Most diets leave a person battling with hunger yet the most effective way to lose weight should not involve any struggle with hunger.

The body needs food to survive and one of the ways the body makes sure that it gets this fuel is through the feeling of hunger. For most people in developed countries, not having enough food is not a problem. Instead, people are more concerned with losing weight and controlling their eating. The body has a fine balance, however, and eating too little by ignoring hunger can lead to gaining weight rather than losing it. This is often what is behind the yo-yo pattern of weight loss and regaining typical of most dieters. Successful weight loss is not a matter of how little a person can eat, but how they balance their eating.

Not only does the body’s metabolism slow down if it’s not fed enough (leading to a body that stores fat readily and burns it more slowly), but ignoring hunger to the point of excess leads to out of control eating. Almost everyone has experienced the feeling of ravenous hunger at one time or another and its resulting feeding frenzy. A slower metabolism and overeating spell weight gain, not loss. Clearly, careful care of hunger is important in any plan for losing weight.

Americans like to eat out a lot. Unfortunately, eating out can get in the way of managing our weight. There are ways, however, to lessen its caloric impact.

Eating out can be fun and flavorful but it can also be fattening. Restaurants are businesses so they are concerned with the bottom line . One of the ways that restaurants get people to return is to make the food irresistibly flavorful. How do they do this? By enhancing the flavor with fat and spices (mostly salt). Fat and salt are inexpensive ways of making food tasty.

When we eat out we have no idea of how much fat, salt, and other ingredients are in the food. We just know whether we like the taste or not. For example, we see that we’re eating chicken but we don’t know how many calories, fat, or salt we’re eating. What we think is a normal meal may prove to be the reason we are frustrated with our weight gain next week.

Restaurant Portions

Another method that restaurants have used to get us to return is by serving extremely large portions. It’s not unusual today to be served enough for four people. Because it’s on our plate we have a tendency to think that it must be a serving for one person, but don’t be fooled – it could be enough for four people.

Frequency of Eating Out and Weight

Americans do like eating out frequently. With our fast-paced lifestyles, some people eat out more than they cook at home. That’s unfortunate because the more we eat out, the harder it is to manage weight.

How to Out-Smart Restaurants

How can we still have fun eating out without ruining our goals for fitness?

• Gradually reduce the number of times that you eat out and replace with quality meals at home.
• Don’t starve yourself all day to compensate for the meal out later. It will make you hungrier and will cause overeating. Eat enough to satisfy during the day but pick foods that are high in nutrition and fiber, and low in fat.
• Reduce or eliminate how much alcohol you drink when eating out as the effects of alcohol will only cause you to eat more and will add more calories.
• Ask for a “doggy bag” at the start of the meal and save part of the meal to have the next day.
• Eliminate the extras such as appetizers and desserts. These only make your “four-person meal” more like a “six person meal.” If you really want the appetizer or dessert then forgo the entree. Decide which is most important to you.

How to Handle Menu Choices

If you’ve done your job of not being too hungry or inebriated when you’re looking at the menu, it should be easy to choose a healthier meal. Here are steps to take:

1. Decide which meal you would really like.
2. Look for the most nutritious (more fiber, more vitamins, less fat, less salt) meal on the menu.
3. Ask yourself if you’d be satisfied with #2. If yes, then order it. If no, go to #4
4. Look for a meal that resembles your first choice but is more nutritious. Ask yourself if you would be satisfied with that choice. If yes, order it. If no, go to #5.
5. If you feel you won’t be satisfied with any of the alternate choices go back to choice #1. Now look for ways to make this meal more nutritious. For example, ask for meat to be baked or grilled instead of fried or saucy, ask for a lower fat vegetable, and don’t put butter on your bread.

It’s easy to gain weight from eating out. The smart ones learn to manage it well.

How to Eat Healthy Food Without Measuring, Weighing, or Counting

Diets that involve rigid measuring, weighing or counting never last. But there are simple and fun ways of improving nutrition without becoming a scholar on the subject.

Who wants to be bothered with studying up on nutrition to eat better or lose weight? Learning about vitamins and minerals, number of servings, and what food qualities affect what body functions can get tedious and boring.

Isn’t There an Easy Way to Improve Nutrition?

