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When we think about weight loss, we often think about eating healthy food, exercise, and every weight loss scheme out there (laxatives, new protein bars and powder, pills, sweating in the sauna, etc. etc. etc.)
But the reality of weight loss is that it mostly requires us to deprogram ourselves from the unhealthy eating habits that we have adopted. If you sink back into the same habits and learned behaviours; you will not only gain the weight back. You, also, won’t learn how to develop healthy eating habits that could serve not only for weight loss but for the well-being of your overall health for the rest of your life.
Today, I have combined a list of the 5 easiest eating habits to lose weight, but most importantly to help you incorporate and stick with these healthy eating habits far beyond weight loss.
1. Eat and chew slowly
Eating and chewing slowly sounds easy right?
Wrong.
As we are becoming an increasingly fast-paced society, who has the time to chew slowly?
Listen, unless I am at a fancy restaurant and trying to follow polite etiquette… I can scarf down food in under a minute. Did I chew or did I just swallow? I would never even know, it unconsciously went down.
When I was in university, I had no time to eat all day and went I finally got to eating my healthy meal – I ate it (I’m not joking) under two minutes. All the food was gone and I was still hungry.
This is why you need to be conscious of the speed of your eating. If others tell you “wow you eat so fast” or “wow you eat so slow” those could be good telling markers. You can also compare yourself (speed wise) to how quickly or slowly others eat.
Eating and chewing slowly allows you to fully masticate and process food correctly. And therefore helps you to enjoy your food and not feel rushed or stressed while eating. It also allows your body to digest better.
These are all winning scenarios!
So why do we eat so quick?
Because food corporations want you to consume and consume and consume and snack and snack and snack. And you can only do that when you eat quick, when you’re in a rush to eat, and when you never feel full.
However, when you do take your time to eat, you will also see your appetite decrease because you’re slowly going to start getting signals from your brain telling you that you’re full.
When you eat quickly, you tend to eat more food per second (food/s). And when the food is all gone on your plate; your brain and body haven’t processed all that food. That’s why you tend to have more food on your plate or even get yourself second helpings even when you’ve ate more than enough.
Therefore, eating and chewing slowly would reduce your calorie intake. Plus, you get to enjoy all of your meals fully. It is the least you could do for yourself, for your body and your health, considering how busy and fast-paced we’ve become.
Next time you eat, think to yourself if fast food is bad, fast eating is just as bad for my body.
You need to be conscientious to develop the habit of eating and chewing slowly.
2. Drink a lot of water and green tea
Listen up folks. We are literally composed of water. Those water molecules, yeah, they keep you alive. And they’re in your blood stream too. We are walking bodies of wat-ahhhh.
SO WHY ARE YOU NOT DRINKING WATER?????
This is something I can not wrap my head around. Don’t people get dehydrated???
In all honesty, sometimes you’re not even hungry; you’re thirsty. And you’re thirsty for that delicious water. I dare YOU to drink a glass of water right now. Go do it. And come back to this post.
Do you feel better? Yes? No?
Either way, drink more water.
If you drink water before and after a meal as well as throughout the day; you will feel yourself much more full and replenished.
Like I said, a lot of the time you’re not hungry; you’re actually dehydrated. The next time you feel ravenous, ask yourself first, “When was the last time I drank water?” Drink a glass of water and then eat.
Personally, in the morning, when I wake up, I feel so hungry. But then I reach for my bottle of water and drink the whole thing and I go “Ahhhhh much better.” And then I totally forget that I was hungry. In reality, I was more thirsty than anything.
If I haven’t convinced you about drinking water, let me try to appeal to your vanity (you leave me no choice.) Water makes you young and beautiful (ok that’s maybe a stretch) but it does help the health of your skin and overall your body.
Also, the next time you have a hangover just know us water drinkers won’t have the same hangover as you because in fact, we are drinking water and recompensing for that lack of oxygen in our brain and blood cells.
How do you think I’m writing this blog post this morning after having a bottle of wine last night? Because I drank thrice the amount of wat-ahhhh.
Furthermore, if you drink a lot of caffeine, you need to replenish your body with water.
Also, drink a cup of green tea per day. It is said that green tea helps to reduce fat and enhance brain function. As well as it helps your metabolism.
Honestly, drink water and green tea – this shouldn’t be a debate. If you need to make a conscious efforts write it down in your calendar or your to-do list.
I drink a lot of water and tea and I still write down my goal to drink 3 bottles of water a day and 1 large cup of green tea at night.
What’s your excuse?
If you don’t drink water, I will cry, and ergo, I will have to drink more water. 💧
3. Portion control
Portion control is key because or else we tend to overeat (especially if we eat quickly as mentioned above.)
