You know if you want to lose weight, you need to eat less, or eat healthier foods, or use a combination of the two. But there’s one problem. When you’re hungry, no one better get in your way. You gotta eat.
If you want to put a label on the problem, it’s your appetite. Simply put, your appetite is your desire to eat. Whether it’s because you haven’t eaten all day, or you just can’t resist chocolate, your appetite kicks in and nothing can stop you from chowing down.
So, if your appetite more or less forces you to eat, then appetite control is an obvious way to cut back on how much you eat.
But it’s a mistake to think of your appetite as making your weight loss journey more difficult. Your appetite is your body’s way of making sure you get the nutrition and energy you need from your diet. That means you need to be careful about how you control your appetite.
Many popular appetite control methods, like crash diets, can backfire when they deny your body the nutrition it needs to function.
If your goal is weight loss and a healthier lifestyle, you need to find ways to control your diet in a healthy way. Here are just a few to help you get started.
1. Drink Lots of Water
Yes, you hear this all the time, but it really works. The most common trigger for your appetite is hunger. But problems can happen if you eat too fast or too much. Having a glass of water when you’re hungry, or before every meal, is one of the best and healthiest natural appetite control mechanisms you can use.
2. Eat Regularly
While it seems to make sense to cut out a meal like breakfast or lunch to reduce your calorie intake, unless you have incredible discipline to control your eating at other times, skipping meals will usually backfire. Eating regular meals throughout the day, including healthy snacks, will reduce the chance of hunger pangs forcing you to overeat or eat the wrong foods.
3. Eat a Balanced Diet
Your body needs to get its nutrition and energy from a balanced proportion of nutrients. In an unbalanced diet, your body won’t get what it needs, even though you’re consuming the right number of calories. Your body then triggers your appetite to try and get the missing nutrition, which makes you to eat more, even though you already have the recommended number of calories for the day.
4. Be Mindful of Your Eating Habits
Have you ever tried your best to eat a healthy, balanced diet and still not managed to lose any weight? Focusing on what you eat at meal time is just one step on the path. Being more aware of every time and every thing you eat is another. Healthy diets can give you a false sense of security about your eating habits and make you miss those times you reach for sweet or salty snacks when you’re happy, sad or just as a reward.
5. Cut Down on Sugar
If there is anything that is the complete opposite of appetite control, it’s the refined sugars found in processed foods and your sugar bowl. These ‘simple’ carbohydrates are broken down quickly by your body and turned into energy. But most of us don’t burn enough energy to use up all that we get from simple carbs. Without anything to do with it, your body stores that energy as fat.
When you satisfy your appetite with sugary foods, like candy, your body gets almost pure energy and very little else of what it’s looking for. While your appetite might go away temporarily, it’ll soon be back looking for what your body really needs, forcing you to overeat. In that way, eating sugars does little or nothing to control your appetite.
If you need help to control your appetite, proven, high quality appetite control supplements, like those you’ll find at your nearest Herbal One Centre, are an effective option.