorie amount for your meals with the benefit of all the added vitamins and minerals plus fiber.
3. Eat a Higher Protein Diet – protein has been shown to be the most satiating macronutrient. This means that it fills you up faster. I do recommend sticking to more lean sources of protein as the fat can add up calories quicker. Protein sources like lean jerky meats can be a great snack to help keep you from eating too much between meals. Not only will the increased protein intake help fill you up faster and longer, it will also help you better recover from your workouts. For individuals doing resistance training 1 gram per pound of GOAL body weight for those trying to lose weight. You can divvy up your remaining calories however you like between fats and carbs.
4. Serve your meal in stages – this is probably the weirdest one of the bunch for most people. Instead of putting your protein, carbs, and veggies on the plate at once, prioritize the type of food and serve accordingly. I like to plate veggies first, to make sure I eat them, then go back and plate the protein BUT NOT UNTIL I’VE FINISHED THE VEGGIES. Then after the protein is finished I will go and plate the carbs. By splitting the foods up, you increase the time you take to eat which allows your brain to sense that you have eaten. This will decrease the total food intake as you will be come full with less food. If you really want more of something after you’ve gone through all three parts of your meal, then go back and serve up some protein or veggies, and make it a small to moderate sized serving.
5. Eat a BIG ASS SALAD – this is one of my personal favorites to prescribe to clients. Most of my clients have had trouble with late night snacking. My way to combat this was to give them the task of eating one big ass salad for dinner. Feel free to throw some protein on there also! Like we discussed above, vegetables have a very low calorie density, which means you can really eat a lot of them and a low intake of calories. The combination of protein and leafy greens is great for holding you over until the next meal.
Incorporate any or all of these strategies and you will be amazed at how good you feel and how effective the strategies are. If you have any questions or would like to be updated on future articles I have coming out go ahead and subscribe to my email list and the articles will be sent straight to your inbox!
Author: Chris Whalen