You don’t have to be a nutritionist or a biologist to improve your nutrition. All you have to do is:

1. Want to eat better.
2. Understand that learning to eat better is a process and needs to be done one step at a time.
3. Strive for continual improvement rather than perfection.
4. Be willing to experiment.

The 1-2-3′s of Better Nutrition

• One: Food Groups

The first thing to do to improve nutritional intake is to have a general knowledge of food groups. Most people are familiar with what these are:

• Protein/Meat Group-foods such as meats, eggs, beans
• Fruit/Vegetable Group-all fruits and vegetables
• Grains/Cereals Group-breads, pasta, cereals

Although the particular food groups differ depending upon the source, concentrating on the three basic food groups above will get you started in a good direction and keep you from feeling overwhelmed about how much to know. Remember it’s about increasing nutrition, not about perfection. Later, if you wish to learn more and continue to consume higher quality foods you can get into more details. For now, keep it simple. The psychology of change is important to success.

• Two: Color

The most nutritious foods have bright colors. Instead of boring ourselves with what vitamins and minerals are in different foods all we have to do is focus on color in the following ways:

1. Look for foods that have bright colors such as green, yellow, red, orange, and black. Fruits and vegetables are the most colorful foods.
2. Strive to make your plate colorful. A plate that has mainly beige and brown foods is not what we’re looking for. Make it look like a beautiful color wheel.
3. As you approach each meal ask yourself, “What colors have I eaten today? What colors am I missing?”
4. Strive to have a meal where most of the plate is composed of bright-colored foods.

By following the above, your nutrition will improve significantly and you will have had fun doing it. It’s that easy.

• Three: The Comfort Group

These are the foods that give you warm fuzzies – your favorite foods. It’s important to include comfort foods in any eating program as trying to eliminate them completely makes it more difficult to succeed at your goal. It’s one of the main reasons most diets are broken sooner or later. However, the focus here should be to see how your comfort foods can be made more nutritious. For example, if your comfort food is ice cream perhaps you can add colorful berries to add more nutrition and fiber. Experiment with your favorite cookie recipe to see what can be added or eliminated to add nutrition and still keep the flavor. Don’t eliminate these foods – just make them more nutritious.

Finally, experiment with different recipes to see if you can find ways to eat those nutritious foods you don’t like by disguising their flavor with other tastes. Sometimes mixing foods you don’t like with those you like a lot will make the whole dish taste good. Chopping less liked foods into tiny pieces to mix with other foods, also can be tried. Just don’t give up on something nutritious just because you feel you don’t like it. If nothing makes a disliked food taste good don’t eat it, but search for the same color elsewhere. It’s about making nutrition easy and fun.

Disclaimer: The above tips do not replace the advise of your health care professional. Consult with your doctor.

Hunger is a normal body signal.  The body uses hunger to signal when it needs fuel.  It’s possible, however, to mess up this natural and adaptive function and many people do it by stringent, yo-yo dieting and subscribing to dieting myths.

If a person has never dieted they don’t give a second thought to hunger.  They simply eat when they feel hungry and stop when they feel satisfied.  When a person listens to their body’s hunger, they start eating before the hunger gets too uncomfortable for them.  The more intense the hunger, the more the body pushes a person to eat.  After all, it’s the body’s job to try to keep the body alive and food is essential to survival.

The problem comes in when people get in the way of this natural system by doing things like ignoring hunger to avoid eating and or confusing other things such as thirst or emotions for hunger.

Most people can remember a time when they had natural control of food and ate primarily when they were hungry instead of fighting hunger.  Psychologically, the more we try to ignore hunger, the more preoccupied we get with food and the harder it becomes to keep from overeating.

Simple Steps to Control Hunger

There are simple ways to control hunger and they involve paying attention to hunger rather than fighting it. Just follow the simple steps below:

1. Use a hunger rating scale from 0 to 5.  Zero represents no hunger at all, while 5 represents a level of hunger when we feel “famished.”  This is when we have trouble thinking of anything else but food, we might even feel lightheaded, shaky, and irritable.
2. Several times per day, stop and rate your level of hunger at that moment.
3. The goal is to eat whenever your hunger gets to  a 3.  You feel hunger but it’s not intense and you feel in control.
4. Try to prevent hunger from going beyond a rating of 3.
5. If you find your hunger level to be above a 3, eat as soon as possible but focus on eating nutritious combinations of carbohydrates (such as whole wheat crackers) and protein (such as peanut butter, cheese, of low fat meat).  The combination of protein and carbs helps to get your blood sugar back up to a normal level and keeping it there longer rather than spiking up and then crashing again.  Eating only carbs or sugary foods tends to  leads to intense levels of hunger and compulsive overeating.

