Losing weight requires eating at a calorie deficit, and when you do this, hunger is something that you’ll inevitably have to combat along the way. Dealing with and overcoming it can be incredibly challenging, as all our lives we’re conditioned to eat whenever we get hungry, yet this is the exact reason why most people fail to maintain a diet. If you want to lose weight, it’s essential that you find effective ways to suppress hunger during the day.
By nature, I have a big appetite and love to eat, so when I really committed to getting and staying in shape, learning to control my hunger without succumbing to it was extremely difficult. However, through my experiences I was able to find truly effective ways of reducing my appetite. If you’re struggling with your diet because you can’t fight off the urge to eat, I strongly recommend giving these methods a try.
Choose Foods that Fill You Up
When you have to limit your daily calorie intake, it becomes all the more important that you make your calories count. Of course, this means eating healthy foods so you get plenty of protein, nutrients, and energy, but it also means eating filling foods so you’re less likely to overeat throughout the day.
To make your meals more filling, incorporate foods that are rich in protein, fat, and fiber. Common examples include eggs, oatmeal, meats, and beans. If you want to have a snack, some great options are peanut butter, protein bars, and fruits like apples, pears, and bananas.
These foods tend to be much more filling than foods that are mainly high in carbohydrates. For example, a plate of eggs and avocados for breakfast will keep you satisfied for much longer than would a bowl of cereal or a stack of pancakes, and it’ll also give you energy for the day instead of making you want to go to sleep right after.
Keep Your Mind Away from Food
Like with any other feeling or emotion, you can distract yourself from an empty stomach if you’re able to focus on something else. Therefore, a great way to delay the onset of hunger is to keep yourself busy, either mentally or physically.
You’ve probably noticed that you’re never worried about eating when you’re busy at work, scrambling to wrap something up right before a deadline. Even in less stressful situations, you’re probably not thinking about food as long as you’re actively working to complete a task. It’s only when you catch some downtime during the day when you get the urge to eat. Similarly, even when you’re not at work, you’re less likely to notice feelings of hunger if you’re actively out and about, running errands, or participating in sports and physical activity.
While I’m not suggesting you need to suddenly become the most productive employee at your office, or that you can’t have time to relax at night and on the weekends, it’s just something to be aware of. The reality is that the less time you spend sitting around watching TV, scrolling on your phone, or doing nothing at all, the less you’ll have to worry about forcibly suppressing your appetite.
Slow Down When You Eat
Whenever you have a meal, although you might be starving at this point, it’s important to force yourself to eat slowly. This gives your body time to process the food you eat and send signals to your brain that it’s getting full. As a result, you’ll feel more satiated when you eat, and you’ll be less likely to overeat.
In contrast, when you eat too quickly, you still may not feel satiated once you finish your food since your body hasn’t yet processed that you’ve already eaten. This may lead to you wanting to eat more than you really need to. I’m naturally a fast eater, and there have been many times when I kept eating during a meal because I was still hungry, only for me to end up feeling way too full after some time had passed.
If you find it hard to eat slowly, or you’re still not satisfied after a meal, another tactic you can employ is to wait a bit before you immediately grab more food. It can take as long as 30 minutes for your body to signal to your brain that it’s full, so give yourself this window to see if you fill up by then. Often times, you won’t want to eat anything else afterwards, but if you’re still feeling hungry by then, you can allow yourself to eat a bit more.
Have a Caffeinated Beverage
Many people consume caffeine in the form of coffee or tea throughout the day to keep them awake, but did you know that another benefit of caffeine is that it can serve as an appetite suppressant? Personally, this is something I’ve found to be very effective. Having a black coffee in the early afternoon not only helps me power through my work day and workout afterwards, but it can also hold off my desire to eat until dinnertime.
Again, I don’t recommend taking things to the extreme and having an abundance of coffee throughout the day, as there are certainly health risks associated with too much caffeine; however, if you already consume caffeine as part of your daily routine, you might want to consider how you can strategically leverage it to give you energy and reduce your hunger during the day.
Something to note here, though, is that if you want to use coffee to help you adhere to a diet and lose weight, you should stick to black coffee. As I’ve noted in my post How to Cut Back on Calories without Dieting, adding milk, cream, or sugar to your coffee also adds plenty of additional calories to a drink that otherwise contains none. If you’re not accounting for these calories in your diet, they can easily cancel out your deficit and undermine your efforts to lose weight.
Finding Your Key to Successful Dieting
There are many methods you might come across on the Internet for suppressing hunger, and different ones will work better for different people. While I encourage you to experiment and try various ones out for yourself, the ones listed above were proven in my personal experience, which means that hopefully, at least some of them will work well for you too. If nothing else, at least you now know there are certainly ways to make your weight loss journey easier, even if just by a bit, and that you don’t have to purely rely on motivation and willpower.
On top of it all, while this post mainly addressed how to fight hunger throughout the day, I’ve written another post that specifically deals with ways to manage your late-night cravings. Feel free to check that out if you’re looking for additional dieting resources, because when you’re trying to lose fat, the last few hours of the day can really make or break your diet.