A good rule to follow is the recommended serving size listed in the nutrition facts of the foods you are consuming. If you notice that you go overboard in all of the nutritional facts labels, then you start to understand that you are overeating in your portions.
We tend to overeat when we are unconscious about food and our eating habits. But sometimes even when we are conscious, we still eat too big portions even of the ‘healthy foods.’
Other ways you can portion control is by using a food scale. Linked below is the food scale that I have been using for years. I don’t weigh everything anymore because I more or less know the calories and the weight of a lot of the common foods that I eat.
But some food items that I do not want to eat too much of or that I am not too sure how much I should be taking; I still use my trusty scale. I also use it for making the recipes on my site. You can browse my recipes here.
A third tip to portion control is to use smaller plates. Do this as an experience for yourself to see if this works for you. Migrate the food that would normally be on your regular/large sized plate and add it to a smaller plate. It becomes much more revealing to you how much we eat and consume.
When you fill your small plate fully with food, you send the message from your eyes to your mind that you have more than enough food.
I also want to add in a quick disclaimer that not every calorie is the same calorie. As in, I wouldn’t eat 50g of romaine lettuce and 150g of chicken. Because, first of all, the calories of the chicken far outweighs the lettuce.
So when we portion control we should be mindful and allow ourselves more leeway for greens. But I would definitely portion control carbs, meat, dairy, and fruits. Because if you look at fruits – with the exemption of berries – you will see the crazy amount of sugar and carbohydrates in some fruits… and yikes. Portion control could save you from all that sugar.
4. Meal prep
Don’t roll your eyes at me. Meal preparations is so important. Even simply having an actionable meal plan for the days you don’t have a meal prepared for yourself, can go a long way.
When you prepare meals, you lessen your tendency to eat out, to eat junk and/or to snack mindlessly, basically to overeat and choose the wrong foods and portions, etc.
Weight loss is about calorie in vs. calorie out, hence why, as we’ve seen so far, you need to develop the healthy eating habits of:
- Chewing slowly
- Drinking more water
- Controlling portions
When you meal prep, you have an even better control on your portions. Also, when you meal prep you gain exactly that understanding of portion control and the calories and nutritions of the food you’re consuming daily. If you have the same meal and portion for one week; you can see if that meal and its portions are working for you.
Furthermore, meal prep allows you to try new recipes and meals because often times we are too tired and lazy on weekdays (rightly so) to make something new.
When you make a meal plan and meal prep, you get all the ingredients and use all of the ingredients at your disposal to make a new recipe in a one time effort of cooking. And then voilà, you just have to separate the recipes in boxes for the different days for your week.
You can use these reusable meal prep boxes. A lot of boxes even have portion control features for you as they are split in 3 parts, in which, the largest parts should be greens, while the smaller parts should be split equally between protein and carbohydrates/fibres (as shown below).
5. Once a week cheat meal
Having a cheat meal once a week will actually confuse and shock your body. This is good because it actually kickstarts your metabolism since it has becomes used to clean healthy eating.
Your body is trying to keep you at a level in which you do not lose/gain weight. But when you incorporate healthy or harmful eating habits as well as play with your calories in or out; your body has no choice but to adapt.
Once in a while, having more carbs in one meal shouldn’t effect you.
I see this with my mother. She follows the Ketogenic lifestyle but once in a while she will have a full plate of rice and the next day; she actually loses weight rather than gains.
Note that I said once a week cheat meal not a cheat day. Having a whole cheat day every week makes it much harder for your body to recover, especially if you are trying to lose weight instead of maintaining/gaining weight.
Equally, your one cheat meal shouldn’t be 3000 calories worth. That’s insane. The point of losing weight is to have less calorie in than out throughout the week. And if you consume all that in one meal… I need to warn you; you’re in for a bad bad bad realization.
If your cheat meal is hypothetically an extreme of 3-5000 calories, then you won’t hit your calorie deficit that you’ve been working during the entire week of meal prep and portion control. All of the other days of the week will go to waste from that one meal if you overly indulge.
For the cheat meal, I would still try to keep it as healthy as possible. As in having more carbs or having a slice or two of pizza (not a whole pizza) in which you normally wouldn’t be having.
I have noticed that others (and myself included) tend to undo all the healthy eating habits of the week days when the weekend comes around. And that becomes discouraging because you re-enter a cycle of starting over every week without actually progressing or truly learning how to incorporate healthier eating habits for the rest of your life.
I hope these 5 easy healthy eating habits to lose weight will help you in not only your weight-loss journey but most importantly to sustain your healthy living.
Let me know what are some of the healthy eating habits you’ve incorporated in your life. Were they easy or hard to undertake? Do you still consciously think of these healthy eating habits or have they become second nature to you?
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