Small diet changes add up: part three. A few small changes in your diet every month could help you cut some calories and also make it easier to keep weight off.
Read part one and part two of this series to discover how small changes to your diet can add up to big results and help you meet your nutrition and weight loss goals.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been recommending that you make a few small changes in your dietary habits every month. The thinking behind this strategy is pretty simple. Often when people are eager to get some weight off, they try to tackle too many big changes at one time – and they simply can’t do it.
Instead, I’ve been recommending a slower, gentler approach – one that calls for a few dietary tweaks every month. The reasoning is simple: over time, small dietary changes become a part of your everyday eating habits, which means they’re more likely to stick – and, when added together, the calories you save from a handful of small changes can make a big difference.
Making Small Changes in Your Diet
Over the past couple of months, I suggested some ways to save calories by decreasing your sugar intake, or your fat intake, or by controlling the size of your portions. Hopefully, you’ve found a few small diet changes that you’ve been able to incorporate into your daily life – and that they’re working for you. If you’re ready to tackle a few more, here are three more small changes you can think about working on this month.
Small Change #1: Eat More Slowly
Eating more slowly allows you more time to really enjoy your food – and your digestive tract will probably thank you, too. But for people who eat quickly, learning to slow down can be really difficult. When clients tell me that they usually finish their meals long before everyone else at the table, I ask them to work towards taking at least 15 minutes to finish a plate of food – which, to them, is an eternity. But as they keep working at it, they often find that longer, slower meals often help them to control their intake.
Why it Works: There are several reasons why this strategy may help. When you eat more slowly, you’re eating more “mindfully” – that is, you pay more attention to your meal and all the pleasurable aspects of it. When you eat mindfully, your meals may be more satisfying, which means you might be able to eat less and enjoy it more. Also, when you eat quickly, it’s often a sign that you’ve allowed yourself to become overly hungry – and hungry people tend to dig into the highest calorie foods on their plates first. If you take your time and focus on what you’re doing, you can start with the lowest calorie foods in your meal (your salad, a broth-based soup, or the veggies) and fill up on those first. Overall, you may end up eating less. Another thing that slower eating allows you to do is to consume more water between bites – which may also help to fill you up.
Small Change #2: Aim for Two (or two more!) Fish Meals Per Week
It’s often recommended that you aim for a couple of fish meals per week, in order to get the health benefits from the omega-3 fatty acids that fish and seafood contains. But, many people don’t eat fish nearly that often (See my post on “how to eat more fish” for tips on how to get more fish into your diet). Eating more fish, including seafood not only helps to improve the quality of your diet, it might also help you save some calories, since fish are typically lower in calories than other protein sources.
Why it Works: As long as it’s not cooked with a lot of fat, most fish and seafood have fewer calories per serving than meats or poultry – trading a serving of steak for some grilled seafood could save you a couple hundred calories. One study1, has even suggested that fish – when compared with other animal sources of protein – may have more “staying power”. So, eating fish instead of beef or chicken might not only save you calories at thatmeal – it might also help you to eat less at your next meal, too.
Small Change #3: Switch from Refined Grains to Whole Grains
Whole grains (foods like quinoa, rolled oats, brown rice, whole wheat pasta and 100% whole grain bread) – offer you more nutritionally than refined grains like white bread, white rice and traditional pasta. That’s because whole grains naturally contain fiber, vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients that are mostly stripped away when the grains are processed. But switching from refined grains to whole grains could also help you control calories too, since they are more filling.
Why it Works: There are several reasons why eating whole grains rather than refined grains can help with weight management. First, whole grain foods may be more filling than refined grains, since they generally have a higher fiber content. Higher fiber foods also take longer to digest than refined carbohydrates, which gives them more staying power. And, many whole grain foods tend to have fewer calories per serving than their refined counterparts – a one-cup (140g) serving of cooked whole wheat spaghetti has 175 calories, but the same amount of “white” refined spaghetti has 220; a cup of cooked white rice (150g) has about 200 calories, while the same amount of brown rice has about 155. While those amounts may not sound like much, when you make these changes consistently, they can add up to significant savings over the course of a week.
1Borzoei S et al. Eur J ClinNutr, 60, 897, 2006.
Written by Susan Bowerman, MS, RD, CSSD, FAND. Susan is a paid consultant forHerbalife.
