Are you looking for ways that you can loose
weight without going on a strict diet? I'm going to show you simple, study proven
techniques that you can do right now to make that happen. Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Erik Richardson a board certified Family Practice physician. I'd like to welcome you to FamilyMed, a channel
that focuses giving you practical and accurate medical information to help you and your family. If you think this would be something that
is helpful to you make sure you subscribe, hit that notification button and follow along
with us. Welcome to our latest installment of "I have
a question?". In this series we tackle common questions
that you have about day to day medical issues that you may be facing.
Today, we are going to show you some simple,
yet effective ways that can help you start loosing weight today. These are techniques that do not require you
to go empty your pantry or make you read boring diet book. And best of all they are things that you can
start doing right now and will help you in your weight loss journey. OK, so now that I'm done with my click bait
with you, I do need to give a bit of a disclaimer. These techniques that I'm going to go over,
will not replace making needed changes to your diet to have the most success. You can't be drinking 2 big gulps of a sugary
drink and a bag of potato chips a day and expect to have dramatic success. I have another video that that walks you through
the most important things that you need to be working on with your food choices that
will help you the most with weight loss.
You can get to it here. In this video though, we are going to be going
through some of the psychology of eating and some simple things that we can do to trick
ourself into eating less and help kickstart your weight loss. The first and one of the easiest things to
do is simply use a smaller plate. This is a simple technique that restaurants
take advantage of all the time. Have you ever noticed at your local "all you
can eat" buffet they don't have the large Mexican restaurant combination plate size
plates out to dish up on. They put out small plates and they do it for
a reason. The smaller plate you have, the less food
you are going to eat. You see when we are hungry, our brain, eyes
and stomach all work together to guess how much food is going to be required to fill
the massive hole you are feeling inside of you. The problem is they are not a very good judge
of what you really need.
And the problem is that our stomach is always
a little slower in telling our body when we are done. One of the reasons a small plate works is
that by the time we are done eating that first plate, our stomach has finally started catching
up and will start to let us know that we are full. And even if we aren't quite as full and we
go back for seconds, we are less likely to dish up as much, and for the majority of people,
we will end up eating less. So it's a lot easier to watch our portion
sizes when we eat off of a plate that is smaller. The second thing that I am going to recommend
is that you write down what you eat. Just the simple act of writing down and keeping
track of what you are putting in your mouth will lead to you eating less. One of our biggest issues that gets us in
trouble is something we call mindless eating. This is when we eat that day old doughnut
that's been sitting out on the counter.
If we think more about what we are eating,
then we are less likely to eat it. By getting into the habit of writing down
what you are eating you are more likely to eat less and make better diet choices. Making yourself accountable to yourself can
be a powerful tool in weight loss. The next tip is drink 1-2 glasses of water
within 30 minutes of eating your three main meals. This is a super simple technique that can
be quite powerful. In one study several years ago in England
they looked at 84 obese adults and had half the group drink 16 oz of water before meals
and the other half didn't. All the other diet interventions were the
same. After 12 weeks those who drank water before
meals lost an average of almost 10 pounds as opposed to 2 pounds of the control group. Now admittedly this was a small study but
the results were still very interesting.
The best part about it is that it takes hardly
any effort at all. The mere fact of expanding your stomach with
water before eating helps cut down on the hunger feelings temporarily and makes it less
likely that you will overeat. My 4th suggestion is to put those types of
foods in your house that you know you shouldn't be eating in inconvenient out of the way places. This goes directly to the pscyology of what
attracts us to food as well as to some of our inherent laziness. If you buy some treats that you know you shouldn't
be eating a lot of, then put them somewhere where you can't get to that easily.
Keep it out of sight. I was at lecture a couple months ago and the
presenter was discussing a study that they did where gave candy dishes full of Hershey
kisses. They put it on the test subjects desk at work
and were told to help themselves. The put it on top of the desk, then in the
desk and then 7-8 feet from the desk. AS you would expect, when the dish was visible
and easy to get, more candy was eaten. When it was easy to get to but not seen they
ate less and then when they weren't seen and were harder to get to even less was eaten.
It is kind of a silly study but it shows an
important point about the psychology of us eating. By doing something as simple as putting treats
or high calorie items in harder to get or less visible places we will eat less of it. My last suggestion is simply whatever you
are going to order food wise outside of the home, just order a small. Those who eat out of smaller containers, much
like we talked about with a plate at dinner, will eat less. This applies to fast food meals and even to
popcorn at the movie theater. A while back a study was done with college
students at the movies.
They were given different size popcorn containers. One group got large buckets and the other
exra large buckets. And who do you think ate more? You guessed it, those who had the extra large
buckets ate 45-50% more popcorn. Interestingly enough, they put a different
twist on the study. They then took another group and did the same
thing. Only this time they served them 10 day old
stale popcorn. And guess what, although they did eat less
popcorn overall in both groups, the group with the extra large buckets still ate 45%
more popcorn than those with the large. It just goes to prove that we will pretty
much eat anything in front of us. Understanding this and just ordering something
that is smaller will go far in helping us to keep our calorie intake down. So there you go, 5 simple suggestions.
Just by buying smaller plates, bowls and cups
at home, writing down what you are eating, drinking water before meals, put treats in
harder to reach places as well as ordering smaller sizes when you are out you can get
started on the first steps to avoid overeating and loosing weight without having to start
a diet. Now of course, I'm always going to recommend
that we still make good lasting changes to our diets but this is a good direction to
get started for yourself if you are just struggling to feel motivated or for your loved ones if
they are feeling the same way. These are some simple ideas and certainly
there are others. I'd like to hear from you. What tips or tricks do you have that has helped
you eat better or loose weight. We'd all love to hear about them in the comments
below.
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future content. But until next time, this is FamilyMed with
Dr. Richardson and remember to take care of your body because it's the only one you have..