10 Tips to Curb Your Appetite

Do you know at least 300 million people world wide are obese? Obesity has reached epidemic proportions globally. Obesity is a complex condition, with serious social and psychological dimensions, affecting virtually all ages and socioeconomic groups. The problem needs to be addressed fast. These 10 tips could be good to start with.

1. Don’t skip meal or wait till you get hungry. Because if you’re too hungry, a healthy salad would be the last choice of your mind. Usually, the food choices will consist of fatty rich meals in such situations.  Things would be worse if you have a pizza or burger in this situation.
2. Eat meals on proper time. Once the meal times are set, the craving for food in between meals comes down dramatically. This reduces snacking in between and thus reduces intake of insensible calories.
3. Don’t drink water, juice and soft drinks with your meal or immediately after the meal. Doing this will keep the stomach full for a longer period. Liquids will wash out your stomach and create room for more food. Avoid carbonated drinks, these make the stomach distend and set your satiety point to a much higher level, leading to consumption of more food just to achieve satiety.
4. Eat solid foods that involve chewing, such as meat, chicken, fish etc, along with raw and boiled vegetables. Fruits as Apples, Pears will fill your stomach faster and keep it full for a longer period. Soft food such as mashed potatoes will not fill your stomach but will increase the calorie.
5. Plan your diet well and according to your work schedule. If you work late at night, use fresh fruits such as cucumber, carrots, and tomatoes etc as snack choices instead of potato chips or French fries. Avoid snacking on chocolate and candy.
6. Stop eating just as immediately as you feel satisfied. Don’t wait for ‘full stomach’ feeling. By practising this method, the satiety point will be reset to lower amount of food intake and reduce those cravings. Fight the mental hunger!
7. Just because you are in a movie theatre doesn’t mean you have to buy popcorn and other snacks. Stay away from impulse eating habits. The same rule applies to high calorie foods such as ice creams, cakes etc on different social occasions. Keep count of your calorie intake and limit it to your daily requirement.
8. Avoid consumption of alcohol. This will drastically increase your appetite besides giving calories themselves. The salty snacks and drink mixes also pumps significant amount of calories.
9. Satisfying foods are those that remain longest in the stomach. Meat is the most satisfying of all foods and keeps you full longer than simple carbohydrates. So, if you are not an obligate vegetarian, start most of your meals with a choice of meat. Milk ranks next to meat in satiety value. Whole milk is more satisfying than skimmed milk. Fish is slightly less satisfying than meat because usually it contains less fat.
10. You also need green vegetables and bread though these are low in satiety value. You do need a healthy portion of these in your meal to make it better balanced.

Aside from the satisfying effects of food, there are other ways of putting a rein on your appetite. Certainly, there are medications that help to reduce the appetite. But that should be a second line of defence once the above have been tried.