If you’re trying to lose weight, you already know the most important thing is controlling your diet. Which is definitely easier said than (but so is everything else in the world). This is especially challenging if you’re trying to follow a low-calorie diet. It becomes so hard to fit in more food without having more calories – which makes it difficult to stick to the diet because you end up so hungry by the end of the day that you eat everything in sight. This is why it’s incredibly important for you to include high food volume foods into your diet!

Consuming this nutrient-filled food should assist in paving the way to successful weight loss and healthy living. If you’re not incorporating these foods into your diet, your diet isn’t going to go well and that’s why these foods are so key for your diet. To be clear, these foods aren’t magical fat loss accelerators that rip the fat off your body – no food on Earth can do that for you. The most important aspect of weight loss is being in a calorie deficit, but, as we said earlier, it can be hard to do especially if you get hungry.

Here’s Why This Is Helpful

Your body doesn’t want to lose weight, it just wants to survive, and it’s doing everything it can to help you survive. When it sees that you’re not eating as much food, it’s going to create a lot of resistance to let go of the weight. That’s because fat is the body’s energy store, this is what it looks to, for emergency energy.

The body’s main function is to help you survive, to help you live longer. Sometimes, your body doesn’t get what it needs to survive (especially when dieting) so it tries to communicate to you that it needs things.

Your body can’t talk to you, so it communicates that it has needs in other ways, like:

• increasing your cravings
• increasing your hunger
• lowering your energy (so you burn fewer calories)

These are incredibly common symptoms of dieting. If you have all of these, it makes sticking to the diet that much harder. Using the foods that we’re going to be discussing today, you’re going to be able to reduce your appetite, eliminate cravings, and improve your energy while staying at a low-calorie marker that is going to help you lose weight.

The Foods That Help Make The Dieting Process Easier

Again, these foods aren’t going to melt fat off of your body, but they are foods that help keep you satiated by manipulating food volume and nutrient density.

Food volume is the biggest trick here, the classic approach to reducing calories is by shrinking the amount of food that you’re having, instead of having a full plate of food, you have half a plate of food, and because you usually eat a full plate of food, you never feel quite as full, eating that half plate of food.

There are ways to get more food volume in without adding excessive calories. Assuming we have 100 calories of mixed nuts, it will fit in the palm of your hand, barely a mouthful. It’s not going to fill you up too much, but if we have 100 calories of strawberries, this will take up an entire plate and more! You get much more food for the same amount of calories and THAT is the trick to food volume.

You need to include food that is low calorie, but high volume. This takes up more space in your stomach and helps you feel fuller for longer. Having high food volume foods is one thing, but the other thing is having certain nutrients in your diet, that are going to help manage satiety, reduce your appetite, and eliminate your cravings.

The two most important nutrients to have while dieting is protein and fiber. Both of these foods are very filling and can help you stay satiated, and eliminate the signals coming from your stomach, telling you you’re hungry for hours at a time. Having these foods, and prioritizing them in your diet, when you’re working on losing weight, can also help you maintain muscle tissue. This is to ensure that the weight you lose is not muscle and only fat.

Boost Your Metabolism Through Digestion

Protein and fiber will not only satiate you but also help you burn more calories. This is because it takes more energy (calories) to digest these nutrients than any other nutrient. Simply by replacing 500 calories of your diet from carbohydrates and fats with 500 calories of protein and fiber, you’re increasing your metabolism without even trying.

So What Foods Should I Be Eating?!

What do high food volume, protein, and fiber foods look like? There are a lot of different options but the simplest and most effective I like to use are the three S’s:

• Scrambles
• Stir-fries
• Salads

Scrambles are just as they sound. They are just eggs, mixed with vegetables. if you make this using mostly egg whites you’ll save more calories because the yolk contains extra fat calories (to be clear, it’s not bad to have egg yolks, it’s just higher in calories). You’re going to get a good plate full of food that you can spice up or add sauce to. This is to help keep the taste good and give you some variety. It also helps to keep you full and gives you the nutrients you need to make weight loss easier. Here’s a quick and simple recipe that I love using:

Salads are your generic, boring dieting food but there are a lot of different ways that you can dress up a salad to make it more fun! As long as you focus on including different kinds of veggies and fruits that aren’t high-fat (i.e avocado). You can get a lot of food from a big salad bowl, good nutrient diversity, and high food volume to help you feel fuller for longer! Here’s an example of a fun salad recipe:

Stir fry is just a bunch of vegetables, with a bunch of meat. It’s the best thing for a diet, and it always tastes good. Making sure to incorporate these throughout your week and throughout your day can be helpful to make you not feel like you’re dieting, and still have good food along the way. Here’s a simple stir fry recipe that I love to have during my diet:

These are my three go-to’s when it comes to dieting because it helps simplify the diet and make it easy to stick to. These aren’t the only foods that are going to be high volume and have a high nutrient density though. You can get 30+ other recipes that are perfect for dieting in the free Stoopid Simple Cookbook. The best part is, that all the recipes take less than 10 minutes to make and don’t require any cooking experience. Dieting has never been simpler!

Conclusion

You don’t need to eat less food to lose more weight, you just need to eat fewer calories! Adding the right foods to your diet will be the difference between facing a long and hard diet that you struggle to get through and making a diet as easy as possible.

It can be more difficult to make healthy food decisions if you wait until you are famished. Planning your meals is another tip that can help ensure that there are nutritious options available.