Hunger is nothing to be afraid of nor should it be ignored.  Controlling hunger is simple.  Feed your body when it’s telling you it needs fuel rather than when it’s screaming at you.  Enjoy.

Does It work to Set Resolutions About Weight?

People get tons of messages at the year’s end that making resolutions to lose weight is a worthwhile endeavor.  If the commercials, the talk show hosts, and the advertised new diets are believed,  making a resolution to lose weight during the new year will guarantee success. Making a New Year’s Resolution implies sincere intent and motivation to “make it really happen this time.”  If there’s ever a time to look to the past, it’s when thinking about making another resolution to lose weight at the start of a new year.

This is the time to ask,

1. Have I made this resolution before?
2. How many times have I made this New Year’s resolution?
3. Has it really worked to make New Year’s resolutions about weight?

If resolutions about weight have been made before and another is being made now, then it probably means the strategy hasn’t been successful.  If it hasn’t been successful, why wasn’t it?

Sometimes people will rationalize by saying, “Yea, but I did lose weight when I made the resolution.  It’s just that I regained it.”  Success with weight is not about how much weight is lost, it’s about losing the weight and not regaining it.  It’s about managing weight well.

The secret that no one is revealing, but is obvious, is that New Year’s resolutions to lose weight don’t work.  Why?  Here are some reasons:

Why New Year’s Resolutions About Weight Don’t Work

1. Most New Year’s resolutions about weight are about the weight itself (“I’m going to lose weight,” “I’m going to lose 20 pounds,” “I’m going to lose enough weight to fit into my wedding dress”) rather than the behaviors that will produce the weight loss such as exercise, eating nutritiously, or reducing portions.
2. Most resolutions about weight are followed by diets that don’t work.  Usually these are diets with quirky names that require the dieter to follow rules that can’t be followed for the rest of their lives.  It’s no wonder that 90% of dieting attempts fail.
3. When deadlines are set for losing weight such as when a person expects to lose weight for an event like a wedding, the focus is temporary and so will be the weight loss.

What Kind of New Year’s Resolutions Work?

It is good to take stock of our lives periodically and the New Year provides a reminder to do just that.  However, the more rigid and overwhelming the resolutions are, the more likely it will be that the goal will never be reached only to be readdressed again the next year.  It’s time to stop spinning wheels and approach life in ways that are positive, long-lasting (even if not fast), and logical.  Here are some tips:

• Set goals about behaviors, not numbers (e.g. “I want to work on increasing my exercise,” “I want to take a nutrition course to learn to eat more nutritiously,” “I want to focus on increasing the amount of veggies and fruit that I eat”).
• Set specific but small goals that are gradually increased.  For example, “I want to add one more day of exercise each week until I reach at least six days per week.”  “I will make a list of different activities that I want to try for exercise and I will try a different one each week.”
• Forget about perfection.  Perfectionism has no place in managing weight.  Actually, it leads to loss of control and failure.  Instead, be ready to learn, accept set backs, but continue on.  It’s about a lifetime of managing weight successfully not about yo-yo dieting for the rest of your life.

So, what’s the best resolution to set this New Year?  It’s the one that says, “I resolve not to set anymore useless resolutions that don’t work.”

Few people who are trying to lose weight find learning about dietary nutrition to be fun despite their desire to eat better.  Along with exercise, eating in a highly nutritious way is important for a lifetime of fitness.  How can someone learn to eat better without getting bogged down by all the nutritional information, however?  Nutrition can be made easy.

It’s as simple as one, two, and three.

One:  The Basic Food Groups

Become familiar with the basic food groups.  These are basically, the Protein/Meat Group (e.g. eggs, chicken, beef, beans), the Fruit/Vegetable Group (e.g. apples, celery, potatoes, kiwis), and the Bread/Cereal Group (e.g. breakfast cereals, whole wheat bread, pasta).

