Are you looking for ways that you can loose weight without going on a strict diet?
I'm going to show you simple, study proven techniques that you can do right now to make
that happen.
Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Erik Richardson a board
certified Family Practice physician.
I'd like to welcome you to FamilyMed, a channel that focuses giving you practical and accurate
medical information to help you and your family.
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Welcome to our latest installment of "I have a question?".
In this series we tackle common questions that you have about day to day medical issues
that you may be facing.
Today, we are going to show you some simple, yet effective ways that can help you start
loosing weight today.
These are techniques that do not require you to go empty your pantry or make you read boring
diet book.
And best of all they are things that you can start doing right now and will help you in
your weight loss journey.
OK, so now that I'm done with my click bait with you, I do need to give a bit of a disclaimer.
These techniques that I'm going to go over, will not replace making needed changes to
your diet to have the most success.
You can't be drinking 2 big gulps of a sugary drink and a bag of potato chips a day and
expect to have dramatic success.
I have another video that that walks you through the most important things that you need to
be working on with your food choices that will help you the most with weight loss.
You can get to it here.
In this video though, we are going to be going through some of the psychology of eating and
some simple things that we can do to trick ourself into eating less and help kickstart
your weight loss.
The first and one of the easiest things to do is simply use a smaller plate.
This is a simple technique that restaurants take advantage of all the time.
Have you ever noticed at your local "all you can eat" buffet they don't have the large
Mexican restaurant combination plate size plates out to dish up on.
They put out small plates and they do it for a reason.
The smaller plate you have, the less food you are going to eat.
You see when we are hungry, our brain, eyes and stomach all work together to guess how
much food is going to be required to fill the massive hole you are feeling inside of
you.
The problem is they are not a very good judge of what you really need.
And the problem is that our stomach is always a little slower in telling our body when we
are done.
One of the reasons a small plate works is that by the time we are done eating that first
plate, our stomach has finally started catching up and will start to let us know that we are
full.
And even if we aren't quite as full and we go back for seconds, we are less likely to
dish up as much, and for the majority of people, we will end up eating less.
So it's a lot easier to watch our portion sizes when we eat off of a plate that is smaller.
The second thing that I am going to recommend is that you write down what you eat.
Just the simple act of writing down and keeping track of what you are putting in your mouth
will lead to you eating less.
One of our biggest issues that gets us in trouble is something we call mindless eating.
This is when we eat that day old doughnut that's been sitting out on the counter.
If we think more about what we are eating, then we are less likely to eat it.
By getting into the habit of writing down what you are eating you are more likely to
eat less and make better diet choices.
Making yourself accountable to yourself can be a powerful tool in weight loss.
The next tip is drink 1-2 glasses of water within 30 minutes of eating your three main
meals.
This is a super simple technique that can be quite powerful.
In one study several years ago in England they looked at 84 obese adults and had half
the group drink 16 oz of water before meals and the other half didn't.
All the other diet interventions were the same.
After 12 weeks those who drank water before meals lost an average of almost 10 pounds
as opposed to 2 pounds of the control group.
Now admittedly this was a small study but the results were still very interesting.
The best part about it is that it takes hardly any effort at all.
The mere fact of expanding your stomach with water before eating helps cut down on the
hunger feelings temporarily and makes it less likely that you will overeat.
My 4th suggestion is to put those types of foods in your house that you know you shouldn't
be eating in inconvenient out of the way places.
This goes directly to the pscyology of what attracts us to food as well as to some of
our inherent laziness.
If you buy some treats that you know you shouldn't be eating a lot of, then put them somewhere
where you can't get to that easily.
Keep it out of sight.
I was at lecture a couple months ago and the presenter was discussing a study that they
did where gave candy dishes full of Hershey kisses.
They put it on the test subjects desk at work and were told to help themselves.
The put it on top of the desk, then in the desk and then 7-8 feet from the desk.
AS you would expect, when the dish was visible and easy to get, more candy was eaten.
When it was easy to get to but not seen they ate less and then when they weren't seen and
were harder to get to even less was eaten.
It is kind of a silly study but it shows an important point about the psychology of us
eating.
By doing something as simple as putting treats or high calorie items in harder to get or
less visible places we will eat less of it.
My last suggestion is simply whatever you are going to order food wise outside of the
home, just order a small.
Those who eat out of smaller containers, much like we talked about with a plate at dinner,
will eat less.
This applies to fast food meals and even to popcorn at the movie theater.
A while back a study was done with college students at the movies.
They were given different size popcorn containers.
One group got large buckets and the other exra large buckets.
And who do you think ate more?
You guessed it, those who had the extra large buckets ate 45-50% more popcorn.
Interestingly enough, they put a different twist on the study.
They then took another group and did the same thing.
Only this time they served them 10 day old stale popcorn.
And guess what, although they did eat less popcorn overall in both groups, the group
with the extra large buckets still ate 45% more popcorn than those with the large.
It just goes to prove that we will pretty much eat anything in front of us.
Understanding this and just ordering something that is smaller will go far in helping us
to keep our calorie intake down.
So there you go, 5 simple suggestions.
Just by buying smaller plates, bowls and cups at home, writing down what you are eating,
drinking water before meals, put treats in harder to reach places as well as ordering
smaller sizes when you are out you can get started on the first steps to avoid overeating
and loosing weight without having to start a diet.
Now of course, I'm always going to recommend that we still make good lasting changes to
our diets but this is a good direction to get started for yourself if you are just struggling
to feel motivated or for your loved ones if they are feeling the same way.
These are some simple ideas and certainly there are others.
I'd like to hear from you.
What tips or tricks do you have that has helped you eat better or loose weight.
We'd all love to hear about them in the comments below.
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But until next time, this is FamilyMed with Dr. Richardson and remember to take care of
your body because it's the only one you have.