It’s Not Just What You Eat, It’s How You Eat

One of the most vital elements of weight loss is to have a balanced diet consisting of foods that are high in nutrients and low in saturated fats. But it’s not just what you eat, it’s how you eat too. Timing and the type of eating habits you practice are just as important. So, if you’re wondering why you’re not losing as much weight as you’d like to, the following might be useful for you to keep in mind.

Be aware of how fast you eat

Although this may seem like one of those crazy and farfetched notions, eating too fast often means that you have a higher chance of over eating.  Researchers say that this is because it can take up to 20 minutes for signals to travel from the stomach to the brain to tell it that it’s full. Otherwise, your body has no other way of knowing whether it is satisfied or not.

Tip to adjust your eating speed: Chew slower and make sure that you swallow first before taking the next bite. Also, try not to be the first person at the table to finish.

The time between meals 

SureSlim recommends that you have 3 meals a day with a 5 hour break in between each meal. Research shows that this practice controls the release of insulin in your body, which helps to control your appetite and your craving to excessively over snack. And why is the production of insulin bad? Because it stops the use of fat as an energy source, meaning that our bodies find it harder to burn the fat off, leaving it to be stored in our bodies instead.

Tip to adjust your timing: After the first two hours of eating, your desire to snack usually subsides. But before this time, if you’ve just eaten, you’re probably craving food without your body even being hungry. To offset this, try drinking a big glass of water or try distracting yourself for 10 minutes, as the craving is usually short lived and will go away if you don’t give in straight away.

The way it’s cooked

This may be an obvious one, but the way you cook your food may be adding calories and stripping healthy foods of their nutrients. “You can have a house full of healthy food and still not lose weight” says Dr. Michael Hall, practitioner at St. Mary’s, Pennsylvania. This is because we can transform many healthy foods into unhealthy meals by using the wrong cooking method or by overloading our foods with fats during the cooking process.

Tips to healthy cooking: Think about how you can eliminate fat from your foods as much as possible by taking off all fat and skin, and altering recipes by always replacing the use of sauces with elements such as herbs wherever possible. Also don’t forget to use healthy cooking methods at all times such as steaming or baking to ensure that your proteins and vegetables retain the highest amount of nutrients and flavors.

Losing weight, sticking to healthy foods and avoiding bad habits does take a lot of committment, but in the end we can gaurauntee you’ll feel so much better about yourself and that your body will thank you for it!