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Losing unhealthy calories from your diet is as easy as making simple but smart switches, like opting for air fryer healthy recipes like kale chips than overindulging in greasy fast foods. Focus on the quality and amount of calories than randomly removing foods from your diet.
Whether you want to lose weight and manage health conditions or shed off a few pounds to fit into your bridesmaid’s dress, cutting back on calories will help you reach this goal. Simply put, the more food you consume, the more calories you take in and the heavier you will get. But you don’t want to keep cutting back on food just to reduce the amount of calories you consume. The best way is to reduce the amount of unhealthy calories, replace them with good ones and stick to the optimal amount of calories for a healthy and balanced diet.
Too often, you’re gaining more weight because of unhealthy food choices. Simple switches will yield better, healthy and quality calories. Opting air fryer healthy recipes like sweet potato fries, kale chips and empanadas are better options than fast foods and their restaurant counterparts. If you haven’t got one yet, airfryerbro.com can help you choose your partner air fryer. Or, you could opt for water while dining out instead of getting that 12-ounce calorie-laden soda. Each food you consume has an attached calorie to it and it’s better to make every calorie count by focusing on quality.
1. Watch your Habits
Habits are often second-nature and you perform them without giving that much thought. Certain habits may lead you to eat more and thus acquire more calories. It’s best to spot these destructive habits early and correct them. For instance, studies found that eating with the non-eating hand helps you consume less. This kind of disruption make you think twice about food consumption. Other tricks to try are eating with a smaller plate and using chopsticks.
If snacking is a nasty habit you can’t get rid of, you can reduce calories by snacking in the afternoon than in the morning. You have lesser time gap snacking mid-morning between breakfast and lunch, while there’s a longer stretch when snacking between lunch and dinner. Experts believe that snacking mid-afternoon make you more conscious of your calorie intake than when you do in the morning.
2. Cut Back Calories from Unhealthy Food Sources and Replace them with Healthy Ones
You don’t want to simply skip meals to reduce your calorie intake. You have to be mindful of the food you cut back on. Ideally, you want to reduce or eliminate your consumption of unhealthy foods. Exercise processed foods and junk foods because they are either laden with calories or have empty calories that don’t even provide you with energy. What you want to do is remove unhealthy calories from your diet and to make out for that deficit, replace them with healthy ones.
Some of the replacements to reduce bad quality calories from your diet are obvious. For instance, opting for water is instead of sugary commercial juices and soda will help reduce unhealthy calories. Opt for a breakfast omelet than a bagel in the morning. Also, balsamic vinaigrette as salad dressing is healthier than a mayo-based one. You could opt for a meal replacement shake like the Herbalife Formula 1 Healthy Meal shake as these are very convenient for on the run parents as well.
There are less obvious replacements that you can do in your daily meals. Reduce the normal amount of ground beef in your meat balls and replace the other half with brown rice. You can eat more greens in your salad and skip the croutons. When craving for something sweet, opt for fresh fruits like an apple or banana than a slice of chocolate cake. You can also try out Mid-Day Squares’ vegan chocolate bars.
3. Consume the Recommended Amount of Calories but Don’t go Lower
According to NHS, the recommended calorie intake for men is 2500kcal per day and for women is 2000kcal per day. However, other factors come into play that might affect your required calorie intake like age, level of physical activity and medications.
What happens if you go lower than the recommended calories per day?
You must remember that the food you eat becomes the source of energy. Energy is required for your muscles to work and ability to perform physical activities. You also need energy to repair damage cells and protect your body from deficiency in immune system. If you don’t consume the required amount of calorie, you will feel weaker and fatigued. You will also lose muscle mass, which you might believe is making you slimmer. Your body will try to make up for the lost calories by making you feel hungrier and place you in vulnerable spot of binge eating.
Therefore, trying to lose weight by drastically reducing your calorie intake is never healthy. Your metabolism will suffer and so will your physical and mental health. You need to have the optimal amount of calories your body needs, but they should come from good quality and healthy food sources.
4. Complement with Exercise
After reducing bad calories and filling them up with good ones, now it’s time to burn those calories off. Extra calories sitting inside your body will be converted to fat so burn them off now before that happens. You don’t have to be a hard-core gym buff to burn a lot of calories. Simple activities like shoveling off snow, walking, biking and swimming will all help a lot in burning those calories down.
5. Conclusion:
Your calorie consumption has a lot to do with your weight. If you need to trim your weight down, you should initially focus on how much calories you consume and where they came from. Do not try to cut back on food randomly; rather, focus on bad sources of calories such as processed foods and sugar. Also, you don’t want to suffer from calorie deficiency. Replace bad sources of calories with good sources such as vegetables, fruits and whole wheat. Lastly, it is easier to bring down weight by burning calories through physical activities. With all of these in synergy, you will be able to lose weight by eating healthy calories and burning them down through exercise.
Also, check out Be Well Chiropractic for more health tips and help.
Author Bio:
My name is Sabrina Zaragoza. I’m a total foodie and a wanderlust-driven traveler. Throughout my travels, I’ve been able to taste many cultures and curate a ton of recipes! I truly hope you enjoy the recipes I’ve been able to enlighten you with through the power of blogging.
Sources:
http://www.nhs.uk/chq/pages/1126.aspx?categoryid=51
http://www.prevention.com/weight-loss/weight-loss-tips/how-lose-weight-simple-changes-your-routine
