Trying to eat less to lose weight doesn't work

& it's likely what is tripping you up

Common advice is that you need to eat less to lose weight.

This rarely works and if it does work for a period of time you then end up putting the weight back on.

That is because WHAT you eat matters.

I am sure you’ve heard that you can eat what you want within your calories and lose weight. This is true in theory but not in practice.

It completely ignores hunger, satiety and human behaviour.

When people say you don’t need to eat less you need to eat better they aren’t (completely) wrong.

To lose fat and keep it off you need to consider what you are eating.

A really cool study showed that people tend to consume the same weight of food regardless of energy density.

When subjects were given a diet that contained 20, 40 or 60% of calories from fat they consumed a very similar weight of food.

Needless to say the diets with a higher fat% were higher in calories.

An important point to make here is that the participants in this study ate ad libitum which means they ate as much as they liked.

This makes the study as applicable to real life as possible.

It is unsurprising (and has been shown in numerous studies) that consuming foods higher in calories results in greater weight gain.

Consider that 250g of chocolate contains 1333 calories and 250g of carrots contains 103 calories.

So what do you do with this information?

You can ‘hack’ your diet & hunger response by being clever with your food choices.

Adding vegetables to your meals has been shown to be an effective way of reducing calories without impacting satiety or feelings of restriction.

One study even showed that having a salad for your first course reduced the amount of calories you consumed from your main by 7-12%!

That’s right - eating MORE resulted in less calorie consumption.

Eating the same weight in food but making those foods contain less calories is a simple and effective way to lose weight. Not enough people talk about this with the emphasis being so calorie focused at the expense of food choices.

Take homes:

- Eat more fruit and vegetables! (high volume foods)
- Have a pre- meal salad (make sure it is low in fat i.e don’t add high calories cheese and dressing)
- Remember this info and that you can ‘trick’ your body into consuming less calories without increased hunger by changing your food choices

Please share this with anyone who you think would benefit :)

click here for some extra help.

Hope this is useful,

Love,

ESG x