High fibre foods make you feel full faster, so they help you to stop eating sooner. You’ll fill up quicker with wholemeal bread than with white bread, for example (and it’s better for you). The same goes for wholewheat pasta and brown rice.
You can take this one stage further. As well as substituting more fibrous foods for what you’d normally eat, you can add (low calorie) fibre to your cooking in order to fill you up faster. So cook with wholemeal flour, and add beans or peas to soups and stews. Chuck a handful of pearl barley in your casserole, or chop up an apple to add to your salad.
Food that has a high water content fills you up quicker and helps you to feel fuller for longer. All you have to do is turn your vegetables into soup, or your fruit into smoothies, and it will help deter you from eating other things.
If you’re eating out at a restaurant, order soup as your starter and you’ll find it easier to say no to extras with your main course, or to leave food that you don’t need on your plate. Or, of course, to pass on pudding.
You can make a great breakfast smoothie with banana, milk, a handful of oats and a blender. It’s as good as porridge and it will fill you up really well to get you through the morning.
Drink Your Food
But not lots and often. I don’t know about you, but I was brought up on three square meals a day, and told ‘you shouldn’t eat between meals’. Well, it turns out this isn’t so (yippee!). You actually need to eat every three or four hours to keep your blood sugar level stable. If this level drops too far, you’ll get an urge to eat – preferably something sweet – in order to give you energy. And that’s when you head for the biscuit tin…
There’s some research to show that people who eat several times throughout the day are slimmer than those who eat just a couple of meals. And more research, incidentally, suggesting that snacking throughout the day can help lower cholesterol. In other words, a mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack will actually help you lose weight.
