BHG Articles

Are you fed up of diet tips given out from someone with obviously infinite money and time? For a few of us, it might not be possible to spend half of our weekend creating carefully portioned meals for the rest of the workweek, or financially feasible to buy all our meals prepackaged in just the right portions. And there are those of us who cringe at the thought of weighing food to achieve ‘optimal portion sizes’. Here are ten real life diet tips for the rest of us.

1. Eating out? Restaurant portions tend to be enormous, and if it’s on the plate, we tend to eat it. If it’s possible, order from the kid’s menu, where portions are more reasonably sized.

2. Keep healthy snacks around and easily accessible. A bowl of fruit on the kitchen table, a container of celery or carrot sticks in the refrigerator, or a couple of pop-open cans of fruit salad in your desk at work will help you grab for something healthy when those first hunger pains begin. In other words, you’ll be more likely to grab something low-calorie and good for you if it’s easy to eat.

3. Substitute canned vegetables for frozen. Canned veggies tend to be high in sodium, which you don’t need, and low in real nutrition, which you do. Frozen vegetables are much better for you. If buy economy size resalable bags it will make it much easy to pour and get the correct size for each serving.

4. Buy a vegetable steamer. Steaming is one of the healthiest ways to cook vegetables. The food retains nearly all of its natural nutrients instead of leaching it out into the cooking water. Even better, it makes your veggies taste great - which means you’ll be more likely to eat them instead of filling up on fatty foods that pack on weight.

5. Never eat standing up. One of the easiest ways to sabotage your diet is to ‘eat without thinking’. Treat eating with the respect that it deserves. Fix yourself a plate. Sit down and eat properly. You’ll be less likely to just pop food into your mouth without paying attention.

6. Spread your meals out. If you eat three meals a day, your body will store what it does not need at that moment. By adopting a ‘grazing’ habit, you will be able to keep your metabolism going throughout the day. Try eating a small breakfast, then one piece of fruit with toast or crackers at mid-morning, a light lunch and an ‘after school snack’ mid-afternoon. All you are doing is breaking up your larger meals into smaller ones, and not ADDING any more food into your diet.

7. Grab a fruit juice or flavored water instead of soda. Soda is nothing but empty calories. Instead, grab some water flavored with some fruit or a bottle of 100% fruit juice.

8. Make sure you drink water. Even the FDA recommends at least 8 full 8 ounce glasses of water a day to keep your body working right. When you’re dieting, you should drink even more.Water can help you to feel full, helps your body to digest food and also flushed out toxins from your system.

9. Can’t afford a gym membership? Make a pact with friends to exercise together. Try playing volleyball, taking a walk or spend half an hour doing something active at very least three times a week.

10. Skip the potato chips. Fatty snacks fried in hydrogenated oil like potato chips contribute fat and calories and not much else. Instead, grab a handful of dried fruit or a cup of yogurt for the same amount of calories and a lot more nutritional benefit.