Guest post contributed by Matjaž Macuh
You may think that getting fit and healthy and achieving the perfect summer body requires eating strictly healthy foods in minuscule amounts and in turn, feeling hungry and without energy all day long.
If you were thinking in this line of taught then keep reading and check out these effective trick to help you eat a lot of food and still be able to maintain a lean and healthy physique.
1) Prioritize Foods With Lower Energy Density
We can explain energy density with the fact that different types of foods contain a different amount of energy.
Foods which contain a lot of calories per gram of food are called high-energy dense foods.
And foods which contain fewer calories per gram of food are called low-energy dense foods.
Let’s have a look at an example of energy density and compare blueberries to a blueberry muffin:
• Blueberries contain 55 kcal per 100 g.
• One medium sized blueberry muffin contains 300 kcal per 100 g.
As you can clearly see you can eat almost 6 times the amount of blueberries to ingest the same amount of calories as you can find in a blueberry muffin.
If you prioritize low energy dense foods such as fruits, vegetables, leaner cuts of meat etc you can eat more food in general and feel fuller.
2) Don’t Drink Your Calories
We live in an era where drinking smoothies, energy drinks filled with sugar, fruit juices, and other pre-prepared shakes is very popular. Add alcohol drinks and cocktails on top of that and you are probably unknowingly eating a ton of additional calories you never needed or wanted.
Drinking your calories simply isn’t as satisfying as taking the time and actually eating and chewing your food which significantly reduces self-reported hunger and food intake, probably through increased gut hormone release as shown in a meta-analysis conducted by Miquel-Kergoat et al.
If you want to eat more I would suggest staying away from liquid calories.
3) Incorporate an Exercise Program
So this one isn’t really related to your nutrition program, at least not directly.
However, exercise does have many physiological benefits to your body. It also burns quite a lot of calories and it improves insulin sensitivity, meaning your muscles will uptake more glucose and less glucose will be left in your bloodstream to be stored as body fat.
As you can see, exercising can actually help you eat more food without you gaining weight.
The best training program has a healthy balance of cardiovascular training in combination with resistance training in the form of lifting weights, bodyweight training, training with resistance bands, etc.
Conclusion
Incorporating these few easy tricks provided above can make drastic improvements in your body and will help you eat more food and stay satiated and healthy while helping you maintain or even lose weight.
References
Miquel-Kergoata S,Azais-Braescob V,Burton-Freemanc B, Hetherington M. M. 2015. Effects of chewing on appetite, food intake and gut hormones: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Physiology & Behavior, 151: 88-96
Author Bio
Matjaž is a personal trainer and has BSc in Food Technology and Nutrition. He promotes a healthy lifestyle and helps people achieve their fitness goals. He regularly writes about exercise, nutrition and supplement tips on resistance bands
