For losing weight, it is important to practice healthy and clean eating. Dieting shouldn’t be seen as a short-term weight loss goal. There might be faster and riskier ways of losing weight than dieting, but the results would be temporary and there might be undesirable side effects. Straightening out unhealthy eating habits can probably be considered as the first step to a healthy lifestyle and weight loss of course. If you are specifically trying to shed extra weight, check out the weight loss diets on Rati Beauty app that help you start on the right kind of food and eating practices to lose weight. In this post, we list down 10 eating habits that hamper weight loss and why you should tidy them out.
1. Eating Fewer Home-cooked Meals: Ordering food from outside leaves you with little control over ingredients and the type of oil used. These meals would also be high in calories with excess salt content, easily adding more pounds to your existing weight. Also, when you consume meals at restaurants, they usually have larger portion sizes that can create calorie surplus in the body. Check out the various meal recipes on Rati Beauty that are quick to prepare and low in calories.
2. Substituting Healthy Fats with Low and Fat-Free Food: Not all fats are created equal! Healthy fats are an essential part of anyone’s healthy diet because they help to absorb fat-soluble vitamins and nutrients, increase metabolism, reduce insulin spikes and prevent fat storage. On the other hand, when fat content is ripped away, it leaves food bland and tasteless, and to make it appealing to the palate – lots of sugar, refined flour, emulsifiers, and thickeners are added – all these ingredients increase the calorie content to a great extent. So, avoid transfat, saturated fat, and get a good dose of healthy fats, and avoid fat-free versions of processed food. Read “How Eating Fats Can Make you Thin” in this post.
3. Eating Food Too Quickly: When you eat too fast, your brain doesn’t get the signal to stop once you are full and that would mean that you would tend to eat more frequently than you actually require. Another interesting fact is that the brain takes about 20 minutes to register that you have eaten food and by slowing down, you can actually reach satiation point, maybe halfway through the meal itself, which would prevent building up of extra calories. A slow-paced meal will make you think that you have eaten a good amount of food. When you eat too quickly, you actually lose count of the food intake and gradually put on weight.
4. Avoid Multi-tasking While Eating: Watching TV, reading, whatsapping on the phone would distract you from the kind of food you are eating and the quantity. You would most probably overeat while being distracted. Eat in peace, chew slowly, eat mindfully, and savour each bite.
5. Eating without Portion Control: Portion control is essential to stop piling on the pounds, even if it’s a festival. Do not go for second servings, eat from a small plate. Here are 10 Tips to Portion Control for Weight Loss.
6. Not Drinking Enough Water: Not reminding yourself to sip on water throughout the day, can trigger hunger signals and lower down the metabolism. Frequent hunger pangs are most probably caused due to dehydration and if you can provide your body with more H2O, you can lose weight rather effectively. Do not limit water intake to just 8 glasses of water per day, drink as much as you can!
7. Too Many Salty and Sugary Snacks: These snacks contain unhealthy ingredients and are high on salt, leaving you dehydrated and creating bloating and water retention. Avoid sugary delights as well because excess sugar leads to build up of calories which later get stored as fat in tissues. Since your goal is losing weight, consuming sugar is not in option. According to a survey, the recommended dosage of sugar for an adult is 2 tablespoons per day. Consuming more could effect your weight loss goal. Almost every dietician would recommend switching refined sugar with stevia when losing weight. Sugar undoubtedly causes weight gain, obesity and other diseases and hence is not recommended for weight watchers. Tip- When you experience low energy levels and cant binge on sugar, try jaggery (Indian gud) or organic honey in your tea, coffee, juice etc to increase your energy levels.
8. Liquid calories through Fruit Juices/Packaged Juice: It’s wrong to assume that liquids such as fruit juices, are healthy, and would not add many calories. In fact, liquid calories get easily digested without the fiber content, raising insulin levels and the subsequent energy slump would leave you craving for more food, and in that way, would be adding more calories to the diet. Also, it’s a bit difficult to keep track of calories with liquids. Eat your fruit raw and in the fresh form always.
9. Too Many Empty Calories in the Day: If you eat a lot of processed food through the day, such as candies, pasta, white bread, chocolates, cakes, biscuits, pastries, soft drinks, energy drinks, they all build up empty calories in the body, completely bereft of nutrients. These empty calories quickly add up, raising energy levels sharply and then the subsequent energy crash can leave you hungry, craving for more of such unhealthy food. All these empty calories can cause rapid weight gain.
10. Eating out of Packets: If you love chips, cookies, and ice creams, and cannot even dream about giving them up, a better way to healthy eating would be to serve them up in a small plate or bowl instead of eating directly out of their packets or package. It’s easy to lose track of portion control when eating directly out of boxes, and that’s why it’s important to shun this extremely unhealthy eating habit to lose weight.
How Eating Fats Can Make you Thin
10 Tips to Portion Control Food for Weight Loss
