When it comes right down to it, the only way to really manage, and also maintain, a healthy weight, is to make sure you are managing the amount of total calories you are consuming in a day. Sure, this means that ideally you aren’t eating junk like McDonalds, but only restricting it to one single meal a day.
Rather, the ideal way to lose weight and keep it off is to eat several times a day, so you actually feel GOOD and can keep it off because you can function well and keep your blood sugar stable by eating foods which support healthy blood sugar levels and don’t make you ravenous.
One of the ways to do this is to eat high fiber foods. If you eat high fiber foods, you are actually eating less calories without even realizing it, because these foods tend to be so filling. High fiber, low cal foods are things like salads made with spinach leaves, a nice pureed sqash soup, carrots, apples, and other leafy greens and high fiber fruits.
Generally, adding a lot of fruits and veggies to any meal will reduce the overall caloric intake while simultaneously filling your belly and stabilizing blood sugar, which is great for dieting since it controls appetite while also controlling cravings for bad foods.
One way to sneak these types of foods in is to actually puree them or cut them into very small pieces and add them to your entrees. An example of this trickery is to make a veggie lasagna with whole grain pasta for the lasagna noodles, with sparse amounts of low fat cheese but an abundance of finely diced veggies.
This not only ups the fiber count and fills you up more, but it also helps to add to the “bulk” of the meal without adding to the calorie content, since most veggies are historically low in calories but add a lot of flavor and a lot of fiber.
A great research study was done on this actually. Researchers found that people who ate the same food as another group, but the only difference was that the food they ate contained about 25% pureed veggies by weight, actually ate less than the group that had that same entree with NO pureed veggies.
So, not only did they eat less of that very same food to begin with, but they also took in overall less calories because the addition of the veggies took away from the overall caloric content of the food in the first place. Essentially, by adding veggies, you are giving more oomph to the caloric “efficiency” of your meals and making yourself feel less deprived and more satiated.
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