5 Tips to Cut the COVID Pounds in Half
Enjoyment at home was (and is) important during the weeks of the lockdown – but at times it was too much of a good thing.
The harsh light of January sharpens the view that the cream, sugar and grape juice that made us cheerful in the months of November and December and that made us swallow some things more easily, now find themselves in a higher dress size.
Don’t worry, we are not recommending a special diet that is difficult to follow or may be very one-sided. Who also wants to spend more time than absolutely necessary shopping at the moment.
The GloriousMe suggestion: continue to enjoy yourself with a balanced diet and delicious tasting meals, but just half of them.
Fits again
Halving portions is a very effective and easy to implement method of getting rid of excess pounds.
As a regular GloriousMe reader, you are familiar with healthy eating and therefore do not need to radically change your eating habits, but simply eat half of your usual portion.
This can be done immediately, without a special shopping list or additional time, and works well when several people are eating together.
You can estimate your portion size well from experience – just take half of it.
Because even the effective interval fasting shows little or no effect if the food at the “right” times is simply too much.
Five tips on how to succeed in enjoying the half:
1
Think about the leftovers before, not after
Most often, too much is cooked and leftovers after the meal. No problem, on the contrary, many a dish tastes even better warmed up. The spices had time to make their flavors even more intense.
Leftovers can be recombined with a little imagination and it saves time to have access to leftovers.
The change: Even before serving, divide the meal into two parts and set aside half of it as “leftovers”.
Once you start eating, the temptation to eat more is great, simply because it tastes delicious and the seemingly “small” remainder is hardly worth keeping.
2
The smaller the plate, the better
In recent years, plate sizes have increased dramatically not only in the U.S. but also in Europe. If you pick up a porcelain service from earlier times, you immediately notice the smaller diameter of the plates.
Maybe you have a few heirlooms in your cupboard, pull them out and use the smaller plate sizes. Or for all future meals, reach for smaller sized plates like appetizer plates, small cereal bowls, side dishes, etc…. It’s a visual trick that helps keep meals smaller in size.
3
Time
Celebrate instead of gulping down quickly. The saturation effect requires at least 20 minutes. Everything we eat quickly standing up, looking at the screen or in a hurry and our thoughts completely elsewhere, distracts us from conscious enjoyment, does not seem to satiate us and we automatically eat more than necessary.
Portion control is easier when something nice is planned after the meal. On days when we are on the go and sprinting from one topic to the next, we automatically eat less.
In the home office and due to pandemic travel restrictions at home, the adrenaline that makes us almost forget about hunger is gone and the temptation to eat another course or seconds is strong.
It helps to plan a nice activity after dinner: answering a long private email in detail, celebrating a nice movie in the evening like going to the cinema. Whatever you enjoy, anticipation curbs your appetite.
4
Quality instead of laboratory
It is almost impossible to resist the lure of highly specialized food engineering. The appetite for more is very difficult to curb with many foods, which also contain the extensive knowledge of food chemists.
The seasoning blends and flavors continuously make me want more and cause me to feel like just a few more spoonfuls or a few more bites and then I’ll be full. Who manages to put away a half-empty pack of chips?
The easiest way to do your own experiment is with chocolate. The more additives in chocolate, the stronger the incentive to want to eat more of it. With high-quality chocolate, the pleasure is more complex and only a fraction of it will do.
So for half the pleasure, it’s better to cook for yourself or order a healthy take-away box from your trusted restaurant.
5
Fluid, sports, cottage cheese and nuts
Often it is thirst rather than hunger that makes us eat. If you feel hungry, it is often enough to drink something.
A water bottle on the desk often remains empty; tomorrow is another day. An attractive carafe with water, on the other hand, encourages far more to actually drink the water in it. It is even easier with a little natural lemon.
Even a large fir of favorite tea, with plenty of ginger and lemon, on the desk tempts more than one cup to drink.
You can’t do it without sports. A new running outfit, a new yoga outfit or a stylish new cycling jacket is a good incentive to exercise more and boost the organism in this way as well. The anticipation of looking better in your new outfit each week helps to stick with it.
Eating half is a time-saving and easy, but not a quick way to lose weight. You need a little more patience compared to other, more radical methods.
That’s what makes this way to reduce weight so attractive at the same time. The German Nutrition Society advises against all diets that lead to very rapid weight loss (more than one kilo per week). The likelihood of the infamous yo-yo effect is too great.
Enjoying a portion of curd cheese exclusively every now and then in the evening additionally helps to move the scale in the right direction.
Nuts for the planet
The Lancet, one of the most respected scientific medical publications has launched the global Lancet EAT initiative in 2019. The goal is to combine the sum of medical knowledge on how dietary habits positively or negatively affect our health with the knowledge of agricultural experts to derive dietary recommendations that benefit our health and our planet.
If you are interested in this interesting initiative, you will find extensive material here.
Summarized in one sentence, the short form of the recommendations for Western eating habits is: Less red meat, more fish, far more legumes and more nuts.
Our Western diets, according to the study of scientists, surprisingly do not provide enough nuts. But that’s easy to change: How about a few almonds when hunger strikes in between meals?
Overall, the experts agree with the path we propose:
Indulgence instead of a one-sided diet, but simply half of it.
