Simple Ways to Reduce Calories for Successful Weight Loss

Take Care of Your Basic Needs First

• Getting adequate sleep helps to lose weight and maintain healthy weight easier.
• Eating your meals at consistent and reasonable intervals prevents overeating and binging due to excessive hunger.
• Movement will help you spend extra calories, regulate your hormones, and reduce stress.

Evaluate the Situation With a Calorie Counter

Start logging your daily calories with a calorie counter to learn about your eating habits and to identify pitfalls. This knowledge is invaluable in its ability to affect your lifestyle choices. The best calorie counter app, like our Lifesum weight tracker, will also motivate you with daily check-ins, progress displays, recipe ideas, and lifestyle advice.

Use the information you gathered to decide how many calories you can cut realistically and which of the following ideas for reducing calories will be easy to incorporate in your lifestyle.

Reduce Calories With Kitchen Tools

The right tools will encourage your cooking efforts by saving you time and doing the work of reducing calories for you.

• Nonstick pans eliminate the need to use fats for cooking while making the cleanup easy.
• Good knives make food preparation faster and more enjoyable. Nothing could be as frustrating as using a dull knife to chop a tomato.
• Smaller plates will help you transition to smaller portions.
• Single-serving containers are essential for portion control, especially when you are very hungry. Having your food already portioned out will spare you from overeating. Also, by placing your meals into containers, you make it easy for yourself to grab one for lunch when you are rushing to work in the morning.

Eat Foods With Less Calories

1. Get rid of junk food, so it’s not tempting you every time you pass by the kitchen.
2. Stock up on healthy snacks and cooking ingredients that you like. Having your fridge and pantry fully stocked will prevent you from ordering in pizza or going to a fast-food joint when you are hungry.
3. Have plenty of good proteins on hand to add to every meal for better satiation and less cravings.
4. Consider the following substitutions:

• Have your coffee with skim milk instead of your favorite Coffee-mate creamer.
• Make your tuna salad with Greek yogurt instead of mayonnaise.
• Skip sugar in your coffee or tea.
• Drink plain or mineral water instead of sodas and fruit juices.
• When baking, replace half the batter with applesauce or mashed bananas.

Have a Strategy for Eating Out

• Share an entrée with your partner.
• Choose a smaller size of soda than the one you usually get.
• Opt for thin-crust pizza.
• Have your ice cream in a sugar cone instead of the waffle kind.
• Have your latte with skim milk instead of whole milk.
• Replace fried rice with steamed rice.
• Snack on a 1-ounce bag of Lay’s instead of movie theater popcorn.

Though these ideas might seem too simple to cause any significant weight loss, remember that successful and long-term weight loss comes from consistency rather than any drastic measures. Even reduction in daily caloric intake by 100 calories could result in 10 pounds of weight loss in a year.