In order to control your appetite, you have to know what are the right ways to feel full.
Well, sometimes the body sends hunger signals for the wrong reasons. This article talks about the need to feel full as a strategy to control appetite, showing a series of tips to eat less and not gain weight.
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Feel full: 10 tips to eat less (and not gain weight)
Feeling full is essential to control what you eat . This is one of the great secrets to gain control over food, and it is that when you feel full you can eat less and avoid gaining weight.
Some of the advice in this article may seem surprising at first, but it actually makes perfect sense if you think about it. Science has been in charge of demonstrating that through these steps you can control your appetite much more.
1. Ingest fiber
Eating fiber is surely the most important tip to feel full . Fiber is a type of carbohydrate that the human body cannot digest, so it occupies volume in the digestive tract without providing calories. This makes the stomach fuller, so the signals sent to the brain are that there is no more to eat.
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2. Drink water
Water also helps to promote the feeling of satiety . In addition to being very important to stay hydrated for the general health of the body, regularly drinking water is good for controlling hunger. It helps mitigate the sensations of great hunger that can appear, and drinking a little water while eating is also recommended.
3. Eat foods rich in water
Water is even more interesting when associated with food . There are foods that contain very little water, which means that they have very little volume and sometimes you eat more than you should. Water has no calories, so eating a vegetable soup or gazpacho can be an excellent idea to control what you eat and feel full.
4. Bet on real food
In order not to gain weight, it is very important to bet on real food . This means going back to eating foods such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes, etc. in its natural form. Today, most people do their weekly shopping at the supermarket, but it is common to end up buying unhealthy food products.
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5. Avoid refined
When choosing what to eat, it is important to avoid refined foods . These are the result of a food having gone through a process that removes the fiber. And fiber takes up bulk in the stomach, but it also slows down sugars from food into the blood. Therefore, for example, it is better to eat brown rice than white rice.
6. Avoid certain high-calorie foods
The caloric density of some foods can be dangerous . Normally this is related to some previous points, and in many cases it is about refined food products. These lots are often low in water and low in fiber, so for every gram there are a lot of calories. However, it is advisable to consume moderate amounts of foods such as nuts, extra virgin olive oil, etc.
7. Eat foods rich in micronutrients
The micronutrients that a food contains give it nutritional value . Foods rich in vitamins and minerals are essential to ensure the health of the body. That is why it is important to eat reasonable amounts of foods with high caloric density but rich in these nutrients and to avoid products with “empty” calories (they provide energy but not micronutrients).
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8. Don’t eat in a hurry
There are many people who tend to eat very quickly . This is detrimental for different reasons. For starters, when you eat fast you don’t get to chew your food well, and you can also swallow air. But perhaps the worst thing is that the body is not given time to send the satiety signals to the brain and receive its inhibition response to eat. This means that for a few minutes you can eat more than you should.
9. Plan meals
By planning meals it is much easier to achieve healthy eating habits . Preparing the menus is important in order not to eat too much. For example, it is highly recommended to prepare a dish with what you are going to eat and not repeat different quantities and add things later. Human beings are visual beings, and eating what is on a plate of food helps to understand that you should not eat more.
10. Reduce anxiety
There are people who eat too much due to anxiety . Somehow they have established the fact of eating as their small reward, an act that calms the anxiety they experience during the day to day. This relationship with food is very dangerous, since it makes people not tend to plan meals and eat food in a much more indiscriminate way.
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Bibliographic references
- De Araujo, IE, Gutierrez, R., Oliveira-Maia, AJ, Pereira, AJ, Nicolelis, MA and Simon, SA (2006). Neural ensemble coding of satiety states. Neuron, 51(4), 483-494 .
- Marieb , E. , & Marieb , E. (2010). Human anatomy & physiology. (Eighth edition). San Francisco: Pearson Benjamin Cummings.
- Pinel, J.P.J., Assanand, S. y Lehman, D.R. (2000). Hunger, eating, and ill health. American Psychologist. 55: 1105–1116.
To the classic question “what do you do?” I always answer “basically I am a psychologist”. In fact, my academic training has revolved around the psychology of development, education and community, a field of study influenced my volunteer activities, as well as my first work experiences in personal services.