Easy Ways To Cut Calories

If you want to lose weight and keep it off then forget crash dieting and try slow dieting instead! Studies show that the average person puts on 2lbs per year. However if you make little calorie savings each day, you’ll soon lose weight and if you can walk an extra mile (about 2,000 steps) each day you’ll get even better results!

Some Tips

1. Forget shop-bought sandwiches and make your own lunch. A typical chunk of French bread has 500 calories – and that’s before you add any fillings. Take a wholemeal pitta bread in to work instead, which only has 200 calories.
2. Shop-made tuna mayonnaise sandwiches contain about 400 calories. Make your own without the mayonnaise and you’ll save over 100 calories. Give cheese a miss and go for grilled chicken or prawn with lemon juice instead.
3. Reduce the amount of cooked rice or pasta you serve by half a cup. Or, cut your usual carbohydrate portion by half and fill up on steamed or grilled vegetables instead.
4. When you order a jacket potato, limit yourself to just one high-calorie topping and no butter. So you don’t feel deprived, fill up your plate with a crunchy salad with vinegar and lemon juice dressing.
5. Eat from a small plate and you will eat fewer calories. Researchers also found that we eat less from blue plates, as this colour is the least appetizing to the brain.
6. Try swapping your portion of ice cream for low-calorie frozen yoghurt or sorbet. Or, you could eat a dish of fresh fruit instead.
7. Switch from whole milk to skimmed milk and you’ll soon start to save calories. Drink just two mugs of tea or coffee with skimmed milk and no sugar to save 134 calories, compared to whole milk and two spoonfuls of sugar.
8. A typical glass of wine (250ml) contains 185 calories. Switch to a smaller 125ml of wine and top up your glass with sparkling water.
9. Buy a pedometer and walk an extra 2000 steps each day (about a mile) to burn off those 100 calories. You could even dance around your living room or do ‘power’ housework for 20 minutes instead.