Eat Breakfast
Eat breakfast if you want to stay healthy and slim. A study from Harvard University suggests that people who eat breakfast daily may be less likely to succumb to obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, reports Reuters. Why? Eating breakfast regularly helps control your appetite throughout the day, which means you're less likely to overeat later. In addition, a good breakfast helps regulate the body's blood sugar. What you eat is just as important as making sure you eat. The best breakfast foods are whole grain cereals.
Drink Milk
Drink milk. Eat yogurt. Snack on cheese. Low-fat dairy products may help control body fat, according to the Nutrition Institute at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. How? Lead researcher Michael Zemel says that a diet rich in low-fat dairy foods will change the way the body's fat cells do their job. "A diet high in low-fat dairy causes fat cells to make less fat and turns on the machinery to break down fat, which translates into a significantly lower risk of obesity," he explained in a news release announcing the study results. In other words, dairy foods burn fat.
Get Enough Sleep
Forget the complicated diets. Just go to bed. Researchers from the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk conducted a very complex study to arrive at a stunningly simple conclusion: If you don't get enough sleep regularly, you will gain weight. Treat yourself to adequate sleep each and every night, and you'll have a far greater likelihood of staying thin. The researchers found that as sleep time decreased, the body mass index increased, especially for people who were already obese, reports Reuters. And it doesn't take much sleep deprivation to make a big difference. On average, those of normal weight slept just 16 minutes more per day--or almost two hours a week--than the heavier participants.
Eat Foods That Control Your Appetite
The cold and ugly truth about weight loss is that you will be hungry some of the time. While there are many tactics to reduce hunger--from avoiding refined carbohydrates to meal-timing strategies--the best may be finding food and beverages you can consume when you're feeling intense hunger pains that don't have a lot of calories, reports NewsTarget.com.
These 5 foods really do control your appetite and suppress cravings--without adding calories:
- Water or broth
- Green leafy vegetables, including lettuce, cabbage, and bokchoy
- Homemade instant banana pudding
- Pickles
- Apples
Portion Control
Portion distortion will bust even the best diet. It's how much you eat--more than what you eat--that makes you fat. Eat too much of anything and you'll get fat. We have a problem with portion distortion. If your serving of meat is larger than a cassette tape or your baked potato is bigger than a computer mouse, you're eating too much.
