Another reason to eat protein at breakfast. Protein helps keep you full and satisfied until lunch – and a new study suggests it might even help curb snacking at night.

If you keep up with the latest in dietary advice, you can probably list a few reasons why protein is such an important nutrient.  It’s necessary, of course, to help you build and maintain your muscle mass, and it’s also known to be a much better at filling you up than either fat or carbohydrate – which is why we suggest that people aim to have a good source of protein at each meal or snack.  The idea is simply this:  high carb meals don’t stay with you, while higher protein meals can help control hunger from one meal to the next.  But here’s something else… a recent study by Heather Leidy¹ suggests that a high protein breakfast not only helps control your appetite until the next meal, it might reduce unhealthy snacking in the evening.

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Everywhere you go, it seems, there’s pressure to eat.  Here’s how to push back.

For most of us, the last thing we need is the pressure to eat more.  But it happens all the time.  A few years back, one of the fast food chains in the US began a push to add a whole extra meal to your day –  “the meal between dinner and breakfast”.  I do understand the desire for an occasional midnight snack – sometimes you eat dinner early, you stay up late and you get hungry. But once that midnight snack morphs into “the fourth meal”, it starts to sound more like an everyday need – which just makes it easier to justify why we cave into the pressure to eat it.

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January is all about resolutions and “turning over a new leaf”.  So all this month, we’re talking about the big nutritional benefits you can get from making just a few small changes.  Now let’s take a look at ways you can start to eat less without leaving your tummy grumbling.

We started with little adjustments you can make when you’re buying food, and in the last post I suggested some ways in which you could make changes in the way you prepare your foods to shave calories and make them healthier.  You might already be reaping some benefits if you’ve been trying to make these changes – and you may even be thinking that there isn’t a whole lot more tweaking you can do.  Maybe you haven’t given it much thought, but a little fine-tuning in the way your foods are served can also affect your food intake, too.

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Candles, music and the one you love may be a recipe for overeating.  Subtle cues in your surroundings can affect how much  food you eat.

Seasoned dieters know plenty of the tricks for keeping their eating in check.  Beyond the usual strategies - eating right, getting plenty of exercise and maybe keeping a food diary – they might use more subtle tactics for keeping portions down.   They’ll use smaller plates or taller glasses, for instance, to give the illusion that they’re getting more food and drink than they really are.  They’ll make sure to put tempting foods out of sight – and keep healthy ones in plain view.  What they may not realize is that there are other influences in the environment – much less obvious ones – that could still throw their eating off course. Read more »