Losing weight does not have to be a chore. You can lose weight by changing some of your old habits. I’ve already discussed in previous articles about making lifestyle changes you can live with. I’ve also written about activity. Today I want to talk about listening to your body’s signals. Many of us love food. Eating is enjoyable. We socialize with food. It’s perfectly okay to socialize with food, but at the same time we need to listen to what our body tells us.
How many of us are guilty of eating until we are full? How many of us go beyond the signal that we are full and continue to eat, just because there is food remaining on the dish? Many of us have become accustomed to the way it feels to be full, and we are not satisfied until we get that busting the gut feeling. This is one habit we should work on breaking. What if you were to stop eating the moment your brain gives the signal you are done? There would be a lot less obese people walking around if we all did this.
It might help you to actually pay attention to how you feel when you are hungry, full, or when you feel like you’ve had just the right amount of food to feel satisfied. As most people know I am a member of Weight Watchers. On our food trackers we have a little graph to track our hunger/satiety experiences throughout the day. You go in your tracker and put a little dot on the graph throughout the day to track how you feel.
When I first started tracking my hunger/satiety level I was hungry more often. However, after a few days of eating more filling foods my hunger decreased and my satiety increased. Now I am rarely hungry, except when it is meal time. If I do feel an urge to snack on something I snack on something healthy, like an ounce of mixed nuts. I do keep some other snacks around for those times when I want something sweet or salty. I buy a big bag of pretzels and place 48 pretzel sticks in a Zip lock snack bag. 48 pretzels are just 100 calories. It’s perfectly fine to snack on your favorite foods in moderation. The worst thing you can do is just sit down with a full bag of treats and eat mindlessly. Put some thought into your choices, and the portions you want to have. Make the snacks up ahead of time and arrange them in a snack bowl so when you need a snack you can pick up a snack that is just about 100 calories. I allow myself to have 3 – 100 calorie snacks per day.
When you dole up your snacks into 100 calorie (approximately) packs you won’t have an urge to eat a whole bag of trail mix, pretzels, M & M’s or whatever. Find out what a serving is. If an 8 ounce bag of M & M Peanuts is 876 calories, then a serving of 1 ounce would be 109.5 calories. You could just round that one ounce off at 110 calories and pop that ounce of M & M Peanuts into your Zip lock snack bag. It makes so much more sense to me to make changes you can live with, than trying to deprive yourself of everything that you like. Portion size is one of the biggest lifestyle changes one can make. We often have no idea what our portion size should be. We only know that a portion is how much we put on our plate. The fact is, our ‘portion’ may actually be as many as 3 portion sizes.
Since I have been paying attention to portion sizes, and listening to my body’s hunger/satiety cues I have felt much better. I’ve not been overly hungry. I believe the more we eat, the more we want to eat. This is especially true when we are eating foods and treats that are laced with sugar and fat. Sugar stimulates insulin production. Increased levels of insulin stimulate hunger. Watching your portion sizes will help your hunger/satiety level stay in balance. Remember, this is NOT a diet. This is just health eating, and healthy lifestyle choices.