What we want to do here is strive to include all food groups daily.  There’s no need to worry about the number of servings each day.  The goal here is to improve as time goes by.  By focusing on trying to include each food group daily improvement in nutritional intake is achieved.

We also want to try to improve our daily nutritional intake by trying to eat fresher fruits and vegetables, whole grain cereals and pasta, and lower fat proteins.  Perfection isn’t required – just improvement.  Taking small steps from wherever the baseline is will get a person to where they want to be.  Focusing on perfection will get in the way of the goal.  As one focuses on these small steps while eating fresher and heartier foods the caloric content will automatically go down.  There’s no need to be preoccupied with that.

For the brain’s sake, I’ve added another group to the basic food groups that is important because if you’re brain isn’t satisfied it will make it difficult to improve dietary nutrition.  I call this group the Comfort Group.  The Comfort Group includes all favorite foods despite their nutritional qualities.

What we want to do here is to allow ourselves to have something from this group whenever we have a desire for it; however, we also want to improve the nutritional quality of whatever it is we’ve chosen.  For example, if ice cream is the item chosen from the Comfort Group we would strive to increase its nutritional content by adding berries.  By adding berries one increases dietary nutrition, adds another food group to the daily intake, and adds fiber to the chosen food.

Two: Color

By focusing on color a person increases their nutrition with little thought.  The most nutritious foods tend to be colorful.  By choosing foods that have greens, oranges, yellows, reds, purples and black the quality of what is eaten is increased without having much knowledge about the nutritional content of the specific foods.  Now that’s making nutrition easy and simple!

Here are some tips on what to focus on a daily basis with respect to color:

• Strive to make your plate as colorful as possible.
• At each meal ask, “What colors haven’t I included yet?” “How can I make my plate more colorful?”
• Praise yourself for adding more color to your plate.
• Try to create a plate that is at least ¾ colorful as compared to brown, white and beige colors.

Three:  Experiments

Be willing to experiment with foods.  Nobody likes everything.  Instead of discounting a nutritious food because it’s disliked, it’s best to experiment with different recipes to disguise the unpleasant flavor.  There might be a way that the food can be made to taste good.  If a good try with experimenting doesn’t end in a positive result, it’s OK to forget about it.  There are plenty of other nutritious foods to eat even ones with the same color.

Increasing nutrition shouldn’t be frightening or complicated.  Dietary nutrition made easy involves simply focusing on basic food groups, color, and experimenting.

If you want to control your food portion sizes, stop depending just on your will-power and try some of these tips.

Start from where you are – Gradually reduce your portion size so it doesn’t feel so depriving and overwhelming. Going from three scoops of ice cream to two-and-half is going to feel more reachable than going from three to one.

Learn what a normal portion size is – Don’t get bogged down with being accurate. Focus on what a normal portion size is generally, and gradually strive towards it.

Take small steps – If the step you’re taking feels overwhelming, make the goal smaller.

Add color to your plate – Think of your plate like a color palette. Strive to make it as colorful as possible with greens, yellows, oranges, and reds. The more colorful your plate, the more satisfied your brain will be and the less you will eat.

Add fiber – Fiber is filling, making you feel full faster and eat less. Foods such as vegetables, fruits, and whole grains have the most fiber.

Don’t put extra food on the table – When you put serving platters on the table, it bombards the brain with more food cues, and you’ll end up eating more. Leave the extra food in the kitchen.

Use small plates, bowls, and glasses – Smaller plates and bowls make your portion sizes look “fuller” to the brain.  These signals will make the brain feel satisfied with smaller portions.

Slow down – Yes, it’s true. It takes about 20 minutes for your brain to get the message that you are full. If you eat fast, you’ll end up eating more before realizing you’ve had enough. Chew everything well before swallowing, swallow everything before taking another bite, take a sip of water between bites, and especially savor your food.

Wait a little – If you’re not sure if you’re full or not, wait a little (about 20 minutes). Chances are you’ll find out you’ve had enough.

You don’t need to have it all now – Remind yourself that there are no rules about food anymore, so you don’t need to have it all now. You can change your mind at anytime and have more later. It doesn’t have to be now.

Controlling your food portion sizes  is easy if you use the smart tips above.