Lose Weight By Eating Smaller Portions

You have often heard that in order for a diet to work, it is necessary to eat less. Indeed, it is important to eat smaller portions to lose weight healthily. Otherwise, you may experience certain nutritional deficiencies or return to your initial weight after the treatment.

In today’s article we offer you some basic tips to learn how to eat in a more balanced way and to portion foods. This way you will be able to reach the ideal weight without too much effort and sacrifice.

The stomach adapts

The stomach has an extraordinary quality: it easily adapts to the amount of food ingested. You will see that if you learn to eat more or less at certain times, your body will always ask you for the same amounts.

Consuming smaller portions is a great way to lose weight more easily. But you need to make sure that you give your body all the nutrients it needs. Otherwise, your effort can cause the opposite effect, leading to fattening.

How to teach your stomach with smaller portions?

To adjust your stomach to smaller portions, follow the tips below:

• Avoid sitting for four or five hours without eating anything. It is important not to eat anything else before digesting food from the previous meal, but it is also not good to starve between meals: this way you risk overeating.
• Try serving fresh fruit, yogurt or wholemeal bread between meals. These are very filling foods that provide you with small amounts of nutrients in small portions.
• Get used to drinking plenty of fluids, teas or water between meals. It is very easy to confuse thirst with hunger and eat when you shouldn’t.

How long does the feeling of hunger last?

Studies have shown that the “attacks” of true hunger do not last more than 15-20 minutes. That is why people who eat slowly and chew food well feel full faster than those who eat in a hurry and impulsively.

You can test this theory by chewing each mouthful well until the food reaches almost like porridge in your mouth before swallowing. In this way you improve your digestion and you manage to eat less, without starving yourself.

Eating emotionally

Why do most people who eat too much need the feeling of satiety to feel satisfied?  These people confuse the need to eat to survive with the feeling of fulfillment associated with overeating.

In many of these cases, this need is related to certain emotional gaps in times of sadness and anger or stress and fatigue.

The body tries to fill an emotional void with energy. If you do not control what you eat, the results are usually negative. It is possible to choose unhealthy foods, making your digestion difficult and accentuating feelings of regret and guilt.

The solution is to eat only 80%

You have to learn to stop eating when you feel a little tired, at that moment when you are no longer hungry, but you feel that you could eat a little more.

This is the time when you are usually tempted to make the worst choice – to put on another serving or to serve a dessert.

To better understand how you should proceed, try to eat only 80% of what you can. 

In the first days you will not feel very well because you are not used to this practice. However, consuming a digestive tea is an excellent solution to get rid of the feeling of emptiness. The prolonged feeling of hunger will disappear, and you will be able to naturally stop eating.

In addition, if you eat only 80% of what you can eat, do not overload your digestive system. Thus the body needs less time to replenish its energy stores. This phenomenon is the opposite of what happens when you eat more than you should or choose to eat very heavy foods.

In this way, you become much more active and you can perform your daily tasks without overeating. During the night, for example, your liver will function efficiently, and you will rest much better and wake up full of energy and ready to face the day that awaits you.