Reduce Your Calories Today
I don’t believe in dieting but I think assessing your eating habits regularly is a great practice to be in. When you pay attention to what you are consuming, you may be surprised at how much you actually eat in a day. To help bring awareness to eating habits, I have my Personal Training clients routinely send me food logs or pictures of what they’re eating for us to review together. If it looks like too much of the wrong foods are being eaten, we develop a strategy to turn things around.
I encourage you to track your food for one week to determine if there’s something you should be altering. If you need help getting started with eating cleaner and reducing your calories, here are a few quick and easy tips you can use now.
3 Calorie Cutting Strategies I use:
- Always have roasted veggies on hand! Roast a big pan of seasoned veggies on Sunday. They are the ultimate low-calorie, healthy snack! Once they’re sitting front and centre in your fridge, I promise you, you’ll start nibbling on them at 5pm while your making dinner, or when a late night hunger pang hits. You’ll also probably find yourself adding them to salads, stir fries and casseroles, or eating them as a delicious side dish with ever dinner.
2. Avoid starchy carbs one day a week. Avoid bread, pasta and rice even once a week and you’ll become more creative with your meal choices. You will automatically start increasing your veggie intake on these days. This strategy will decrease your reliance on starchy carbs, leading to you eat less of them moving forward.
3. Find something else to do! We often snack and overeat because we’re bored. If you have an event to leave the house for after dinner, you’ll be less inclined to help yourself to a second plate of supper. If you busy yourself enough, you won’t even think about food later at night.
I try to avoid watching too much TV, because I find just sitting there leads me to want to snack more.
Some of my weeknight activities include:
*going for long walks with my husband or friends
*rock climbing, ice skating or kickboxing
*taking a meditation course or a yoga class
*playing cards or some type of game
Tips for Changing Your Eating Habits
- Keep the change small. To follow through on making a change, you must have 100% confidence you’ll be able to tackle it. You have to believe you can incorporate the eating modification into your regular routine or it won’t happen; you’ll give up before you even begin. That’s why it’s important to keep the change you are focusing on, very small.
- Alter only one thing at once. If you try modifying more than one eating habit at a time, your chance of success goes way down. Put all of your energy into one change and only after you’ve successfully mastered it for two weeks straight, move on to the next challenge!
To Sum it Up…
Dieting isn’t usually successful over the long-term, but assessing your eating habits regularly is a great practice to be in. If you notice you are overeating and consuming too many calories, try always having roast veggies on hand for healthy, low-calorie snacking. Keeping one day a week “starchy carb free” and making yourself busy with activities that don’t involve food, are other ways I limit my calories. What have you done to reduce your calorie consumption? I would love to hear from you below.