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1. Shop with a Grocery List
Researchers confirm that planning your shop makes it easier to avoid less healthy impulse food purchases. Shopping online can help too.
2. Get Good Quality Sleep
Inadequate sleep can affect appetite controlling hormones, making you more likely to overeat. The best way to get a good night's sleep is to stick to a schedule. Avoid drinking alcohol and exercising right before bedtime.
Keep your bedroom cool, dark and calm, and find ways to unwind that don't involve screens.
3. Snap Your Snacks in Half
Fifteen minutes after you've eaten your snack, you'll feel just as satisfied as if you'd eaten the whole thing, and you can then decide if you really want more or not.
4. Avoid Eating on the Go
It upsets your 'food memory, which means the next meal or snack time you could eat much more than you otherwise would.
5. Up your Water Intake
Drinking two glasses of water before each meal can make it easier to stick to a healthy portion size when you eat your meal.
6. Eat 25g Protein at Breakfast
A CSIRO report has found eating at least 75g a day helps deliver weight loss, and that consuming 1/3 of your protein at breakfast is key.
7. Downsize your Plate
It can help you avoid eating more than your body needs. Use the ideal plate at healthyfood.com as a guide to what healthy portions look like and use a plate that's no more than 25cm wide.
8. Pick and Stick to an Exercise Time
Increasing physical activity at the same time as making a few food related changes helps us maintain or reach a healthy weight better than either strategy on its own.
A study found that people who exercise at roughly the same time each day also do the most activity.
9. Eat a Small Handful of Almonds Daily
Eating a daily 40g serve of almonds has been linked to a reduction in excess stomach fat.
Too much stomach fat is associated with increased risk of inflammation, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, asthma and arthritis, compared with excess fat on hips and thighs.
10. Read Food Labels
People who read food labels to choose food products tend to weigh less than those who never bother reading the nutrition information.
11. Practice Leaving the Table Satisfied- but Not Full
There's a difference between not feeling hungry anymore and feeliing stuffed to the brim.
Practice listening to your stomach as you eat and try to finish on a hunger scal of 7/10 with 0/10 being starving and 10/10 being full-to-absolutely bursting.
12. Eat Mindfully
Remove distractions at mealtimes, so you can focus on how your body feels. Sit down at the table and really enjoy the look, smell and texture of every bite of your meal.
Try to slow your eating down as this will help you tune into your appetitIe signals and realise when you are starting to feel full.
Taking smaller mouthfuls, chewing each bite 20 times and pausing between forkfuls leaves you feeling fuller because the hormones that signal your fullness have more time to get through to your brain.
13. Check your Stress
Stress can derail your weight-loss success. It increases your body's production of cortisol, promoting fat storage and triggering less healthy food cravings.
The best type of stress management is exercise. Take up something you enjoy but make sure to mix things up, as doing the same routine every day is a sure-fire way to get bored.
14. Timing Matters
A current fad is intermittent fasting. This means often breakfast is the first to be scrapped to cut calories and shorten the time you eat throughout the day.
But when you eat and how much you eat at each meal matters, and its breakfast that's the most important.
Controlled research studies have shown this is the time when your body best uses the calories you put in- in fact, it burns the calories from a meal two-and-a-half times more efficiently in the morning compared with the evening.
So load up your breakfast, and eat a reduced sized evening meal earlier than usual.
15. Have What you Really Want so You're Satisfied
There's no point in choosing to eat yoghurt or a piece of fruit if you really want some chocolate- you'll feel cheated!
Have that piece of chocolate (just not the whole block!) and make sure to savour every moment of it.
16. Plan your Meals
In a US study, people who bought their lunch immediately after they'd eaten breakfast consumed fewer kilojoules than people who decided what to eat for lunch at lunchtime. Think ahead!
17. Before You Eat, Ask Yourself if You're Really Hungry
There's the grumbling empty-tummy hunger and then there's the ' I'm bored and need distraction' hunger. If you're not actually hungry, ask yourself why you want to eat.
Is there something else you could do instead? Try stepping outside for some fresh air or making a phone call you've been meaning to make for a while.
18. Organise your Fridge
What you see first is what you're most likely to reach for, so store treat foods out of sight, while putting healthy options at eye level in the fridge and pantry.
Cut up raw vegie sticks to snack on, portion out handfuls of mixed nuts and keep fresh fruit and your favourite yoghurt at the ready to make choosing healthier snacks easier.
19. It's Okay to Have an Imperfect Meal or Snack
You eat three meals a day, seven days a week. If one or two of those meals aren't perfectly healthy, it's no big deal!
20. Divide your Plate into Four
Fill two quarters of it with non-starchy vegies, one quarter with a wholegrain carbohydrate and the final quarter with a serve of healthy, lean protein.
People who did this for 6 months were three times more likely to lose 5% of their body weight.
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